[Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed
before. The gender gap has skyrocketed. Every poll we consume over the
closing weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for
which we have no benchmark.]
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WOMEN ARE SO FIRED UP TO VOTE, I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT  
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Tom Bonier
September 3, 2022
New York Times
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_ Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before.
The gender gap has skyrocketed. Every poll we consume over the closing
weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for which we
have no benchmark. _

I voted, aperte (CC BY 2.0)

 

I’ve watched Americans in recent years acclimate to some very grim
realities. Especially since the ascension of Donald Trump, numerous
tragedies and extreme policies have been met with little political
consequence: schools targeted by mass murderers, immigrants treated as
subhuman and autocratic regimes around the globe affirmed as allies.
While Mr. Trump failed in his re-election bid, a swing of just over
20,000 votes in the three states with the narrowest margins would have
produced a win for him, and Democrats hold razor-thin majorities in
the House and the Senate.

In the weeks following the leak of a draft ruling in the Dobbs v.
Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which all but guaranteed
the end of abortion protections under Roe v. Wade, it initially seemed
this pattern would hold. About three weeks after the leak, a CNN
analyst claimed
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“the Republican wave is building fast” heading into the midterm
elections. In late May, the highly respected election analysts at The
Cook Political Report increased their estimate of how many House seats
the G.O.P. would gain. The discussion was focused on not whether the
November general election would be a red wave but rather just how big
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wave it would be.

But once the actual Dobbs decision came down, everything changed. For
many Americans, confronting the loss of abortion rights was different
from anticipating it. In my 28 years of analyzing elections, I had
never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in
American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I never
witnessed before. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how
different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy
and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw
old political assumptions out the window and to consider that
Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.

One of the first big signs that things had changed came from Kansas.
After voters there defeated in a landslide a constitutional amendment
that would have removed abortion protections in the state, I sought to
understand how activists could have accomplished such an astounding
upset. While it takes several weeks for state election officials to
produce full reports on who voted in any given election, there was an
immediate clue. I looked at new voter registrants in the state since
the June 24 Dobbs_ _decision. As shocking as the election result was
to me, what I found was more striking than any single election
statistic I can recall discovering throughout my career. Sixty-nine
percent of those new registrants were women. In the six months before
Dobbs, women outnumbered men by a three-percentage-point margin among
new voter registrations. After Dobbs,_ _that gender gap skyrocketed
to 40 points. Women were engaged politically in a way that lacked any
known precedent.

Repeating the Kansas analysis across several other states, I saw that
a clear pattern emerged. Nowhere were the results as stark as they
were there, but no other state was facing the issue with the immediacy
of an August vote on a constitutional amendment. My team and I found
large surges in women registering to vote relative to men, when
comparing the period before June 24 and after.

The pattern was clearest in states where abortion access was most at
risk and where the electoral stakes for abortion rights this November
were the highest. The states with the biggest surges in women
registering post-Dobbs were deep red Kansas and Idaho, with Louisiana
emerging among the top five states. Key battleground states also
showed large increases, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin
and Ohio, which all have statewide races in which the fate of abortion
access could be decided in November.

The surge in women registering and voting helped the Democrat Pat Ryan
prevail over Marc Molinaro — one of the more credible Republican
recruits this cycle — in New York’s fiercely contested 19th
Congressional District last month. This is not the type of performance
you would see in a red wave election. Among the mailed and early votes
cast in the district, women outnumbered men by an 18-point margin,
despite accounting for about 52 percent of registered voters.

With over two months until Election Day, uncertainty abounds. Election
prognostication relies heavily on precedent. Yet there is no precedent
for an election centered on the removal of a constitutional right
affirmed a half-century before. Every poll we consume over the closing
weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for which we
have no benchmark.

The stakes are high. Going into the midterms this fall, the G.O.P.
needs to gain only six seats in the House and one seat in the Senate
to retake control of those chambers, thwarting any hope of advancing
federal abortion protections or any number of other liberal
priorities.\

Already, several Republicans seem to be sensing that they’re in
trouble. In Arizona, the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, an
ardent abortion opponent, recently
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language advocating extreme abortion restrictions from his website.

Whether the coming elections will be viewed as a red wave, a Roe wave
or something in between will be decided by the actions of millions of
Americans — especially, it seems, American women. As Justice Samuel
Alito wrote in the majority decision in Dobbs: “Women are not
without electoral or political power.” He was right about that.
Republicans might soon find out just how much political power they
have.

_Tom Bonier is a Democratic political strategist and the C.E.O. of
TargetSmart, a data and polling firm. He teaches political science at
Howard University and is a member of S.E.I.U. Local 500._

_Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook
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* elections
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* Gender Gap
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* Dobbs v. Jackson
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* women voters
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