Women are registering to vote in surprising numbers and Biden’s approval rate has begun to rise
Since June 24th, when the Supreme Court eviscerated the right to an abortion, significantly more women than men have been registering to vote, according to data compiled by Tom Bonier of TargetSmart. In Pennsylvania, the margin is 17% more women than men, and that is in a state where registered women previously outnumbered men by 4 points. In Ohio, the tilt is 11%. In Michigan, women are out-registering men by 8 points. Many of these women are registering as Democrats — for example, in Wisconsin, women have out-registered men by almost 15 points since the Dobbs decision came down. 52% of all the newly registered voters there are signing up as Democrats, compared to just 17% as Republicans.
The tilt is most pronounced in states where reproductive rights are in danger; in pro-abortion rights states like New York and Rhode Island there is no meaningful gender gap among new registrants, Bonier reports. The numbers aren’t huge; in Michigan we’re talking about less than 13,000 new voters out of more than seven million. But there too Democrats are out-registering Republicans. This is doubly important because party identification is the strongest predictor of how someone will vote; by taking away a core right that millions of Americans have come to take for granted, the rightwing Supreme Court and the anti-abortion movement has ignited a generational shift that is just beginning to surface in our politics.
This isn’t the only sign that the political zeitgeist is shifting. In the last few weeks, President Biden’s job approval rating has improved from an abysmal 37.5% in FiveThirtyEight’s composite average on July 21 to 40.4%. The percentage disapproval has dropped from 57.2% to 55.1%, meaning that overall about 5% of the public have come to see him more favorably than before. (Among polls of likely or registered voters he’s doing slightly better, with 54.6% disapproving compared to 41.7% approving.) He’s still far from above water, but the trend is real. A string of legislative victories on everything from gun control to the Inflation Reduction Act (which is really a massive climate and health care bill) plus a steady decline in the price of gas at the pump have undoubtedly caused some people to reconsider their feelings about his administration.
On PredictIt, an online prediction marketplace run by Victoria University in Wellington, politics junkies are putting less faith in the prospect that Republicans will retake both the House and the Senate this fall, with the value of that bet dropping from 60 cents per share in mid-July to 40 cents now. Since early August, PredictIt has been showing that more participants expect the Democrats to retain the Senate. Betting that the Dems will hold both chambers is still a longshot, but here too PredictIt shows the odds are improving.
Among two typically Democratic-leaning groups where Biden’s drop in popularity has been severe — young voters and voters of color — Democrats still have a lot of work to do. HIT Strategies, a Black-led DC consulting firm, has been warning about this problem for months. In their latest focus groups, the problem is easy to spot. Among young “surge” voters of color, defined as people who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn’t vote in the 2018 midterms, awareness of the Inflation Reduction Act is almost non-existent. But once young voters hear about its provisions, especially those aimed at climate change and reducing health care costs, they’re enthusiastic.
Historically, the party that controls the White House almost always loses seats in the midterm elections, as voters from the out-party tend to be more strongly motivated while those who are happy with their president tend to be more complacent. This is why few observers expect the Democrats to hold onto their narrow majority in the House.
But there’s one more wild card in the election mix, and he lives in a fancy waterfront mansion in Florida. The more that Donald Trump stays in the news, and the more Trumpite election-deniers run for state and congressional office this fall, the more the irregular Democratic voters who surged to the polls in 2018 may decide that they have to vote again this fall. They’ve got fresh reasons to care, after all. The winds are shifting.