{"id":68142,"date":"2015-10-15T09:15:52","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T14:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=68142"},"modified":"2016-11-19T16:02:09","modified_gmt":"2016-11-19T21:02:09","slug":"the-sudden-rise-in-conservative-republicans-opposition-to-abortion-may-reflect-fewer-conservative-republicans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/10\/15\/the-sudden-rise-in-conservative-republicans-opposition-to-abortion-may-reflect-fewer-conservative-republicans\/","title":{"rendered":"A rise in Conservative Republicans against abortion? Or fewer Conservative Republicans?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent Pew survey<\/a> compared attitudes a year ago and last month on the subject of abortion. The 2015 survey was done in the immediate wake of those now-famous videos of Planned Parenthood officials, videos shot surreptitiously and edited tendentiously. The demographic that showed the largest swing in opinion was Conservative Republicans.<\/p>\n

Among people who identified themselves as Conservative Republicans, opposition to abortion rose from 65 to 79%. Four out of five Conservative Republicans now oppose abortion. No other group in the survey comes in at more than half.<\/p>\n

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The obvious explanation is that in the past year an additional 14% of Conservative Republicans have become more conservative on abortion. The hardliners are becoming even harder. But there\u2019s another possibility \u2013 that many of the Conservative Republicans who did not oppose abortion a year ago no longer call themselves Conservative Republicans.That\u2019s not as unlikely as it might seem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Gallup poll<\/a> shows that among Republicans, those who identified themselves as conservative on both economic and social issues \u2013 the largest segment of the faithful \u2013 dropped from 51 to 42%.\u00a0 What if all the dropouts were abortion moderates?<\/p>\n

I did some simple math.\u00a0 I imagined 100 Republicans in 2014. Of those, 51 were self-identified conservatives and of those 65% opposed abortion. That makes 33 who thought abortion should be illegal nearly all the time.<\/p>\n

Last month, only 42 of those 100 Republicans said they were thoroughly conservative, 9 fewer than a year ago.\u00a0Of those left, 79% were anti-abortion. That makes 33. In my scenario, these were the same 33 as a year ago. The 9 who defected to the less-than-fully-conservative camps were the ones who were wishy-washy about making abortion totally illegal. These nine people looked at the hardcore, and the next time that a pollster asked them about where they stood politically, they thought, \u201cIf being a Conservative Republican means wanting all abortions to be illegal, maybe I\u2019m not so conservative after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m speculating here of course\u00a0—\u00a0the data and calculations here are surely too simplistic; I am not a political scientist\u00a0— but maybe the party purists are indeed forcing others who used to be close to them politically to rethink their identification as Conservative Republicans.<\/p>\n

Originally posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent Pew survey compared attitudes a year ago and last month on the subject of abortion. The 2015 survey was done in the immediate wake of those now-famous videos of Planned Parenthood officials, videos shot surreptitiously and edited tendentiously. The demographic that showed the largest swing in opinion was Conservative Republicans. Among people who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":68146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2083,85,693],"class_list":["post-68142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abortionreproduction","tag-politics","tag-public-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/10\/21.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68142"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68151,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68142\/revisions\/68151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}