For perhaps the first time in his polarizing political career, Donald Trump was the guy urging his MAGA colleagues to calm down. That was the message the Republican nominee-in-waiting sent on Monday when he publicly opposed a national ban on abortion — not least because the abortion issue is proving to be political poison for GOP candidates.
Reproductive freedom ballot measures have won in every state where they’ve been introduced, including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Kansas. So have pro-abortion rights Democratic candidates like Marilyn Lands, who flipped an Alabama State House seat last month in a district that voted for Trump in 2020. Fresh polling shows public support for legal abortion at record highs. Even Trump can see the warning lights flashing.
But Republicans won’t find it so easy to dodge this humanitarian crisis of their own making. On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the state’s 1864 near-total ban on abortion is still in full effect, bringing the fight over reproductive freedom to another must-win state for Republicans.
More than any other issue, it will be abortion that sets fire to the GOP’s 2024 ambitions. Good.
Republicans could have spent the last 30 years on a project more constructive than its sole-minded focus on capturing the federal judiciary and overturning Roe v. Wade. But it was the extremists who ultimately won the battle for the soul of the GOP. The result is a Supreme Court hand-picked by Trump and his far-right allies for its willingness to torch a half-century of reproductive freedom in the United States.
Throwing Roe onto the ash heap of history didn’t go far enough for the Republicans who now control the party. GOP lawmakers at first pretended that the fall of Roemeant that abortion law would return to the states. For a while, that was true. But within weeks of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision, Senate Republicans, including South Carolina Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, were already hard at work crafting a sweeping nationwide ban on abortion.
Now, one by one, Republican candidates are losing winnable races as voters voice their outrage at the ballot box. In New York, Tom Suozzi recaptured the seat once held by GOP Rep. George Santos thanks to a campaign that twisted Suozzi’s opponent into pretzels over her position on a national abortion ban. In 2023, abortion issues cut deep into GOP strongholds like Kentucky as traditionally conservative voters scolded their party for its stunning overreach into women’s private lives.
The numbers sure don’t look good for Republicans. Polls conducted since 2022 have consistently shown that between a quarter and a third of self-identified Republican voters support legal abortion. Republican pundits may write off those polls as junk, but actual Republican candidates are certainly taking them seriously. MAGA darling and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake spent Monday afternoon disavowing Arizona’s abortion ruling — despite once loudly supporting that exact same abortion ban.
Lake is a reminder that Republicans’ support for abortion bans has always been built on the lie that American voters agree with their anti-abortion extremism. That has never been true. But after decades turning themselves into a single-issue anti-abortion party, Republicans are now firmly tied to their own sinking ship.
Trump’s plea to leave abortion to the states is in reality a plea to take abortion off the national agenda ahead of November. His declaration has also fractured the GOP, with everyone from MAGA loyalist Lindsey Graham to establishment exile Mike Pence berating Trump for abandoning the party’s true goal of nationalizing its control over women’s bodies. Republicans can’t outrun their war on abortion rights. The national blowback from their disastrous gambit is unfolding before our eyes.
Republicans have spent nearly two years trying and failing to develop a coherent, crowd-pleasing position on abortion. They have failed because that position doesn’t exist, not to the millions of women who have seen their rights demolished, nor to the millions of traditional conservatives who see in Graham’s national abortion ban the creeping hand of big-government overreach.
Donald Trump is now belatedly trying to give the GOP a message that allows them to tout their pro-life credentials while shuffling thorny national issues out of the spotlight. Unfortunately for him, the party that Trump radicalized with his MAGA extremism is no longer interested in compromise politics. Republicans have steered their party into the heart of a hurricane, and the biggest electoral lashing of all is still to come.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.