Abortion and the 1978 congressional Elections.

Public interest in political and social controversies seems to have diminished during the second half of the 1970s as Americans focused more on their individual lives and less on the broader and more divisive issues of the 1960s and early 1970s. Caught between the ravages of inflation and unemployment, most Americans seem more concerned about the state of the economy than about any larger social questions. The only domestic issue that seems to run counter to this trend is abortion, which arouses a moral fervor among certain segments of the populace that is reminiscent of the civil rights and Vietnam debates and has been able to divide and even paralyze the U.S. Congress. Despite the prevailing distribution of attitudes of the general public on the issue, suggesting support for legal abortion for a variety of reasons but not under all circumstances, (1) there are minorities at either extreme who engage in political activity with such intensity that they have been credited with achieving an impact beyond what w ould be expected from their numbers alone.

Though most commentators agree that the abortion issue is one of the major social controversies today, there is little consensus on exactly how important it is politically or which side is winning. In this regard, the congressional elections of 1978 are particularly interesting since they are frequently cited as the best evidence of the large political impact of the abortion issue. Following the widely publicized defeats of several prominent legislators who supported abortion rights such as Sen. Dick Clark (D.-Iowa) and Rep. Donald Fraser (D.-Minn.), Anthony Lewis of The New York Times observed:

Most reporters accepted the importance of the abortion issue in influencing the outcome of the congressional elections of 1978 and concluded that the "prolife" forces had scored an impressive victory over the "prochoice" activists; only a few journalists challenged this interpretation. (3) (Throughout this article, we use the terms "prolife" to describe those opposed to legal abortion and "prochoice" to describe those who favor it. We use these terms because they are the labels that activists on each side of the abortion issue have generally used to describe themselves, not because we necessarily believe that they accurately characterize either group.)

Over the last few years political analysts have noted the significance of the single-issue voter: the person who cares only about a candidate's views on gun control, for example, or busing, or capital punishment. It is clear now, I think, that one such issue is likely to have the largest impact on American politics for the longest time. That is abortion. (2)

In the absence of any detailed and objective analyses of the impact of abortion on congressional elections, it is impossible for public officials or the general public to gauge the real political importance of the abortion issue in the face of sharply diverging claims and interpretations.

In this article, we seek to evaluate the importance of the abortion issue as a factor in the congressional elections of 1978 and the changes that took place in the composition of Congress in terms of support for and opposition to bills involving access to abortion. Because an unusually rich set of data on the 1978 campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives is available, much of our analysis involves that chamber. While this focus is limiting, since the news media tended to concentrate on the impact of the abortion issue on the Senate races, it provides much more detailed information and case studies of more political contests than would an analysis of the Senate elections.

Abortion Politics Before 1978