Women Voters Revisited: Inflation, Abortion, and Increased Motivation in the 2024 Election Countdown

This KFF Survey of Women Voters: Revisited was designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at KFF. The survey was conducted September 12 – October 1, 2024, online and by telephone among a representative sample of U.S. women registered voters using a registration-based sample from L2, one of the major providers of voter list samples. This wave recontacted U.S. women registered voters who previously took part in the first wave of KFF Survey of Women voters from May 23 – June 5, 2024, of whom 649 took part in the second wave, as well as a supplemental sample of 29 Black women registered voters from the SSRS Opinion Panel in order to ensure adequate sample size and representatives of a key voting group. For full methodological details of the first wave of the Women Voters Survey, see methodology here.

For this wave, voters were recontacted through an invitation letter via USPS First class mail with an enclosed $5 non-contingent incentive. The letter asked the named registered voter to go online or call a toll-free number to complete a follow up survey. A postcard reminder was sent via USPS five days after the initial invitation letter. Email invitations and up to 4 reminders were sent to those with a matched email address on file. An SMS (text message) invitation with a link to the web survey was sent to sample with a cell phone number on file. Up to 4 call attempts were made to those with a matched phone number who did not respond to the letter, email, or text invitations. In total, 594 completed via web and 55 completed via phone.

Respondents from the Wave 1 sample received a $20 incentive via an electronic gift card if they completed online and via check if they completed by phone. In order to ensure data quality, cases were removed if they had over 30% item non-response and had a length less than one quarter of the mean length by mode. Based on this criterion, no cases were removed.

To ensure a large enough sample of Black women registered voters, an additional 29 respondents were reached through the SSRS Opinion Panel. The SSRS Opinion Panel is a nationally representative probability-based panel where panel members are recruited randomly in one of two ways: (a) Through invitations mailed to respondents randomly sampled from an Address-Based Sample (ABS) provided by Marketing Systems Groups (MSG) through the U.S. Postal Service’s Computerized Delivery Sequence (CDS); (b) from a dual-frame random digit dial (RDD) sample provided by MSG. For the online panel component of the Survey of Women Voters, invitations were sent to panel members by email followed by up to three reminder emails. Respondents were panelists whose profiles indicated they were women who were registered to vote by the date of the Wave 1 survey, could be matched to records in the L2 voter file, and identified as Black or African American. Panelists completing the survey received $5 incentive.

The sample was weighted to provide representative and projectable estimates of registered women voters in the US while adjusting for the probability of participating in a recontact survey. The recontact sample was weighted to match the first wave of the survey, using parameters from the L2 voter file and the Census Bureau’s 2022 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement. The sample was weighted by age, education, race/ethnicity, nativity, party identification, census region, metropolitan status, 2020 general election vote mode, past primary vote participation, and recent general election vote history. In addition, the recontact sample was weighted to the Wave 1 national weighted data for language of interview, mode of interview (phone or online), leaned party identification, 2020 recalled vote, and self-reported intended 2024 vote. The weight accounts for differences in the probability of selection including adjustment for the sample design and stratification by race/ethnicity, age, and 2020 general election vote. The combined sample, including the Opinion Panel, was weighted to the same L2 and Census parameters as the recontact sample.

The margin of sampling error including the design effect for the second wave of women voters is plus or minus 5 percentage points. Additional numbers of respondents and margins of sampling error for key subgroups are shown in the table below. For results based on other subgroups, the margin of sampling error may be higher. Sample sizes and margins of sampling error for other subgroups are available by request. Sampling error is only one of many potential sources of error and there may be other unmeasured error in this or any other public opinion poll. KFF public opinion and survey research is a charter member of the Transparency Initiative of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.