How DeSantis could use Civil War controversy to hit Haley on abortion

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and his supporters haven’t been shy about hitting former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on her failure to mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War.

DeSantis’s own stab at explaining the Civil War raises questions about whether he will use this as an opening to also hit Haley on abortion.

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“Of course, you have the issue of slavery,” DeSantis said of the war’s origins. “You have the states that were concerned about Lincoln interfering and potentially eliminating it. And they viewed it as a state’s rights issue, not as a federal issue.”

The Florida governor went on to laud the abolition of slavery as the Republican Party’s “top achievement” and argued it was a “partisan achievement” opposed by the Democrats.

But this also dovetails with DeSantis’s willingness to support federal legislation curbing abortion access consistent with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which upheld a Mississippi abortion ban and overturned 1973’s Roe v. Wade ruling.

Haley, like former President Donald Trump, has been more reluctant to support federal legislation on the subject, though they both oppose legal abortion in most cases.

“When we’re looking at this, there are some states that are going more on the pro-life side. I welcome that,” Haley said at a Republican presidential debate earlier this year. “There’s some states that are going more on the pro-choice side. I wish that wasn’t the case, but the people decided.”

The former South Carolina governor has also indicated that she does not believe that more sweeping anti-abortion legislation, such as a federal law prohibiting the procedure in most instances after 15 weeks of pregnancy, could pass the Senate with the 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster.

DeSantis has mostly used Haley’s Civil War flub to argue that she is not ready for prime time and cannot answer tough questions without her standard talking points.

“Nikki Haley is on day three of trying to clean up the inexplicable gaffe she made in New Hampshire about the cause of the Civil War, and she is only continuing to make things worse,” DeSantis’s campaign team said in a statement on Friday.

“When she gets off script, she tends to make big mistakes,” DeSantis told Fox News. “The media has really given her a free pass for the last six weeks trying to pump her up, but I think the more voters see that … it’s one thing to read talking points, but you’ve gotta speak from a position of conviction. You either understand the foundations of America or you don’t.”

But the anti-abortion movement has often linked its cause to abolishing slavery and speaks in terms of abolishing abortion to protect the rights described in the Declaration of Independence.

“Our rights come from God, not from government,” DeSantis said in the Fox interview. “And the purpose of government is to protect the rights we already possess. Everything I do is seen through the prism of our nation’s founding principles.”

That could just as easily be applied to the contemporary abortion debate — and may well be the seed DeSantis is attempting to plant ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

DeSantis is trying to upset Trump and beat back a Haley surge in Iowa, counting heavily on the votes of evangelicals and other social conservatives to do so.

Haley has surged past DeSantis in New Hampshire polls. She is thought to be relying more on crossover votes from Democrats and independents, though her Civil War response would not seem designed to appeal to either of those voting blocs. She has also been catching up to DeSantis in polls of Republicans nationally and in Iowa.

Abortion has always been one issue DeSantis might use to compete with Trump and Haley, who have urged Republicans to be cautious in the wake of post-Dobbs ballot-box setbacks.

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With former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) out of the race, there are no major Republican candidates running to DeSantis’s right on abortion.

Now Haley may have given DeSantis another opening to press this case.