Even in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, sending the abortion issue back to the states, the share of voters who listed abortion as their most important issue for the midterm elections never hit the double digits. Since peaking at 8% in Gallup’s July poll, the share of voters prioritizing abortion has halved, giving way to the highest portion of voters prioritizing economic issues since the Obama administration.
Democrats have lamented that the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (and perhaps more importantly, Politico’s publication of a draft opinion leak) may have come too early to staunch the electoral bleeding the president’s party may face come November. And it’s no wonder. Unlike inflation, which affects every single person, abortion is, now more than ever, an avoidable issue, even for women.
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When the Supreme Court decided Roe nearly half a century ago, women had nowhere near the proactive powers over her reproductive and sexual autonomy as she does now. The Supreme Court was not a full decade out from legalizing contraception nationwide, and those contraception methods included: first-generation, high-estrogen oral contraceptives, which had a much higher risk of blood clotting than anything in the current market; the copper IUD, which, while highly effective, can result in much heavier and painful periods; and physical barrier methods such as diaphragms and condoms, which leave room for human error.
Now, the Affordable Care Act legally mandates that all employers, both public and private, fully fund a far greater variety of better contraception methods. More than 1 in 6 women using contraception use long-acting reversible contraception methods, including implants and hormonal IUDs, which have near-zero failure rates with none of the side effects of copper IUDs.
It’s not a coincidence that the ACA’s contraception mandate going into effect coincided with a precipitous drop in the abortion rate, which ultimately fell to the lowest point since Roe was decided. (Recall that not only were the methods to prevent pregnancy proactively far less accessible, affordable, and effective. In 1973, federal law allowed banks to deny women lines of credit on the basis of their sex or marital status, and employers could discriminate against prospective or current mothers on the basis of their pregnancies or parental status, giving women a much greater reason to want to avoid pregnancies.)
By contrast, inflation has become an unavoidable, once-in-a-generation crisis for all. There is no employer-funded IUD to insulate anyone of any social stratum from its consequences.
Consider this: The cumulative inflation rate for the entire Biden presidency thus far is more than 13%, and that’s even with the modest decrease in gas prices, which only happened because demand fell to its lowest point since the worst of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. Thanks to the stickiness of soaring service prices and skyrocketing wholesale prices, inflation itself is set to worsen into next year, when the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank predicts medical care inflation will double.
The Federal Reserve has made the economic crisis worse out of necessity, and the White House has made it worse out of will. The Fed’s interest rate hike campaign, crucial and unavoidable, has brought mortgage rates to their highest point in two decades, and Biden has continued to throw fuel on the inflation fire with stunts such as his student debt forgiveness scheme, which forces the Fed to ramp up the pain. All of this is ignoring Biden’s regulatory squeeze, exacerbating supply-side shortages, most obviously in domestic oil production.
Even without the bear market’s impact on the average worker’s retirement funds — Stephen Moore and E.J. Antoni report that it’s $34,000 per 401(k) thus far — inflation itself is extraordinarily regressive. For many working-class people, their actual inflation burden is much worse than the 8.2% CPI rate calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The BLS grants shelter costs about a third of the weight of its overall inflation rate, food 14%, transportation commodities sans motor fuel 8%, and gas just 4%. But with inelastic demand, the consumer price index’s inflation misses many Americans spending a far greater share of their budgets on gas out of necessity,” I noted back in June. “As illustrated by Axios, when gas spiked to an inflation-adjusted high in 2008, the lowest quintile of earners spent nearly 12% of their disposable income on gas, three times what the BLS allots for gas spending. When gas prices are up nearly 50% year-over-year, that means the difference between a significant swath of the country’s real inflation experience and the BLS’s inflation number is wildly different.”
The polls indicate that voters favor Democrats on the abortion question, but in a world of over-the-counter Plan B and Uncle Sam forcing your boss to fund your IUD, abortion has never been more avoidable, even for the most sexually active of women. But inflation is costing every taxpayer hundreds, if not thousands, of real dollars every month. For better or worse, voters trust Republicans on the economy, and that’s why the GOP continues to win.
