After Roe, Women Surged in Signing Up to Vote in Some States

In the first few months of this year, more than half of Kansans who registered to vote were men.

That changed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

In the week after the court’s decision, more than 70 percent of newly registered voters in Kansas were women, according to an analysis of the state’s registered voter list. An unusually high level of new female registrants persisted all the way until the Kansas primary this month, when a strong Democratic turnout helped defeat a referendum that would have effectively ended abortion rights in the state.

The Kansas figures are the most pronounced example of a broader increase in registration among women since the Dobbs decision, according to an Upshot analysis of 10 states with available voter registration data. On average in the month after Dobbs, 55 percent of newly registered voters in those states were women, according to the analysis, up from just under 50 percent before the decision was leaked in early May.

The increase varied greatly across the 10 states — Kansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, North Carolina, Idaho, Alabama, New Mexico and Maine — with some states showing a pronounced surge in the share of new registrants who were women and others showing little change at all.

The total number of women registering to vote in those states rose by about 35 percent after the decision, compared with the month before the leak. Men had an uptick of 9 percent.

The increase offers rare concrete evidence that the Supreme Court’s decision has galvanized female voters, though the data gives little indication of whether the shift will be large enough, broad enough or persistent enough to affect the outcome of the midterm elections in November. The increase in registration has already begun to fade in most states.

And on its own, the rise in registration does not necessarily mean much. The new registrants make up a tiny fraction of the electorate. The share of all registered voters in those 10 states who are women remains essentially unchanged.

But the increase in registration among women is nonetheless consistent with a broader constellation of evidence suggesting that the court’s ruling has motivated voters, to the advantage of Democrats. The party has gained ground in the race for Congress in the wake of the court’s ruling, with polls showing Democrats overtaking Republicans on the generic ballot — a poll question asking voters which party they support for Congress. The party has also outperformed expectations in several special congressional elections since Dobbs. On Tuesday, in a swing-district in New York State, the Democrat Pat Ryan posted a surprising victory after putting abortion at the center of his campaign.

Registration doesn’t automatically translate into a vote, of course, and some women may be newly energized to oppose abortion rights rather than supporting them. But women are more likely than men to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, polling shows, though the gap is small. Women are also more likely to say they will only vote for a candidate who wants to protect abortion rights, and to vote for Democrats.

The increased gender gap was particularly large in two states where elections have a direct link to the legality of abortion: Kansas and Pennsylvania, where the governor’s race this fall might determine whether the Legislature, controlled now by Republicans, could enact an abortion ban.

In Pennsylvania, more than 40,000 people registered over nearly two months after the Dobbs decision, compared with around 30,000 in the same number of days before the ruling was leaked in early May, according to the state’s voter roll. Women went from about half of those new registrants before the leak to 56 percent after. The jump was most pronounced during the first week after the ruling, when more than 60 percent of new registered voters were women. There had been no comparable increase in at least the last four years, according to state data.

In Kansas, women made up nearly two-thirds of new registrants in the weeks after the decision, up from about half before the leak. Although there are no figures yet on the turnout among women in the August primary, the turnout among Democratic voters was unusually high. Of those who cast a ballot in the primaries for governor, 38 percent were Democrats, up from 33 percent four years ago.

Ohio has a six-week ban on abortion, and Idaho a near-total ban. Both states had increases of around six percentage points in the share of voters who were women. But in both, the total number of registrants was lower after the decision than before the leak; the decline was simply larger for men than for women.

In Florida, the total number of new registrants swelled ahead of the state’s primary election, but the increase in the percentage who were women was small.

The share of registrants who were women remained all but unchanged in New Mexico, where abortion rights are not at risk, and North Carolina, where a 20-week abortion ban is in effect but the state’s Democratic governor, who is not up for re-election this year, has vowed to veto any new restrictions. In Maine, where abortion is also protected, the change in the gender gap represented a normal fluctuation among the state’s relatively small number of new registrants.

In the states that collect party affiliation information for new registered voters, the surge among women also accompanied an increase in Democratic voter registration. Overall, 55 percent of women who registered with either major party chose the Democrats after Dobbs, compared with 44 percent in the month before the leak.

In general, the share of female registrants increases when Democratic registration increases, as women are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. But even among Democrats, the gender breakdown also shifted toward women in the states where party registration data was available.

In most states, the gender gap remained unchanged for Republicans. But one exception was Kansas, where the gap actually shifted more among Republicans than Democrats. Ahead of the leak, around 42 percent of new Republican registrants were women. Immediately after the decision, the share who were women spiked to around 60 percent, and then averaged out to 54 percent of new registered voters over the following weeks.

“For a lot of older women here, when they look at the abortion issue, they remember what it was like before Roe was decided,” said Alexandra Middlewood, a professor of political science at Wichita State University. “For independent and moderate Republican women, this wasn’t a partisan issue. It was an issue that affected them, and still affects women today.”

A New York Times/Siena College poll after the Dobbs decision found that 9 percent of women ranked abortion as their most important issue, compared with 1 percent of men. Since the ruling, Democrats have leaned into the abortion message, pouring millions into television ads.

“We know that what motivates voters is usually their pocketbook, the economic issue,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics. “But will it be the thing that gets them to turn out? What gets them to the polls could be the abortion issue. It could be that fear.”

Losing the right to abortion could spur women to engage with politics beyond the ballot box, Ms. Walsh said, including as organizers, activists and candidates themselves. Something similar has happened before: The high-profile Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas, in which he was accused of sexual harassment, preceeded a wave of women elected to the Senate in 1992. And a record-breaking number of women were elected to higher office in 2018, after Donald J. Trump won the presidency despite the release of a tape in which he was heard bragging about groping women.

In Kansas this summer, women across the state volunteered to turn out voters. At a bipartisan organization called Kansans for Constitutional Freedom that rallied support to vote down the referendum, the number of volunteers surged after the Dobbs decision, according to a spokeswoman. Most were women.