Republican men the most eager voters in 2022

 Ed Morrissey:

… not Democrat women angry over abortion. It’s not independents unhappy with Donald Trump. If Philip Bump’s analysis for the Washington Post is correct, the most enthusiastic demo in this cycle may have been broadly overlooked by prognosticators this summer.

Because the most enthusiastic demo this fall is Republican men (via David Strom, who will join us next week):

On Tuesday, I looked at the growing murmurs that American women in particular are going to flood the polls in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Protecting access to abortion in the wake of the dismantling of Roe v. Wade quickly became a rallying cry aimed at November — but polling doesn’t indicate that Democrats have seen a big surge in support from female voters.

In fact, data provided to The Washington Post by the polling firm YouGov indicate that the group that reports the most enthusiasm about voting is the polar opposite of what many expect: Republican men. And that this enthusiasm has grown.

True, but hasn’t enthusiasm grown faster among those demos tied more closely to the end of Roe? One would think that if such trends existed, YouGov would find them, given their routinely sunnier estimates of Joe Biden’s approval rating among pollsters. The answer YouGov gives Bump, however, is a resounding no:

Democratic women reported more enthusiasm after the decision was released in late June, continuing an upward trend. But Democratic men expressed a much bigger surge in enthusiasm — one that was fairly short-lived.

Republican women, meanwhile, didn’t change their reported enthusiasm much following Dobbs. But more than half of Republican men now consistently report being more enthusiastic than in other years to vote in November. They’re the only group above that mark. Their reported enthusiasm has also been trending upward.

The patterns are more clear if we look at four-week groups of reported enthusiasm. If we consider the four polls before Dobbs, the four immediately after and the four most recent, you see that enthusiasm is pretty flat among independents and Republican women. For Republican men, their already-high level of enthusiasm ticked upward. For Democratic men and women, enthusiasm increased quite a bit post-Dobbs and then waned.

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The number of people for whom abortion is an important issue is probably relatively small.  Sexually active single women are not a majority in this country.  Those who are can take precautions to prevent pregnancy.