While liberals may love to see Clinton push to undo Hyde, moderates may be reluctant to take that on. | AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta POLITICO-Harvard poll: Clinton voters eager to scrap Hyde Amendment

Most voters oppose Hillary Clinton’s proposal to allow federal tax dollars to cover abortion — but her most ardent supporters love it.

A new poll conducted for POLITICO by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that only 36 percent of likely voters want to overturn the long-standing ban on Medicaid paying for abortion with federal funds. But among self-described Clinton voters, 57 percent support scrapping the current rules.


Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, in contrast, has considerable bipartisan support, by an approximately 3-to-2 ratio. That’s despite the strong Republican drive to cut off its funds, nationally and in many states. That was fueled by undercover videos released in the summer of 2015 that purported to show some clinics illegally selling fetal tissue — an accusation that Planned Parenthood denied.

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The ban on federal funding of most abortions, known as the Hyde Amendment after the late anti-abortion Rep. Henry Hyde, has been on the books for 40 years. Democrats have grudgingly accepted it as a kind of compromise on abortion.

But during this year’s presidential campaign, that changed. Clinton, who has made defending reproductive rights a cornerstone of her candidacy, and other prominent abortion-rights supporters have said the time has come to end Hyde.

They argue that the ban unfairly prevents low-income and minority women from accessing a basic form of women’s health. Under Medicaid, abortion funding is banned except in cases of rape, incest and threat to the mother’s life. Some states use their own funds to cover abortion in certain circumstances but more often if a Medicaid recipient seeks an abortion, she must pay for it herself.

The push to repeal the Hyde Amendment — a policy rider Congress attaches to spending bills every year — could rally Clinton’s base and propel her to fight for it if she wins the presidency, even though congressional Republicans (and probably some moderate Democrats) would block it.

Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor of health policy and political analysis who conducted the poll, says that if Clinton is elected, her supporters are going to want her to make progress on women’s health — and progress means more than protecting the status quo on reproductive rights.

“She put this in [the platform] because activist Democrats care about it and if she wins, it’s not enough to say, ‘We’re not going to defund Planned Parenthood,’” Blendon said. “She has to make some positive step.”’

If the Hyde Amendment is divisive, Clinton’s support for federal funding for Planned Parenthood has strong bipartisan support among likely voters. Fifty-eight percent favor ongoing funding, while 37 percent want to end it.

Surprisingly, self-described Trump voters are evenly split — 48 percent want to keep funding Planned Parenthood and 47 percent want to end it. Clinton voters are much more supportive: 70 percent are in favor of continued funding and 26 percent want to cut it off.

“For the majority of Americans, Planned Parenthood isn’t a political talking point, it’s where people get their health care,” said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “Right now in this election we’re seeing the last gasp of an outdated agenda to attack women’s health and rights.”

Lawmakers in the next Congress may have to contend with both Planned Parenthood funding and attempts to repeal Hyde. Efforts to defund Planned Parenthood have failed several times, but Republican leaders — if they maintain control of the House or Senate — could revive that effort to please their base. Hyde's repeal has not faced a recent vote in either chamber.

While liberals may love to see Clinton push to undo Hyde, moderates may be reluctant to take that on. And conservative groups that oppose abortion have already started a counter-offensive, indicating that Republicans would try to vote it down.

Among Trump voters, 77 percent want to maintain current policy while 19 percent oppose it.

If Clinton does push for repeal of Hyde, it could squeeze moderate Democrats, especially in the Senate, where many of them are up for reelection in 2018.

House Democrats have introduced a bill to repeal the Hyde Amendment with 124 co-sponsors — all Democrats.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said she’s confident that as more people learn what the Hyde Amendment does, support for repeal will grow.

“It has been a long-term fight but we have some phenomenal young people in our country who are working day and night to turn this around,” she said on the 40th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment last month. “It’s not going to take us another 40 years to win this.”

Overall, abortion remains divisive, the POLITICO/Harvard poll found. About one-quarter of all likely voters say it is extremely important to their pick for president. But for Republicans, it’s more salient.

Republicans count abortion as one of their top health care concerns in choosing for whom to vote. However, abortion for Republican voters trails behind the future of the health care law, the government’s role in slowing the rise of health costs and Medicare. Democrats count Medicare as their top concern, followed by five other issues before abortion.

Women (67 percent) were much more likely than men (46 percent) to say that abortion policies are extremely or very important to their presidential pick.

The POLITICO Pro-Harvard poll was conducted by independent research company SSRS from Sept. 14-21 among a nationally representative sample of 1,492 likely voters. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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This article tagged under: Health Care