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.
Trump has sought to moderate his position but carries the baggage of helping to overturn Roe, the landmark abortion rights case, and this week he opposed an abortion rights measure in Florida after months of equivocating. Running mate JD Vance, like a host of other GOP candidates, has softened his stance — but found his past support for sweeping abortion restrictions hard to escape. And party leaders have been evasive on key policy questions such as their plans for abortion pill access.
“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. “It’s just terrible the way they’ve handled the whole thing.”
Trump, Coughlin said, wants to “jettison his legacy, which he can’t jettison. … He’s a deer in the headlights.” Trump has boasted of appointing three justices to the Supreme Court that cemented the majority behind the June 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.
Led by Trump, Republicans in competitive races are rushing to frame abortion as a states’ rights matter, hoping to convince voters that the issue is not truly on the ballot this year. That is a sharp pivot from the message many in the party have pushed for decades — that abortion is murder and should be widely banned.
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.
Trump in particular faces the reality that while he touts his role in the Dobbs decision, that ruling is broadly unpopular. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in August found that 62 percent of Americans oppose it while 35 percent support it. And 59 percent said the abortion issue would be important as to which candidate they voted for.
Many Republicans are hoping that other topics, like the economy and the border, will take precedence for voters, and they cite polls showing broader voter interest in those issues than in abortion.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that women voters will compare the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and that under Trump, “the economy was better, groceries and gas cost less, our neighborhoods were safer, and young women like Laken Riley were still alive” — a reference to a Georgia student allegedly killed by someone who entered the country illegally in 2022.
At the same time, Republicans are cognizant of the political risk that abortion poses for them.
The reproductive rights issue powered Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, when the party did far better than anticipated and avoided a widely predicted “red wave.” Last year, Democrats, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, relied on the issue to help them prevail even in Republican areas.
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.
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.
And this week, Trump criticized a six-week abortion ban in his home state of Florida as too strict, suggesting he might vote for a November ballot measure that would overturn it. A day later, however, after conservative backlash, Trump said he would actually vote “no” on the measure so that the six-week limit would remain.
That prompted an immediate statement from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris saying, “Donald Trump just made his position on abortion very clear: He will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant.”
The Florida ballot measure would overturn the six-week law by legalizing abortion until a fetus can survive outside the womb, and afterward if the woman’s health is deemed at risk. Trump said he believes that would allow abortions too late in a woman’s pregnancy, though he said he also thinks people “need more time” than six weeks.
The evolving explanation underscored the challenge that sweeping state-level abortion laws present for GOP politicians up and down the ballot. And it’s not clear that it reassured people on either side.
Republican moderates worried that the former president had tied himself to a six-week abortion ban that many centrist voters would find unpalatable. At the same time, some conservative activists were not enthused, given Trump’s back-and-forth on abortion in recent months.
“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.”
“It’s risky to switch positions, because voters can see through that,” said Bill McCoshen, a GOP strategist in swing-state Wisconsin. He urged, “Defend your position, don’t keep moving left.”
But many in the party have calculated it’s a risk they need to take.
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, calling red-leaning Ohio’s popular vote for abortion access a “gut punch,” and as Trump’s running mate he has ruled out a national ban.
But Democrats have plenty of sound bites to deploy against Vance, and his derisive comment dismissing “childless cat ladies” as people with no stake in the country’s future has further alienated some women who distrust the GOP on reproductive issues.
Harris and other Democrats are increasingly framing the abortion and reproductive rights issue as part of a broader argument. Trump and the GOP, they say, are determined to take away Americans’ rights — whether by limiting the availability of books, restricting what can be taught in schools or intervening in private medical decisions.
Republicans say Democrats have misrepresented their views. Vance spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk accused Harris of “lying about these issues because she has no other option.” Trump and Vance, she said, “have made it abundantly clear that under their administration, abortion policy will be set at the state level, and every woman in America will have access to IVF.”
But some Republicans are uncomfortable with their party’s position as well.
Katrina Shealy, a GOP state senator in South Carolina, suggested her party should listen more to women on reproductive issues. Shealy joined the two other Republican women in the South Carolina Senate to oppose a six-week ban in the state. The bill passed anyway, and now all three legislators have lost to GOP primary challengers.
“They got rid of all the women,” she said.
Harris aides, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy, said they see abortion access as a winning issue for Democrats even in states with larger swaths of conservative voters, such as North Carolina and Georgia. They said Harris plans to lean harder into the issue of reproductive freedom in the final months of the race.
On Friday, her campaign announced a “reproductive freedoms tour,” including more than 50 stops through the battleground states likely to decide the election. The first stop will be in Florida, a short distance from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s sprawling home and private club in Palm Beach.
People in at least eight states will vote in November on whether to embed the right to an abortion in their state constitutions. Democrats hope a surge of support for those ballot measures will help their candidates, particularly in swing states like Arizona and Nevada.
In her most recent campaign stop, in Savannah, Ga., Harris warned that Trump would sign a national abortion ban — even though his campaign says he would not — and emphasized his role in ending Roe, saying his Supreme Court appointees paved the way for a “Trump abortion ban” in many states.
North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock, political director for the Harris campaign in the state, said she has been having “holistic” conversations with voters about reproductive freedom, emphasizing that the issue is broader than abortion itself.
“People are saying that MAGA extremists, Republicans, are not going to stop with abortion,” Murdock said. “They are seeking to control women’s bodies.”