Republican attacks against Planned Parenthood, which symbolizes choice in conservative circles even though Planned Parenthood does so much more than abortion, have backfired big time with the public. Support for abortion rights has hit a 2 year high, and with independents’ support gaining by 11 points.
According to the latest AP/GfK Poll:
Nearly six in 10 Americans — 58 percent — now think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, up from 51 percent who said so at the beginning of the year, according to the AP-GfK survey. It was conducted after three people were killed last month in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado.
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While support for legal abortion edged up to 40 percent among Republicans in this month’s poll, from 35 percent in January, the survey found that the GOP remains deeply divided on the issue: Seven in 10 conservative Republicans said they want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases; six in 10 moderate and liberal Republicans said the opposite.
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Among Democrats, 76 percent of poll respondents now think abortion should be legal all or most of the time, up slightly from 69 percent in January. Independents are more evenly split, with 54 percent saying abortion should be legal all or most of the time, edging up from 43 percent in January.
A larger, more decisive majority of Americans now think abortion should be legal – 58% compared to 51% earlier in the year.
Republicans have filled Congress with with-hunts against Planned Parenthood, based on deceptively edited videos that never showed what they claimed they showed. Republicans didn’t care about the facts, they were using taxpayer money to further their partisan agenda to create political ads for Republicans this election season. So they pushed on, concern trolling about things that were legal and pretending things were happening that were not in evidence.
Naturally all of their hyperbolic rhetoric cranked up the nut jobs that so often seem to fall for conservative tinfoil conspiracy theories and next thing you know, there’s an arson attack on a Planned Parenthood and then three people were killed by a man who repeated Republican talking points about Planned Parenthood.
Republicans played their moral card too far for too long, until they jumped the shark with outright lies they simply couldn’t support or sustain with facts. And now the public is pulling away from yet another Republican wedge issue. And as we all know, culture issues are all Republicans have. Without cultural issues, Republicans can’t convince anyone but the top 1% to vote for them.
Sure, they have that 30% that always buys everything they’re selling, but Republicans are losing independents and that is never a good thing, especially heading into an election year.
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