Trump has said he does NOT support a national abortion ban. Is he telling the truth? Heck if I know!
His platform when running in 2016 included repealing Roe v Wade, lower indiv and corp taxes, securing the board...blah blah blah. He was certainly a toxic asshole, but he did not generally deviate from his major stated policies during his term in office.
Does that mean he can be trusted now. Probably not.
What if he's lying? To enact a national abortion ban the GOP will need to control the House and have a 60-seat fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The odds of that are less than zero percent (sorry I channeling Spritzler).
Abortion May Not Be a Winner for Democrats This Fall
Turnout patterns have changed in ways that could make 2022-23 ballot-measure results deceptive.
By Jason L. Riley
Aug. 27, 2024 5:17 pm ET
Here’s something you don’t see every day: National Public Radio and other left-wing news outlets rebuked Kamala Harris for mischaracterizing Donald Trump’s position on abortion in her acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic convention.
Ms. Harris accused the former president of planning to “enact a nationwide abortion ban with or without Congress.” Not true, NPR reported: “Trump himself has said that abortion should be left up to the states—and insisted that he doesn’t support a national ban.”
Democrats played abortion down when Joe Biden was nominated four years ago. They didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he had only recently abandoned his support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion. This year, however, the party is all in on “reproductive freedom,” even if it means distorting Mr. Trump’s stance in ways that even the liberal media can’t ignore.
Abortion measures will be on the ballot in 10 states on Election Day, and Democrats are betting that the issue will mobilize their voters the way it did in the 2022 midterm elections. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, pro-choice voters have carried the day in all seven states where the question has appeared on the ballot.
At the margin, abortion is a winning issue for the left. The country is broadly pro-choice—most people believe abortion should be all or mostly legal rather than all or mostly illegal. Still, a significant faction of the Democratic Party believes that there should be essentially no restrictions on abortion, a position that is rather unpopular. Highlighting liberal extremism could help neutralize the issue among moderates.
It’s also possible that Democrats are reading too much into recent state ballot results. Ruy Teixeira, a liberal political scientist, likes to remind people that turnout for a midterm election or a special election differs dramatically from turnout in a presidential race in both size and composition.
“In the past, Democrats have believed that the higher the turnout, the better off they were, because less-educated and lower-income voters voted for Democrats,” Mr. Teixeira told me earlier this month. “Now the Democratic coalition has shifted toward being dominated by high-engagement, high-education voters who will turn out for dog-catcher elections, and it’s to their advantage to have turnout relatively low.”
The vote in Ohio last year to approve a ballot measure that protects abortion rights illustrates Mr. Teixeira’s point. Exit polls showed that liberals were 34% of voters, up from 20% in the 2022 midterms and 21% in 2020. “Voters said in exit polling that they backed Joe Biden over Trump in 2020, 45-43%,” ABC News reported. “But Trump won Ohio in that election, 53-45%.” The abortion measure passed largely because Trump voters stayed home, which is unlikely to happen in November. Mr. Trump leads Ms. Harris in Ohio by double digits.
Since Mr. Biden exited the presidential contest last month, Democrats have seen a surge in fundraising and voter enthusiasm. Still, Ms. Harris leads Mr. Trump nationally by less than 2 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average, and most of the battleground match-ups remain within the polling margin of error. That speaks to the country’s deep political divisions. The former president’s approval rating remains in the mid-40s, yet the race remains close because of the millions of Americans who have had it with Democrats who want to raise taxes, erase the border and defund police.
In Chicago last week, Ms. Harris promised, as candidates always do, to unify the country. “Our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward,” she told the convention. Yet every aspect of her campaign, from her choice of a progressive governor as her running mate to her calls to raise taxes, has prioritized the concerns of the hard left.
Abortion animates liberal elites, but Democrats need working-class voters to prevail against Mr. Trump, and those voters say they are more concerned about the cost of fuel and housing than they are about reproductive rights. “If you believe that Democrats need to do at least as well as Biden did in 2020 with working-class voters, then abortion rights would not appear to be the key,” Mr. Teixeira said. “Just because it’s a pro-choice country doesn’t mean it’s a pro-Democratic country. It doesn’t mean that just by turning up the volume on abortion, Democrats will get a lot more votes than they would have received anyway.”
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