Dear John,
When it comes to the right-wing Project 2025—the 887-page policy agenda for the next Republican president—it’s hard to know where to start. Luckily, Ms. has your back: in our Fall issue, contributing editor Carrie Baker unpacks the right’s “misogynist manifesto” and its potential to turn back the progress of the past 50 years for women’s rights, from the workplace to schools to reproductive rights and beyond.
She also illustrates how their playbook plans to make the conservative policies—which are largely unpopular with the American public—permanent, by gutting regulatory agencies like the FDA, the Department of Justice, and even eliminating the Department of Education. “By destroying departments and programs, and embedding right-wing ideologies throughout the federal government, any future Democratic president would be unable to reverse the damage done and restore the country’s civil rights enforcement infrastructure,” she writes. Head to MsMagazine.com next week to read the whole three-part series.
As we enter the post-Labor Day final sprint towards election day, all eyes are on the polls—but when it comes to polling about issues women care about, the numbers aren’t always adding up. In the latest installment of our collaboration with the Fuller Project, also featured in the Fall issue, reporter Jodi Enda explains why the public polls that say abortion has lost its potency as an election-defining issue are mistaken. “When you talk about abortion as an issue in a list, it kind of obscures that something much more fundamental is going on,” Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg tells her. “You talk about what would happen if Trump is elected. To women, it’s happening right now. It underrepresents how fundamentally disturbed women are.”
For the past two years beginning with the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, we have been saying that despite constant reports in the media about inflation and rising prices as the top issues, abortion and women’s rights are actually the top issues for women as they head to the ballot box. Polls conducted for Ms. and our publisher Feminist Majority Foundation by Lake Research Partners, have shown repeatedly that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has lit a fire under women voters, especially young women voters, who have the power to determine close elections. What’s more, polling shows that abortion restrictions and outright bans have energized pro-abortion rights women to be motivated to turn out to vote in much larger numbers than their anti-abortion counterparts, refuting conventional wisdom that those opposed to abortion are more motivated by the issue.
“Harris’ best chance for winning is if abortion rights are central to voters when they make their choice between her and Trump,” Democratic pollster Jim Gerstein tells Ms. Enda writes: “[Abortion] could turn out to be one of those seminal issues that gets people in their guts and rises above quotidian concerns about the price of milk or even housing. Advocates say that’s what the media often overlooks.”
Awareness is spreading about the stakes riding on this election. We’ll all be watching the upcoming debate, and Ms. will be analyzing and fact checking. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as Ms. continues to report on what’s at stake and the potential impacts of the election on all our lives.
For Equality,
