Is Support of Abortion Political Suicide?

Abstract

A systematic review of national and local press coverage of congressional races makes possible a general appraisal of the significance of the abortion issue in the 1974 general election; analysis of polls conducted by congresspersons offers further clues to voter sentiment regarding this issue. Congressional initiatives in regard to abortion following the 1973 Supreme Court decision fell into 3 major categories: 1) introduction of proposals for constitutional amendments to reverse the Supreme Court decision; 2) efforts to exempt both individuals and institutions from having to perform or to allow the performance of abortion; 3) attempts to prohibit or restrict the use of federal funds for abortion in domestic or foreign programs. Many districts are so "safe" that the incumbent is virtually assured of election without campaigning, so a more reliable test of the importance of the abortion issue is to examine what happened to those incumbents whose hold over their districts was generally acknowledged to be insecure or who faced especially strong challengers. The voting records and election outcomes of 119 incumbents were scrutinized. Incumbents from unsafe districts fared considerably more poorly than those from safe areas in the 1974 elections. 1% of the safe incumbents lost compared to 31% of those whose races were considered close. Antiabortion candidates from unsafe districts had a much higher casualty rate (39%) than proabortion candidates (8%); while those with mixed records fared about the same as congresspersons from unsafe districts generally. Among Republicans running in close races, 42% of the antiabortion incumbents were defeated, about the same porportion of casualties as among Republicans in unsafe districts generally. Among Democrats, all of the 12 proabortion incumbents from unsafe districts were reelected, while 2 of the 8 who voted consistently in opposition were defeated. When party affiliation is controlled and attention is on those districts where a single issue might conceivably have made the difference between victory and defeat, the losses among antiabortion incumbents were heavier than those losses among those who voted in favor of legal abortion. The data show conclusively that support of legal abortion does not constitute political suicide.