Trump did Daines a favor by finally announcing his abortion stance, allowing GOP candidates to take a position without worrying they’d be undercut.
Former president Donald Trump made life easier for Senate Republican campaign chief Steve Daines by finally announcing his 2024 campaign position on abortion on Monday after months of waffling, revealing in a social-media video message that he believes the issue should be left to the states.
Now, Daines is hoping to convince his new class of GOP Senate candidates to follow Trump’s lead in firmly and consistently stating where they stand on the issue, so that their Democratic opponents can’t define their positions for them.
“It’s important that voters know where the candidates stand, and to not run away from the issue,” Daines said in a brief interview with National Review in the U.S. Capitol on Monday evening.
For months now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has urged candidates to get ahead of the abortion issue in this tricky post-Dobbs electoral environment in which Democrats relentlessly cast Republicans as extremists on the issue. Trump’s near constant public wavering on the issue — his campaign called reports that he was leaning toward backing a federal ban “fake news,” only for the candidate to say in an interview that he was warming to the idea — has not been helpful, as down-ballot candidates were wary of announcing a firm position only to be publicly undercut by their party’s standard-bearer.
Daines’s preference for candidates to be vocal on abortion is in keeping with many GOP operatives’ private worries about a repeat of the 2022 midterm cycle, when many already weak battleground state GOP Senate candidates struggled to articulate their position on the issue after the overturning of Roe v. Wade and went on to lose in the general.
The Senate GOP campaign chief’s position got a boost on Monday when his party’s presumptive presidential nominee declined to endorse a federal ban on abortion and said the issue should be left up to the states so that the GOP has a better chance of winning elections. The majority of Senate GOP candidates looking to oust Democratic incumbents are aligning themselves with Trump’s stance. Also on Monday, Trump pushed back on a newly popular Democratic talking point that accuses the GOP of opposing access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). Trump, in his video message, said the party “should always be on the side of the miracle of life and the side of mothers, fathers, and their beautiful babies. IVF is an important part of that.”
However, in leaving abortion to the states, Trump is breaking with the positions of many pro-life advocacy groups as well as his own prior support for multiple attempts to push a 20-week federal abortion ban through the Senate during his first term.
Privately, some Republicans are optimistic that Trump’s position on abortion may help neutralize the issue politically in the presidential race, though some restrictive state laws may make this issue difficult to navigate in down-ballot races.
NRSC-backed Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake released a statement Tuesday opposing a new ruling by the Arizona supreme court that will restrict most abortions in the state, while also urging her state legislature and Democratic governor Katie Hobbs to devise an “immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.”
For their part, Democratic operatives are confident that they have more than enough political ammo to paint Republicans as extremists by simply reminding voters that Trump-nominated Supreme Court justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade and by running ads featuring women who have struggled to obtain abortions in states with the most restrictive abortion laws.
Daines is keenly aware of the importance of Senate GOP candidate quality as well, and has put a premium this cycle on recruiting deep-pocketed candidates who he believes will perform well in general elections against battle-tested Democratic incumbents, most of whom are making abortion rights a central issue in their reelection campaigns.
To cut through the noise on the abortion issue, Daines told NR on Monday that Senate GOP candidates must “paint the contrast between placing reasonable limits on late-term abortions with exceptions for rape, incest, and life and the mother — comparing that to the more extreme position the Democrats have taken which is to put no limits for taxpayer-funded abortions even painful abortions, when the baby experiences pain in late term.”
“They will not put the any limits on abortion, they’re drawing no lines,” Daines added. “That’s the most extreme position.”
In this political environment, though, far less media attention is being paid to Democrats’ positions on the issue. When pressed on whether the there is a point in the pregnancy at which abortion should be restricted, Senate Democrats typically point to the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) as their preferred legislative standard.
Take Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who is expected to face a competitive general-election challenge against NRSC-backed likely nominee Eric Hovde in November. Pressed on where she would draw the line on abortion restrictions, Baldwin endorsed the WHPA.
“I am the lead author of the Women’s Health Protection Act. It says very clearly in that bill that science also should dictate it rather than a particular week or timeframe, that science needs to lead,” Baldwin said in a brief hallway interview with NR on Monday. “So take a look at that bill, and that’ll answer your question.”
As NR recently noted, the WHPA goes far beyond codifying Roe in prohibiting restrictions on abortion after viability — in other words, at any point during pregnancy — “when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”
The bill, which passed the House in 2022 after the draft Dobbs decision leaked but failed to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, notably makes no distinction between psychological and physical “health” and would supersede conscience laws that protect health-care providers who decline to participate in abortion procedures on religious grounds. For these reasons, the House-passed legislation failed to garner support from conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia or centrist Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Yet these legislative nuances to the WHPA are difficult to capture in a stump speech or 30-second television commercial. Hence Senate GOP leadership’s messaging strategy of keeping the focus on protecting IVF, endorsing reasonable exceptions to abortion later in pregnancy, and reminding voters of Democrats’ protections of late-term abortions.
To steer the 2024 political conversation away from talk of nationwide abortion bans, even some GOP senators from deep-red states are signaling that current political conditions mean there is little appetite for a national ban at this moment.
As GOP senator John Kennedy put it in a gaggle with reporters in the U.S. Capitol on Monday evening: “So long as my Democratic colleagues believe in abortion up to the moment of birth, we will never be able to agree to some sort of national standards. So it’s an academic discussion.”