Former President Donald Trump overcame social conservatives’ concerns about his position on abortion to twice win the Republican presidential nomination. Now, he may have to do so again to make it a third.
Of all the obstacles Trump faces on the road back to the White House, this seemed the least likely. In 2016, anti-abortion voters decided to take Trump at his word and ignore his pro-abortion rights background to elect him president. In return, they got something they didn’t from Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, or George W. Bush — a Supreme Court majority willing to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Ahead of his third presidential bid, Trump sounds a bit conflicted about his historic achievement.
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Trump said he wasn’t to blame for the GOP’s poor showing in the midterm elections. “It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters,” he argued on his social media website.
The former president also complained that the voters who “pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the U.S. Supreme Court” and then “just plain disappeared, not to be seen again.”
That is a real risk for Trump’s anti-abortion supporters. After blaming them for the red wave that wasn’t, they may just plain disappear. Trump has followed these comments with complaints about the disloyalty of evangelical leaders who are considering backing another horse in 2024.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ought to be Trump’s ace in the hole to avoid slippage with these voters. But in seeking to avoid blame for his role in the Republican underperformance last year, he may alienate primary voters next year.
At the same time, Trump is not wrong that Dobbs was a rallying cry for Democrats and helped cut into Republican gains. Exit polls showed three-fourths of voters who said abortion was their most important issue voted Democratic. The GOP has a genuine problem motivating its base and appealing to swing voters simultaneously. Both Trump and the reversal of Roe have only exacerbated that tension.
The near reversal of Roe in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision was a huge disappointment to opponents of legal abortion. It did, however, expand the realm of judicially permissible abortion restrictions almost entirely into areas where the public sided with them.
Parental involvement laws, late-term abortion bans, and restrictions on taxpayer funding of the procedure all passed muster. After Casey, a number of states enacted such policies. More sweeping bans on first-trimester abortions remained off the table.
Dobbs did away with Roe. Yet in doing so, it permitted states and potentially the federal government to legislate in areas where the anti-abortion position is not aligned with public opinion. More voters said in exit polls last year that they were “angry” about this decision (39%, 85% of whom voted for Democrats) than “satisfied” (21%).
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre earlier this month highlighted “extreme MAGA Republican policies that would take away women’s ability to make their own healthcare decisions” while claiming “Democrats focused on expanding access to reproductive care and lowering costs for American families.”
Trump went from saying he was “very pro-choice” on Meet the Press in 1999 to telling a conservative Christian journalist this year, “Nobody has ever done more for right to life than Donald Trump. I put three Supreme Court justices, who all voted, and they got something that they’ve been fighting for 64 years, for many, many years.” But Trump risks tearing open old wounds long presumed healed on this issue.
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Trump isn’t a creature of the conservative movement, a fact that has sometimes made his political calculations less predictable than other Republicans. He has enjoyed the success he has within the GOP by identifying and not running afoul of the conservative factions that command the most votes.
Now, Trump may be testing his luck as he grapples with the same post-Roe challenges as the rest of the GOP.
