EMILY’s List, the political organization committed to electing pro-choice Democratic women, and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund have circulated a polling memo that shows wide support for access to contraception for women and identifies some political liabilities on the issue for Republicans. The survey was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Research for the two organizations. “Voters are looking to support candidates who stand strong on issues like access to birth control and who will focus on getting things done for women and their families, not wage war on basic health care and the freedoms women deserve,” Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List said in a release.
The poll sampled 800 likely voters in Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. While finding that a 60 majority of voters were opposed to the Blunt Amendment, the amendment allowing employers to nix insurance coverage for moral reasons, the numbers also who that it could be a useful political issue for opponents of the amendment, which were nearly all Democrats. From the memo:
Access to birth control has the potential to impact actual races. As a starting point, in this battleground, a generic Republican leads a generic Democrat by 5 points (47 percent to 42 percent). In a split experiment, we tested a generic informed match-up between a Democrat and a Republican with half the sample; in this exercise, the Democrat continues to trail by 6 points (47 percent to 53 percent). The other split received the same information with accompanying information about birth control. In this match up, the candidates are tied at 48 percent.
