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Poll: Ohioans evenly divided on Heartbeat Bill
By Marc Kovac
COLUMBUS
The divisive Heartbeat Bill has divided Ohioans in half.
That message was among the results of a new survey released Thursday by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Some 45 percent of respondents said they support the Heartbeat Bill, legislation that would prohibit abortions within weeks of conception. Forty-six percent, however, oppose the bill.
Fifty percent said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 44 percent said it should be illegal.
The Heartbeat Bill passed the Ohio House last year but has stalled in the Ohio Senate. The Republican leader of the chamber, Tom Niehaus, told reporters this week that there would be no further hearings on the bill until after the March primary.
The Quinnipiac results were in contrast to a private poll conducted on behalf of supporters of the legislation late last year, in which two-thirds of respondents said they supported the Heartbeat Bill.
That poll asked whether unborn babies should be protected if a doctor detected a heartbeat.
The Quinnipiac poll asked more specifically whether respondents supported legislation that would ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually six to eight weeks into a pregnancy.
“Abortion remains perhaps the most divisive issue in the nation, and there is an almost even split among Ohio voters over the fetal-heartbeat bill,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the polling institute. “Despite a partisan split over the issue, where Republicans support the measure 2-1 while Democrats oppose it 2-1, lower-income voters, who tend to be Democrats, support the bill while high- income voters, who tend to be Republican, oppose it.”
Connecticut-based Quinnipiac regularly gauges Ohioans’ opinions on political candidates, office-holders and issues. It polled 1,610 registered voters over the past week on a variety of issues, including fracking, abortions and Ohio’s U.S. Senate race.
The results have a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
Ohio voters have high hopes for horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
But they don’t want state officials to rush forward with the emerging method of extracting oil and gas from deep, underground shale formations.
Among other results of the Quinnipiac Poll released Thursday:
A majority of voters (68 percent) support a ban on the private ownership of exotic animals.
In the U.S. Senate race, 47 percent of voters are supporting Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown over Republican challenger Josh Mandel.
Gov. John Kasich’s job- approval rating remained little changed from Quinnipiac’s October poll, with 39 percent of voters supporting his work in office and 48 percent of voters opposing.
State lawmakers also received low marks for their performance, with 32 percent approving of the way they are handling their job and 49 percent disapproving.