Data Shows: Abortion Rights Are More Important Than Every Other Political Issue, And It's Not Close
More Americans mentioned abortion rights online in a single week than mentioned inflation in all of 2022...and the vast majority want reproductive freedom.
ENGAGEMENT IS HUGE: Americans talked more about abortion rights the week of the leaked draft opinion than they did about inflation for all of 2022
DEM BASE ENERGIZED, REP BASE MUCH QUIETER: left-leaning partisans were twice as likely to mention abortion as right-leaning partisans
OVERALL CONVERSATION STRONGLY FAVORS PROTECTING ABORTION RIGHTS: 48 of the top 50 posts about abortion (including all of the top 25) advocated for reproductive freedom
When trying to make sense of online conversations, one of the most fundamental metrics is scale - how many people are talking about topic X in relation to topic Y? There’s a lot of noise online, and sometimes a trend that feels huge turns out to be an insignificant blip when stacked up against other big subjects…but sometimes there are topics that appear to be yet another daily outrage, until the sheer size of the conversation is compared with a baseline.
Left-leaning political pundits and consultants are nearly unanimous in their prediction that the most important issue to voters this November will be inflation - rising oil and gas costs and supply chain issues are hitting Americans hard, the thinking goes, and this will be their top concern when going to the polls in November.
Maybe.
Online conversations are a unique datapoint - one of the best uses of social listening is to gauge what people care about most. Taking the time to compose an online post, or even sharing someone else’s, indicates a particular level of enthusiasm about a subject that polls can’t quite capture. It’s not the only tool in the research toolkit, but social listening is crucial to understanding things like the level of passion and energy around a topic. And as any GOP consultant from the past 30 years will tell you, winning campaigns means tapping into voters’ passions - especially anger.
And people are angry about gas prices! There’s no doubt about it. Inflation is a big conversation online, especially when including mentions of everything from gas to rent increases, childcare and healthcare costs, groceries, the whole shebang.
Here’s the size of the conversation about inflation, which peaked at over 1.4 million posts the week that President Biden announced a ban on Russian oil imports:
This is a decent-sized conversation, and it’s on the increase lately - definitely something I would advise Democrats to pay attention to. People are frustrated about rising prices, and lots of them are saying so online.
But here is how inflation looks compared to the online conversation about abortion:
A couple of things are immediately apparent:
Abortion was more important online than inflation even before the draft opinion leaked - stories about abortion (especially state abortion bans) were mentioned more than inflation for every single week of 2022 other than the three weeks surrounding March 8 (the day of the Russian oil import ban).
More Americans posted about abortion in one week (more than 8 million) than posted about inflation all year long (about 5.4 million).
So, we know lots and lots of people are talking about it. What are they saying?
Another useful metric in political social listening is participation from self-identified partisans: an issue that provokes high engagement from both sides runs the risk of inflaming Republicans as much as Democrats, for example. However, a topic that provokes lopsided engagement from the left or the right suggests a winning issue for one side or the other - in other words, an issue that energizes one party’s base without kicking up significant energy on the other side. Those are the issues that our firm tries to identify as potential opportunities, and that’s exactly what we see here with abortion since the draft opinion leaked:
Not only is the Democratic base outnumbering the GOP base by a factor of around 2 to 1, but right partisans are disproportionately focused on the “leak” - a word that does not even appear in the word cloud on the opposite side. What’s more, left partisans are putting women right at the center of their narrative, along with words like “protect” and “ban” - left partisans are laser-focused on the threat to women’s health and safety that abortion bans represent.
But what about folks who are not self-identified partisans? Are they siding more with the left or the right? Again, the data tells a pretty clear story:
Left-leaning narratives about protecting women are being amplified far more than right-leaning narratives suggesting that fertilized eggs are “babies” or “children” - and the word “leak” - central to the conversation among right partisans - does not appear.
But when working with large datasets like this, it’s also useful to cross-check a finding using another type of metric - so here are the top 25 posts about abortion shared since May 2, 2022 by Americans who do not identify as partisans online, and every one of them is about protecting abortion rights:
In fact, of the top fifty most-engaged posts about abortion shared by Americans, only two were anti-abortion, and one of these, from GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, did not even address the issue directly, but instead tried to both-sides anti-abortion politics:
Writer Molly Jong-Fast described the impending reversal of Roe as “seismic.” That’s exactly what the data shows. And Democrats are committing political malpractice if they don’t make the fight to protect abortion rights a centerpiece of their 2022 midterm message.