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The Supreme Court’s two-year-old decision to overturn Roe v. Wade remains unpopular with a wide majority of Americans, according to a poll Friday that landed as Vice President Kamala Harris hammers on reproductive rights as a centerpiece of her campaign for the White House.
Two-thirds of Americans oppose the high court’s abortion decision, according to the new Marquette Law School poll – a more lopsided disapproval than the court’s other major recent decisions to expand access to guns, for instance, or grant former President Donald Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution.
Democrats are hoping to capitalize on the discontent.
Harris, who has called for restoring Roe, has stressed reproductive rights as a key issue. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is telling crowds about his daughter’s birth through in vitro fertilization treatments.
“Donald Trump said he wants to punish women,” Harris said at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this week. “And as a result of his actions, today in America one out of three women live in a state with a Trump abortion ban.”
In the Supreme Court’s bombshell decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, five conservative justices voted to overturn Roe, the 1973 precedent that established a constitutional right to abortion. The 2022 ruling returned the question of abortion to states, about half of which have banned or severely restricted access.
Trump, who as president nominated three justices to the court who voted to overturn Roe, has campaigned on keeping abortion as a state issue. He told reporters in Florida on Thursday that he doesn’t believe the issue will drive voters like it did during the 2022 midterm elections.
“I think that abortion has become much less of an issue,” Trump said during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Still, the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs has kept abortion as a live issue in the nation’s culture wars and on its court dockets. The justices grappled with two major abortion controversies this year. The court barred enforcement of an Idaho law prohibiting emergency room abortions, and it unanimously rejected a lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approach to regulating the abortion pill mifepristone.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents in the Marquette poll supported the court’s decision in the abortion pill case.
Opposition to the outcome in Dobbs has remained consistent in polling since it was decided, with 66% of respondents against it when Marquette asked in 2022.
Also consistent over the past couple of years has been overall near-record dissatisfaction with the Supreme Court.
The latest Marquette poll found 57% of Americans disapprove of the court, compared with 61% who felt that way two years ago. Nearly 6 in 10 respondents in the latest poll said the justices’ decisions are motivated mainly by politics, compared with 43% who believe their decisions are based mainly on the law.
The Marquette poll was conducted from July 24 to August 1 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
A Pew Research Center poll Thursday reached a similar conclusion, with 51% of respondents holding an unfavorable view of the court. The survey found that views on the Supreme Court depended heavily on partisan affiliation, with just 24% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents viewing the court favorably compared with 73% of Republicans.
