Republicans from
Donald Trump down, facing the first presidential election since the fall of
Roe v. Wade, are still struggling to find their footing on the issue, caught between a conservative base and a majority of Americans who support
abortion rights.
“They have looked like a three-ring circus that’s badly managed,” said Chuck Coughlin, a longtime consultant to GOP candidates in Arizona, who laughed when asked if Republicans had corrected the problems with abortion that plagued them in the 2022 midterms.
Trump, Coughlin said, wants to “jettison his legacy, which he can’t jettison."
Many Republican strategists have successfully urged GOP candidates to moderate their public positions, and especially to distance themselves from an
Alabama state court ruling that embryos are children, threatening access to in vitro fertilization. But as Republican-dominated states adopt sweeping abortion restrictions, these candidates have struggled to address their unpopularity.
Ballot referendums have only underscored that electoral potency. The abortion rights position has
won all seven times it appeared on a state referendum, including in such conservative places as Kansas, Ohio and Montana.
[Trump himself did the cha-cha-cha recently on the Florida ballot measure.]
In response, Trump has called abortion a matter for states to decide and removed some antiabortion language from the GOP platform. He recently promised that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights,” and he proposed requiring the government or private insurers to
pay for in vitro fertilization, stunning other Republicans who questioned the expensive idea.
“He’s handled abortion so poorly this election — I wasn’t surprised,” said antiabortion activist Abby Johnson, who spoke in support of Trump at the Republican convention in 2020 but this year does not want to endorse him.
Republicans in some tight congressional races, meanwhile, are backing off their previous sweeping antiabortion stances, with mixed success. In Arizona, GOP Senate nominee Kari Lake this year joined calls to repeal a total abortion ban, despite once calling it “great.”
Vance brought his own record to the ticket: In 2022, he said he would “like abortion to be illegal nationally,” and in 2023 he signed a letter supporting a ban on
the mailing of abortion materials, such as medications that terminate a pregnancy. After the 2022 midterms, Vance said he recognized that Republicans needed to rethink their approach to abortion
