The poll matches other previous polls on the topic. The exact same percentage of voters (67%) said they agreed with the decision reached in Roe in a 2017 Quinnipiac University poll.

What's the big idea: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement this week. Many believe this vacancy will allow President Donald Trump to appoint a justice who is against Roe and could be part of a majority to overturn it.

It's possible that the only thing that will stop the Court from reversing the decision is public opinion polls that show Roe v. Wade is well-liked.

The Supreme Court in theory is immune from the majority will. Justices have lifetime appointments.

Yet, there is a body of academic literature to suggest that the court does respond to public opinion. That is, the court is directly influenced by the public.

As Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman has noted , many of the larger social changes inflicted by the court only occurred when public opinion on the issue changed. He points to Brown v. Board of Education coming after the desegregation of the military, civil service and baseball. Polling at the time indicated that a majority of Americans were for the decision. When it came to same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court only legalized it when public opinion shifted in its favor.

Put another way, the court doesn't lead as much as it follows.

When the court tries to get ahead of public opinion, it can inflict a major backlash. The most noticeable example is when the court outlawed the death penalty in 1972. Although the public's favoring of the death penalty was dropping at the time of the decision, more Americans were for it than against it. After the decision, support for the death penalty climbed by about 15 points and states passed measures challenging the court's decision.

The Supreme Court eventually reversed its own decision and reinstated the death penalty.

Today, Roe is supported by a majority of the public as it was in a Louis Harris & Associates poll in 1973 after the decision was first reached. And although the question wording used by Harris was slightly different than that used by Kaiser, support for the decision seems to have risen a little bit.

But even on the issue of abortion, it could be argued that the court energized the anti-abortion groups and polarized the issue across partisan lines. That was the argument that none other Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has offered. She noted back in 2013 that her "criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change."

Indeed, abortion wasn't a lightning rod issue during the presidential campaign (1972) before Roe was decided. As Ken Rudin points out , it only became a core issue for the Republican Party starting in 1974 and especially after the 1976 presidential campaign.

Now, it's difficult being an elected Republican without being anti-abortion.

A new conservative court could follow the party line when it comes to abortion. On the other hand, they will be aware of the public backlash that would follow. Facing a potentially similar backlash in 2012, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who many have said might turn into the new swing justice in Kennedy's absence, went against his conservative tendencies when deciding the fate of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). In arguably the biggest case before the court this decade, Roberts chose to uphold it.

I'm not arguing here that public opinion will definitely sway the justices. It may not. But given the coming ideological makeup of the court, public pressure might be one of the only barriers standing in the way of the of the court overturning Roe.