New voter registrations have soared by an astonishing proportion in recent months--and the demographics could spell doom for Republicans.
Since the June 24 Supreme Court decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade, a staggering number of new voters have registered--and the overwhelming majority of them are women.
In some states as much as 70% of new registrants are women. In others, new female voters outstrip new male voters by double-digit margins, with women vastly outpacing male registrants across the board in all states with hotly contested fall midterm races.
And it seems to have sent Republicans into a low-grade panic amid what appears more and more to have been a grave political miscalculation as to the popularity of rights to abortion access.
The numbers come from Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic-aligned data services firm.
Bonier shared some of his data in a Twitter thread, in which he wrote:
"Wow. I've been sharing data showing a huge surge in women registering to vote since the 6/24 Dobbs decision. I just started to look at some age and party breakdowns of those new registrants, and the numbers are jaw-dropping."
In Ohio, to take but one extreme example, Bonier found women outregistering men by an 11-point margin--more than 10 times that of previous election years.
For many, the trend has called to mind reliably-red Kansas' shocking landslide repudiation of an anti-choice ballot measure earlier this month when a clear majority of Kansas voters opted to protect abortion rights in their state constitution.
To put that victory in context, Bonier's data show Kansas saw an astonishingly wide female-skewing gender gap among new registrants that was orders of magnitude larger than any other state.
But as columnist Jennifer Rubin explained in The Washington Post, the data show this trend is not a Kansas-specific anomaly. Though a far cry from Kansas' 40% gender gap among new registrants, second-place dark-red Idaho showed a whopping 18% gap.
And it's happening all over the country in states with hotly contested Congressional races like Wisconsin, where newly registered women outpaced men by 17% , and those with abortion bans on the ballot in November like Michigan, where women out-registered men by more than 8%.
And it's got Republicans running scared.
In Arizona on Thursday, far-right Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters scrubbed his website clean of his incredibly draconian anti-abortion stances, including advocacy for a federal personhood law and Constitutional amendment, in favor of what he called "commonsense" bans on exceedingly rare late-term and so-called partial-birth abortions, the latter of which do not exist.
He then accused Democrats and his opponent, incumbent Senator Mark Kelly, of "lying" about his abortion stances.
The female voter surge is also the likely cause of a shocking upset win this week by Democrat Pat Ryan in New York's 19th district, where former Republican President Donald Trump won handily in 2016, a victory few saw coming.
On Twitter, the voter-registration news definitely struck a chord, and many saw it as a portent for a "blue wave" in what many are dubbing "Roevember."
It seems like all of Republicans' "fu*king around" with abortion rights just might land them in the painful "and find out" stage come November.
