Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Abortion was a big issue in the 2022 midterm. It will be a big issue in 2024.
Leigh Ann Caldwell and Theodoric Meyer at WP:
GOP candidates running for Senate in swing states are largely embracing the states’ rights message on abortion that Donald Trump outlined yesterday.
The former president tried to defang the issue by neither endorsing nor explicitly ruling out a 15-week federal abortion ban, instead saying in a video message that states should determine their own abortion laws.
It’s the latest evolution of Republicans’ shifting position on abortion, as they have worked to find a message palatable for voters who have bucked Republican candidates’ antiabortion positions since Roe v. Wade was overturned nearly two years ago.
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With his video announcement yesterday that included no mention of a federal abortion ban, Trump bucked one camp of abortion opponents that had wanted him to back a 15-week ban — a group that included his former adviser Kellyanne Conway, Graham and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, our colleagues Josh Dawsey and Hannah Knowles report. Instead, he listened to other antiabortion advocates who wanted him to avoid being pinned down on a specific gestational limit that Congress wouldn’t be able to pass anyway.
Trump says he’s on the right side of politics. And he challenged Graham and others who disagreed.
“Many Good Republicans lost Elections because of this Issue, and people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the Presidency,” Trump wrote on Truth Social yesterday, responding to Graham’s criticism that he “respectfully disagrees” that Trump didn't back a 15-week national ban because fetuses “feel pain” at that stage of gestation.
