With the midterm elections just over a year away, two issues are top of mind for voters: Covid-19 and abortion, recent polling found.
Texas' new ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy has sparked protests in the Lone Star State, as well as nationwide. The new law is also galvanizing some voters, mainly Democrats and women of color, to participate in the 2022 elections, according to a survey released Monday by All In Together, a nonpartisan nonprofit that encourages civic and political engagement among women.
The pandemic is also an issue of high importance for voters, as more than 700,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. While Democrats and independents indicated the coronavirus was the most important issue to them, Republicans rated it as third most important, behind national security and rising prices.
Just under three-quarters of all registered voters said they are "almost certain" or "probably" going to vote in next year's elections for Congress, state offices and local positions. Republicans showed slightly more motivation, with 59 percent almost certain of voting, than Democrats (49 percent) or independents (42 percent).
Women (53 percent) were slightly more likely than men (49 percent) to be almost certain about voting next year. A majority of Black women and Asian American or Pacific Islander women said they were likely to participate in the midterms, whereas only 40 percent of Latinas said the same.
Additionally, older Americans showed more certainty in voting next year than younger people. More than three-quarters of voters 65 and older and almost two-thirds of voters ages 50-64 said they were almost certain of voting in 2022, compared to two-fifths of voters ages 30-49 and 28 percent of voters under 30.
However, Texas' recent abortion ban could drive more people to the polls next year. While Americans are evenly split on their views of the new law — 46 percent favor it and 47 percent oppose it — nearly three-fifths of voters said Texas' law makes them more interested in voting. (Other polling has found a majority opposes the law with less than 40 percent supporting it.)
The abortion ban is particularly motivating among young women, with 73 percent saying they are more interested in voting next year because of it. Latinas of all ages also indicated more interest in voting (64 percent), as did Asian American and Pacific Islander women (63 percent) and Black women (58 percent).
When it comes to partisan turnout, Democrats are the most motivated by the new restrictions on abortion (68 percent indicating a higher inclination of voting in the midterms). A slight majority of Republicans (52 percent) said they were more interested in voting because of Texas' new law, whereas less than half of independents (48 percent) said the same.
The survey of 1,000 registered voters nationwide was conducted by Lake Research and Emerson College Polling for All In Together from Sept. 22 to 24. The survey oversampled Black women, Latinas, and Asian American and Pacific Islander women, but those oversamples were adjusted to reflect actual population proportions. The margin of error was 3.1 percentage points.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.