Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who is also vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, claimed on Thursday that both Republican men and women are changing their votes due to the Republican Party’s stance on abortion.
Her comments came during a DNC call with reporters ahead of the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa on Friday. Nearly all of the key players in the Republican presidential primary race are gathering to pitch themselves to GOP voters in the state. Former President Donald Trump will notably be absent from the event in what has become a sore point with Republicans in the state.
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“I’m hearing — not just from Republican women — I’m hearing from Republican men,” Duckworth told reporters on the call regarding abortion in Midwestern states. She noted that her home state of Illinois is “just across the Mississippi River” from Iowa.
According to her, everyday Republican voters are not in agreement with the party’s leadership on the issue.
“Tomorrow, we can expect these candidates to once again spend the day competing for who can embrace the most extreme positions, putting them further and further out of step with American people,” the senator said of the Friday gathering of social conservatives.
“These Republican candidates will be arriving in Iowa as women and families are seeing their personal freedom stripped away by MAGA leaders in their own state,” she added, referencing the six-week abortion ban passed by Republican legislators in the state during a special legislative session on Tuesday. Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) is expected to sign the bill into law soon.
Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst, a Democrat, was also on the call and added that “the Family Leader is led by Bob Vander Plaats, and this group has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And it’s a right-wing extremist organization that is one of the most influential special interest organizations in the state of Iowa.”
Konfrst additionally claimed that Republican lawmakers in Iowa didn’t run on the issue of abortion, presumably because they were aware of the unpopularity of restrictive abortion laws. “They did sort of a bait and switch for Iowans,” she said. She further referred to a May Des Moines Register-Mediacom poll of Iowans that revealed 61% say abortion should be legal in most or all cases.
Duckworth recalled that during her campaign for reelection in 2022, she conducted focus groups wherein Republican men expressed concern over abortion rights. She said they told her, “They were going to vote Democratic for the first time because they did not want their granddaughters to have to face a world that they faced when they were young men and that this was going too far.”
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She added, “I had Republican women coming to me all across the red parts of Illinois to say I am all about smaller government, and I can’t think of a more intrusive form of government than one that inserts itself into my doctor’s office.”
Republican presidential candidates Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), former Vice President Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson will be at the Friday event. Pence, Haley, Hutchinson, and Scott have committed to signing federal abortion bans, while DeSantis has remained more vague but admitted to seeing a federal role for abortion policy. Ramaswamy, despite being antiabortion and supporting state-level measures, does not support a federal ban.
