When Florida passed a six-week abortion ban, former President Donald Trump called it a “terrible mistake.”
Now the matter is headed to the ballot in November and is giving Democrats their first rays of hope in Florida since Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) trounced former Gov. Charlie Crist in 2022.
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At the time Trump made his abortion remarks, DeSantis was his main opponent. Now it is President Joe Biden, who is running on restoring Roe v. Wade, which was overturned by Trump’s three appointees to the Supreme Court plus two other conservatives named by Republican presidents.
Trump was always going to have to switch from running to DeSantis’s left to Biden’s right on abortion. The former president has at times been more explicit in describing abortion as killing than any Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan, including in a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton.
This year Trump may need to take a page out of Clinton’s husband’s playbook: triangulation. It was the strategy Bill Clinton employed when he sought a second term as president in 1996. The 42nd president ran to the right of congressional Democrats, supporting welfare reform and deficit reduction, and to the left of his Republican opponent Bob Dole, promising to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Trump has tried to sell Roe being overturned as an opening to negotiate on abortion policy. He has signaled his sympathies remain with abortion opponents, but he would regulate the procedure subject to public opinion constraints.
“Pro-lifers have a tremendous power now with that termination [of Roe] to negotiate. They had none,” Trump told Alabama Republicans last year. “They didn’t have any before that ruling. They had no power whatsoever, [people] could kill babies at any time they wanted, including after what we would call birth. They could kill babies. Now [pro-lifers] have tremendous power.”
“But on pro-life, I will tell you what I did on Roe v. Wade, nobody else, for 50 years they’ve been trying to do it. I got it done,” Trump said in an interview earlier in 2023. “And now we’re in a position to make a really great deal and a deal that people want.”
“We’re in a position now — and I’m going to be leading the charge — we’re in the position now where we can get something that the whole country can agree with, and that’s only because I got us out of the Roe v. Wade where the pro-life people had absolutely nothing to say,” he said.
Trump beat DeSantis in Iowa, where there is a strong contingent of evangelical voters, by nearly 30 points while talking about abortion this way. His last major opponent for the 2024 Republican nomination, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, held a similar abortion position, despite their other differences.
Some of Trump’s abortion positioning was self-serving. He needed an alternate theory as to why Republicans underperformed in the midterm elections besides his endorsements of flawed candidates, and the main obstacle to his renomination was initially a governor who signed a strict ban.
But Trump has been consistent in his abortion messaging for months. Republicans have definitely experienced a series of abortion-related setbacks at the ballot box. And while a grand bargain on one of the most contentious topics in politics is unrealistic, a close look at public opinion shows many voters hold nuanced views.
“Remember, the Democrats are the radicals on this issue. We’re not the radicals on this issue,” Trump said in Alabama last year, after emphasizing his own desire for any abortion bans to include exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the mother’s life. “The Democrats are the radicals because they’re willing to kill babies in their fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth month and even after birth.”
“The Democrats are the extremists on this issue,” Trump told a similar gathering of South Carolina Republicans. “And if you think about it, what we have been able to do, bring it back to the states,” allows for more sensible regulations.
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Not exactly “safe, legal, and rare.” But it is otherwise a Clintonian approach to a matter that threatens Trump’s early momentum and motivates the suburban women who are one of his weakest demographics.
Time will tell if it can work.