The Florida heartbeat bill issue could play in Ron DeSantis’s favor, but only if he embraces the fight.
Last Monday, the Florida Senate passed the Heartbeat Protection Act, a ban on abortions after six weeks, “with exceptions for women who are victims of rape, incest and human trafficking, or whose baby has a devastating diagnosis of a fatal fetal abnormality.” It bans the abortion pill, requiring “that any abortion must be performed in-person by a medical doctor or osteopathic physician.” And it couples this with “additional counseling or mentoring services as well as providing nonmedical material assistance to families such as car seats, cribs, clothing, formula, and diapers” via “$30 million of new funding for pregnant women and families included in the bill.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis has pledged to sign the bill into law.
It’s a good bill, bringing real progress to an increasingly red state that previously moved cautiously on abortion, but preserving exceptions that may be unprincipled but are essential to pass the eyeball test with the public. Its practical effect will depend upon the Florida Supreme Court’s impending decision to reconsider past decisions indicating that the state constitution protects abortion. But with multiple other states having already passed heartbeat bills, the national buzz around the bill will be less about Florida than about DeSantis signing it as he nears the launch of his expected presidential campaign.
As with any decision to take a stand on a divisive issue, this is fraught with risks. It could blow up in DeSantis’s face, either in the primary or the general election. But leave aside for now the general-electorate politics of how heartbeats are the way in which normal humans talk about pregnancy. Of more immediate importance, signing the Florida heartbeat bill could prove to be a great strategy for DeSantis in the upcoming presidential primaries. Let me explain why by looking at the structure of this race.
There are four general theories about the ideal positioning in a high-profile Republican primary, whether a presidential or a statewide race. One traditional theory is electability: The candidate who looks like the best bet in the general election will win. While an image of electability can still be an asset, recent years have vividly illustrated that it is not a particularly powerful one in moving votes in a GOP primary (if DeSantis defeats Trump, that thinking could change). A second theory, which has likewise declined in power, is the “party decides” approach: that you win primaries by raising the most money and locking down the most endorsements in order to signal that party insiders think you’re the right candidate. This can be as much a liability as an asset today with Republican voters who profoundly mistrust the people who run and fund their party. A third theory is one-upmanship: You always want to get to the right of your opponents in order to portray them as RINOs, squishes, and Establishment sellouts against you, the True Conservative. A fourth theory, which contradicts the third, is that of finding the center — not the center of the general electorate, but the center of the party, so as to best marginalize people coming at you from either side while giving them minimal room to occupy without coming off as fringy or squishy.
In the last contested presidential primary in 2016, Trump took the one-upmanship approach on immigration, but he otherwise took more of a find-the-center approach, running to the left of the field on entitlements, spending, and trade, where there was little competition from the other 15 candidates. Trump also exploited some unique advantages in his unparalleled ability to accumulate free media coverage. But he also introduced another element never before presented quite as purely as Trump did: the tribal instinct of negative partisanship. We have all seen negative partisanship at work in how both parties approach general elections, of course: a candidate not beloved by the party faithful can still rally them by appealing to how bad the other party is and how much all the cultural, class, or racial enemies of each party’s base are lined up against the nominee. We have also seen candidates appeal to this instinct in the primaries by attacking the other party or trying to pick fights with their party’s enemies, most conspicuously when Newt Gingrich surged to a landslide victory in the 2012 South Carolina primary after fighting the moderator at a primary debate, or when George H. W. Bush took on Dan Rather in 1988.
Trump, however, has raised this to an art form. Both in intra-party fights (where he has chosen Jeb Bush, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Paul Ryan as foils) and in his endless combat with the press and prosecutors, Trump not only draws up Us vs. Them battle lines; he tells his supporters explicitly that, “They are going after me to get at you.” This is a style of politics that bonds the leader to the voters on a level deeper than policy agendas or calculations of electability, and it explains a lot of Trump’s enduring appeal, even now, when there is nothing even remotely resembling a rational argument for renominating a 78-year-old man who lost the last election, has repeatedly kneecapped the party downticket, is 17 points underwater with the general electorate, is under one indictment with more possibly on the way, and if elected, would be eligible to serve only a single term.
That’s where the abortion issue comes in. If we were still in the pre-Dobbs environment, DeSantis taking a strong pro-life position would be interpreted solely through the lens of one-upmanship: He could argue that he is More Pro-Life Than Thou and challenge Trump and others in the race for lacking his courage. This would be a conventional play, with some upside but limited power to overcome what Trump is selling. Jezebel unearthed a 2012 video of DeSantis in an interview with The St. Augustine Record editorial board attacking Roe v. Wade as wrongly decided, arguing that abortion is constitutionally a state issue, and saying that he would be open to a constitutional amendment to limit abortion. That is conventional pro-life politics.
But we live now in a different moment. Precisely as I predicted in September, even before we saw the fizzle of many Republican campaigns in the midterms, Trump and his most devoted defenders have a huge incentive to shift blame away from Trump, 2020 trutherism, and January 6 in explaining Republican failures, and arguing that opposition to abortion is a political liability is a tempting target. The Democrats’ victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, litigated both on the basis of Dan Kelly’s involvement in “stop the steal” litigation and over abortion, offers another Rorschach test of these contending arguments. Trump himself openly blamed pro-lifers for losing 2022, an approach that has many leaders of the movement still wondering if the man who appointed the justices who ended Roe will now abandon them and their cause. They have reason to be worried. Some of the D.C.-based political consultants and other permanent party establishment figures have been itching for a while to ditch the abortion issue as something that only provincial, Bible-thumping yokels care about. An alliance between them and the MAGA leadership against grassroots social conservatives could be a powerful one.
Trump himself may be calculating that his core base is more northern and Rust Belt and less churchgoing than the sorts of people already in the DeSantis camp, so he can afford to write off the more religious voters who are most passionate about the pro-life cause. But just because those voters aren’t central to the Trump coalition doesn’t mean they have no importance at the margins where races such as this one are won and lost.
This is how the issue could play in DeSantis’s favor, but only if he embraces the fight. From the moment he signs the heartbeat bill, we will hear from Democrats and from progressives and liberals in prominent cultural positions that DeSantis is an extremist and has just signed his political death warrant — and we will simultaneously hear from Trumpworld the exact same message. If Trump is unable to restrain himself from attacking DeSantis on this issue, he could turn DeSantis’s campaign into (among its other features) a de facto referendum on whether the Republican Party should abandon pro-life voters and their cause. If that happens, then voters who have backed the cause for years will be given an open demonstration of negative partisanship: they’re going after DeSantis because they’re tired of listening to you.
DeSantis has never really been a vocal leader on abortion; he has preferred to pick his battles elsewhere. Even when he has encouraged pro-life laws (the 15-week ban he signed previously, and this one) to reach his desk by signaling to the legislature that he would sign them, he has left the job of advocating the cause mostly to others. It’s obviously not an issue he relishes talking about in quite the same way that he does with, say, education or Covid lockdowns or crime. But if this is the fight that he finds himself in, he will have to make the most of it. If handled properly, it could bond to DeSantis through negative partisanship a faction of Republican voters who may be especially crucial in Iowa, South Carolina, and other important early states.