proposal to impose taxes on churches running segregated private schools ( “seg academies” for the children of white Southerners seeking to avoid federally mandated school integration orders) provided the opportunity to mobilize born again and evangelical parishioners through the creation of the Moral Majority. In 1978, the hostile reaction to an I.R.S. They don’t,” Katherine Stewart, the author of the 2019 book “ The Power Worshipers,” wrote in an email. “The anti-abortion movement has been remarkably successful at convincing observers that the positions individuals take on the abortion issue always follow in a deductive way from their supposed moral principles.
According to this argument, conservative strategists settled on a concerted effort to politicize abortion in part because it dodged the race issue and offered the opportunity to unify conservative Catholics and Evangelicals. were seeking to expand their base beyond those opposed to the civil rights movement. Some of the scholars and journalists studying the evolving role of abortion in American politics make the case that key leaders of the conservative movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s - among them Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell Sr. The fact that opinions on all of these issues are now closely interconnected and connected with racial attitudes is a key factor in the deep polarization within the electorate that contributes to high levels of straight ticket voting and a declining proportion of swing voters. This is part of a larger picture in which racial attitudes are increasingly linked with opinions on a wide range of disparate issues including social welfare issues, gun control, immigration and even climate change. Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures. This split was even wider, 59 points, among “strong partisans, the group most likely to vote in primary elections,” Abramowitz said.Ĭrucially, Abramowitz pointed out, opinions on abortion are also closely connected with racial attitudes: The difference in support for the pro-choice position was 48 percentage points. Among Republicans, 60 percent took the pro-life position while 25 percent took the pro-choice position and 15 percent were in the middle. Among Republican identifiers, 33 percent were pro-choice, 45 percent were pro-life and 22 percent were in the middle.”ħ3 percent of Democratic identifiers took the pro-choice position, while only 17 percent took the pro-life position, with 10 percent in the middle. “40 percent of Democratic identifiers were pro-life, while 39 percent were pro-choice. “The difference in support for the pro-choice position was a mere six percentage points,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, told me by email.
As recently as 1984, abortion was not a deeply partisan issue.