Former president Donald Trump predicted Thursday that abortion is \u201cgoing to be a very small issue\u201d this election, portraying it as a settled matter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches,\u201d he said during a news conference at his gilded Mar-a-Lago estate. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a big factor anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
But over a thousand miles away, Democrats were betting on the opposite.<\/p>\n
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, standing beside Vice President Kamala Harris as part of the newly minted Democratic presidential ticket, forecasted that Republicans would do more to restrict abortion nationwide than they were letting on.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey will ban abortion across this country no matter what Congress says,\u201d Walz warned while speaking at the United Auto Workers Local 900 union hall in Wayne, Mich. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s my choice,\u201d a woman in the crowd shouted.<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn right it is,\u201d Walz responded.<\/p>\n
In a string of events in battleground states across the country this week, Harris and Walz riled up Democratic supporters with similar one-liners, calling the patchwork of abortion restrictions in various states \u201cTrump\u2019s abortion bans\u201d and promising that \u201cwe\u2019ll fight for a woman\u2019s right to choose.\u201d The mention of reproductive health care in any fashion stood in stark contrast to the message from the Republican ticket. Trump\u2019s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), held campaign events alongside those by Harris and Walz in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and made little mention of abortion or reproductive health care.<\/p>\n
The disparate approach to the issue on the campaign trail highlights the complicated politics of the moment. Republican voters are largely supportive of some abortion restrictions, though there are disagreements on the details, and Trump has taken credit for the Supreme Court overturning federal protections for abortion, saying it was a popular decision. But most Americans say the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was bad for the country. Abortion rights advocates have won battles against antiabortion candidates and ballot referendums since the decision, and Democrats won midterm victories in campaigns that focused heavily on reproductive rights.<\/p>\n
Democrats believe they can once again harness that energy to help them keep the White House. But the Trump campaign is betting on a message that voters in individual states now get to decide how to address the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cHas Trump found a way to defuse the issue by saying everybody wanted us to give this back to the states for 50 years, which might not be factual?\u201d Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, said in an interview. \u201cHe\u2019s trying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris has placed blame for the harshest bans on abortions on Trump since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. But the Democratic message around abortion has also expanded to broadly include all reproductive health care, motivated in part by an Alabama Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that sparked outrage and debate over the use of in vitro fertilization. On the campaign trail this week, Walz brought up his own family\u2019s experience using IVF to conceive his children, saying the issue is personal for him.<\/p>\n
Walz on Friday described going through \u201cyears\u201d of fertility treatments with his wife, and the devastation of learning the treatments had failed. His eldest daughter was conceived via IVF, and the process inspired her name, Hope, he has said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo when Vice President Kamala Harris and I talk about freedom, we\u2019re very clear: We mean the freedom to make your own health-care decisions,\u201d Walz told cheering Arizona voters.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Trump and Vance have spent little time discussing reproductive health care with voters. Vance did not bring it up in the past two weeks of speeches in five battleground states. And Trump at a news conference Thursday said he believes the issue of abortion bans is resolved because it is being decided on by states \u2014 but he also suggested he was open to revoking access to a key abortion pill.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve done what every Democrat and every Republican wanted to have done,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd we brought that issue back to the states.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later in the news conference, Trump was asked if he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to \u201crevoke access\u201d to mifepristone, a medication used for abortions, and he did not reject the idea. (His campaign later said he didn\u2019t hear the question and maintained the issue is settled because the Supreme Court declined to limit mifepristone access, even though that decision has no bearing on whether a future administration could restrict the drug.)<\/p>\n
Although Republicans have traditionally advocated for a federal abortion ban, the party has retreated from that position under Trump, striking the language from its party platform at the Republican National Convention last month. Trump has said the issue should be determined by states and has added that he would not sign a federal bill banning or restricting abortion.<\/p>\n
About 1 in 8 voters rank abortion as the most important issue for their vote in 2024, according to a KFF poll conducted in February. Those voters were mostly women, young and Black, cohorts that could be critical in this election.<\/p>\n
Asked about the messaging and concerns of voters who rank abortion as a major issue, the Trump campaign pointed to the other issues they are focused on, mainly the economy and immigration.<\/p>\n
\u201cKamala Harris is the most unpopular Vice President in history and doesn\u2019t have any policy plans to fix the top issues voters care about, such as ending inflation and securing the border,\u201d Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. \u201cPresident Trump has been very clear \u2014 he supports the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said abortion is likely to drive turnout, especially women and young voters. She pointed to the string of ballot referendums, elections and special elections in which voters have sided with fewer restrictions on abortions or stopped harsher bans from passing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a loser for Republicans,\u201d Kamarck said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Former president Donald Trump predicted Thursday that abortion is \u201cgoing to be a very small issue\u201d this election, portraying it as a settled matter. \u201cI think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches,\u201d he said during a news conference at his gilded Mar-a-Lago estate. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a big factor anymore.\u201d But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7671,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}