President Joe Biden led celebration Thursday of Democrats’ over-performance in the midterm elections. But the exit polls told a different story.
SO WHAT
It’s not at clear abortion is the electoral game-changer many liberals want it to be.
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING
“Y’all showed up and beat the hell out of them,” Biden said to “pro-choice” women in remarks at an event in for Democratic campaign workers in Washington, D.C.
Other Democratic politicians and liberal commentators have similarly claimed that an electoral “red wave” was averted thanks to women voters’ opposition the Supreme Court overturning national abortion rights in June and subsequent GOP abortion restrictions.
- “Once again it’s the women who saved us,” Jim Messina, former President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff said Wednesday on MSNBC. “And the polls were wrong, again.”
- Proponents of the “pro-choice” theory of the midterms have pointed to early exit polls indicating that abortion motivated voters more than any issue other than inflation.
OK, BUT
CNN exit polls, however, found that Democrats received a significantly smaller share of women’s votes in 2022 than in the 2018.
- Republicans only trailed Democrats by eight points this year, compared to a 19-point deficit in the previous midterms, per CNN.
- In House races, Republicans won nearly all the voters who want to ban abortion along with one-quarter of the majority of voters who say the procedure should be legal.