Republican candidates for president are eagerly staking out tough positions against abortion — and Democrats are convinced it will make the GOP’s nominee vulnerable in a general election.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a six-week abortion ban in his state and has suggested that former President Trump has been weak in not explicitly expressing his support for that move.
Trump has declared himself “the most pro-life president in American history,” boasting to a conference of religious conservatives last month about his role in appointing the three conservative Supreme Court justices who were pivotal in last year’s Dobbs decision that overturned 1973’s Roe v. Wade ruling.
On Wednesday, The Associated Press carried remarks from an interview with former Vice President Mike Pence, in which he said abortion should be banned even when physicians have determined the baby will not survive outside the womb.
“I’m pro-life. I don’t apologize for it,” Pence told the AP. “I just have heard so many stories over the years of courageous women and families who were told that their unborn child would not go to term or would not survive. And then they had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery.”
The expectation is that similar rhetoric will be heard Friday when many of the leading candidates will speak at a Christian conservative event in Iowa, hosted by The Family Leader organization.
DeSantis, Pence, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson will all address the crowd, though Trump will not.
But Democrats are convinced that the dynamics of the GOP primary, which place a premium on appealing to the most activist, most conservative, elements of the party’s base will have real repercussions come Election Day next year.
“Republicans are running to the right and taking exceedingly extreme positions on abortion to cater to the right-wing and anti-abortion extremists,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa told this column.
“The Republican nominee next year is going to have to explain to the American people that they believe they should tell women what they should be doing with their bodies.”
Moussa and other Democrats do, of course, have a vested interest in advancing that argument.
But there is both data and anecdotal evidence to suggest hard-line positions on abortion are unpopular and have already hurt the GOP.
In a Fox News/Associated Press analysis of last November’s midterm elections, for example, 1 in 4 registered voters said they considered abortion the single most important issue in deciding their vote. Those respondents favored the Democratic Party by a margin of almost 3-to-1.
On the same day, ballot measures relating to abortion were held in five states, and all of them were carried by the abortion-rights side — including in conservative states like Kentucky and Montana.
An Associated Press/NORC poll released this week found that 73 percent of all adults, including 56 percent of Republicans, believed abortion should be permitted at least up until six weeks — the point at which the DeSantis-backed law would outlaw it. Those numbers declined as the time since conception lengthened, with about two-thirds of Americans saying abortion should be banned at 24 weeks or beyond.
The complexities of the issue are cited by opponents of abortion, who contend that liberals and Democrats are exaggerating the popularity of their own positions.
“The country is divided, and depending upon how an argument or question is phrased, that will affect the outcome. The country did not overnight turn into a solidly pro-abortion country,” Carol Tobias, the president of National Right to Life, told this column.
Tobias also noted that her organization was pressing more for candidates to back a range of measures protecting life in the womb, rather than focusing on a national ban that she does not believe is realistic anytime soon.
“I think the Republican candidates need to support protections for unborn children — and say they will support policies that will protect unborn children,” she said. “But it is not possible in the foreseeable future to get a national law, one way or another.”
Tobias instead argued for issues like ensuring parents have the right to know if a minor child is seeking an abortion, or to ensure that women considering abortions would have to receive certain information.
In relation to Pence’s comments about not permitting abortion even in circumstances where the child is not expected to live, Tobias drew attention to the growing field of perinatal hospice care — essentially a form of pre-birth care and counseling for mothers and couples whose baby is not expected to live.
But those kinds of points might well go by the wayside in the heat of an election campaign, where nuances tend to get overrun by broad strokes.
Among the leading GOP presidential candidates, Trump has notably been more evasive than most on whether he would push for a nationwide ban. He has not committed to it, but he has not expressed opposition either.
Even some Democrats suggest that speaks to a degree of political wiliness on the former president’s part.
“I think Trump is fundamentally a smarter politician than Ron DeSantis,” said Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky. “I don’t personally think Trump has any core values. But he understands that the way to get elected is not to go to the most extreme position possible on abortion.”
Still, she added of the GOP, “for a party that has used the word ‘freedom’ very jingoistically for my entire lifetime, they seem to be on the wrong side of freedom.”
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage