No matter how you slice it, Monday was a setback for the antiabortion movement. The fact that a presumptive Republican presidential nominee took such pains to avoid taking a position on restricting abortion signals just how scared Donald Trump’s party is of this issue. It’s already leading other Republicans to adopt Trump’s hands-off approach.
Recognizing the danger in that emerging posture, the party’s antiabortion true believers have set about arguing that the party can still run and win on fierce opposition to abortion.
It’s an increasingly difficult argument to make.
Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (R) crystallized the argument late Monday.
“Every pro-life Governor up for re-election over the past 2 years has won big!” he wrote in response to the Biden campaign saying the issue would hurt Trump in the election.
Others similarly pointed to the large 2022 victories of Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, Ohio’s Mike DeWine, South Dakota’s Kristi L. Noem and Georgia’s Brian Kemp — all of whom have either signed or advocated for six-week abortion bans.
“Republicans win on life when we speak the truth boldly and stand on the principle that we all know to be true — human life begins at conception and should be defended from womb to tomb,” former vice president Mike Pence said. Pence was criticizing Trump’s posture to leave the issue to the states and not support a specific time frame for abortions.
It’s true that unapologetically antiabortion Republicans with strong brands have won, even since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in mid-2022 and recast the issue in Democrats’ favor. But the total picture is unmistakable: Abortion is indeed the liability Trump and Republicans are effectively now recognizing.
It bears emphasizing that four of the governors Walker mentioned were running in red states. Their margins were still impressive, even accounting for that, but their electorates lean to the right.
In addition, incumbency was historically strong in 2022, with just one governor losing. (Every incumbent senator seeking reelection also won.)
Just two of the governors mentioned signed six-week abortion bans before the election, and Kemp and DeWine did so long before — back in 2019. Both also treated the issue gingerly on the campaign trail. Kemp downplayed the issue relative to others and signaled that he didn’t want further abortion restrictions. DeWine was extensively attacked for his ban but didn’t feature the issue much, despite previously vowing to “go as far as we can” to prohibit abortions.
Noem advocated for a six-week ban early in 2022, but the effort fell apart. (The state’s highly restrictive abortion ban, a “trigger” law that went into effect when Roe was overturned, was originally passed in 2005.)
And DeSantis and Reynolds have both signed six-week bans, but only after winning reelection in 2022.
DeSantis notably shied away from promoting the ban he signed last year as he was signing it, and both he and Reynolds have seen their approval numbers decline of late, with voters about evenly split on them. A recent survey testing governors across the country found the two of them with the highest disapproval ratings of any governors.
In sum, this wasn’t really something that most of these Republicans campaigned hard on, and it’s difficult to cast most of their victories as resounding affirmations of outlawing abortion.
Which brings us to the non-incumbents — those who don’t have a built-in brand. And when those Republicans went hard to the right on this issue in 2022, the results were awful for them.
Some of the GOP’s most underperforming candidates in 2022 were those who marginalized themselves on abortion — often before trying to pull back on their former positions. Some of those positions:
- Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters had supported a fetal personhood law (effectively outlawing abortion) before scrubbing his website of the proposal.
- Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake had called for a six-week ban and called Arizona’s near-total abortion ban “great.”
- Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon said she wouldn’t even support an abortion exception for a 14-year-old rape victim, saying that “a life is a life.”
- Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano said in 2019 that women who get illegal abortions should be charged with murder.
- Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz said abortion is “murder” at any stage.
- Now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said in 2021 that he didn’t support rape and incest exceptions, because “two wrongs don’t make a right.” While Vance won, he far underperformed other statewide GOP candidates such as DeWine.
There’s a credible argument to be made that Republicans can oppose abortion and still win, provided they’re otherwise good candidates and don’t go so far as to support things like no-exceptions bans or jailing women. Perhaps some of these candidates’ hard-line abortion positions were less the cause of their defeats than symptomatic of their faults as candidates. (Many, for instance, also marginalized themselves on issues such as election denial.)
But with polls showing that more than 6 in 10 Americans say abortion should mostly be legal and abortion rights measures winning on the ballot even in red states, it’s pretty clear which direction the political wind is blowing. And that’s away from things like six-week abortion bans.
“It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans … that lost large numbers of Voters,” Trump wrote on his social media platform after the 2022 election.
Republicans who feel strongly about this issue can surely try to handle it better, and they can still win when they do and when the electorate is right. But for those obsessed with winning, as Trump is, the much easier call is to try to avoid a dicey subject.
Whether the true believers will accept that move away from their principles is one of the most significant questions in today’s Republican Party.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/09/republican-campaign-abortion/