Trump dangerously misunderstands how voters feel about abortion access

Former President Trump speaks at a lectern surrounded by campaign signs

By Jill Lawrence

Aug. 19, 2024 11:08 AM PT

To say this year’s Republican presidential ticket does not know how to talk to or about women, or figure out what matters to them, would be the understatement of the century. And I sure hope they keep it up.

It’s all mind-boggling, from nominee Donald Trump’s racist, sexist ramblings about Vice President Kamala Harris to the, ah, unusual views of his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, on parenthood. Now the hapless pair are digging in deeper as they try to cope with the post-Roe vs. Wade world — the one brought about by Trump’s Supreme Court appointees and celebrated by Vance.

There are two major obstacles in their path, and they are related. One is the shift of women — specifically white, college-educated, Republican women — away from Trump and the GOP. They’re turned off by their party’s “cultural extremism,” says Mike Madrid, a Sacramento-based never-Trump author, strategist and election data analyst.

The second obstacle is that Trump and Vance are in denial. “I think that abortion has become much less of an issue. I think it’s actually going to be a very small issue,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago news conference Aug. 8. “I think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches. I don’t think it’s a big factor anymore.”

Vance went the same route when Fox News host Laura Ingraham told him that according to a “dear friend” of hers, “all these suburban women, all they care about is abortion.” Vance replied: “I don’t buy that, Laura. I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about. Right? They care about inflation. They care about the price of groceries. They care about public safety in the streets where their kids play.”

This is part of the larger Republican insistence that immigration, inflation and crime are the keys to crushing Democrats up and down the ballot. “The issues and conditions favor Donald Trump. He should be winning this election,” GOP pollster Frank Luntz said in frustration on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

It’s not working, and Luntz is among the Republicans who blame Trump. They want him to show focus, discipline and coherence and stop the incessant personal attacks on Harris (the ones Trump maintains he’s “entitled” to make). He needs to “stop behaving like a petulant child,” Luntz said on CNN.

But that won’t work either, because it’s a flawed theory of the case. In actual America, inflation is easing, crime is down and Democrats can persuasively argue that the border would be far more secure and orderly if Trump hadn’t killed a tough bipartisan immigration package negotiated by a conservative senator and endorsed by both Harris and President Biden.

In other news from Planet Earth, election results of the past four years have made clear that “Big Lie” election denialism is not a winner, abortion bans are not winners and Trump has problems with enough fellow Republicans to cost him a close race in a presidential battlefield like Pennsylvania. Especially now that Harris is the Democratic standard-bearer.

Madrid has a three-point prescription for how Harris can win crossover Republican votes — and the White House: Home in on the Big Lie that Trump, not Biden, won the 2020 election; the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to block Biden’s victory; and the Supreme Court’s decision ending the national right to legal abortion.

“There are a lot of people suggesting fatigue” with these issues, Madrid recently told Jennifer Horn, a never-Trump independent who once chaired the New Hampshire GOP. But he said polling data and focus groups show the opposite: “There is not only not fatigue, they are the only proven messages that have actively pried these two-time Trump Republican voters” away from him, the party and the promise of, say, a capital gains tax cut.

Furthermore, Madrid said Democrats can make up much-needed ground with U.S.-born Hispanic men by conveying the same three messages to Hispanic women, via as many Latina messengers as possible: “The more you get Hispanic women engaged in this fight, the more you will be able to limit Hispanic men from drifting to the right.”

Trump and Vance may be getting the picture on abortion. Vance, who backed a national abortion ban in the past, is now on board with Trump’s position since he is the party leader. “Look, as Donald Trump has said, he wants the American people at the state level to decide abortion policy,” he told Ingraham. And Trump does continually boast that, as he put it at his Mar-a-Lago press conference this month, “everybody wanted it back in the states, and I did that.”

But that’s not a safe space. In fact, politically, it’s quite dangerous.

Abortion protections are literally on the ballot in at least eight states so far, and related ballot measures could be approved in up to 11. Their presence tends to juice registration and turnout among women. Harris herself, with her overarching “freedom” message, is another galvanizing force. She has been the administration’s main messenger on abortion care and reproductive freedom since well before she catapulted into the first presidential race since the repeal of Roe.

Trump and the GOP should be quaking at the prospect of reproductive-rights voters. Not “everybody” wanted abortion sent back to the states. In fact, in an eye-popping new Kaiser Family Foundation poll of 3,901 reproductive-age women, 74% opposed leaving abortion up to the states — including 53% of the Republicans in the poll.

Nearly half of the Republican women supported a federal right to abortion (48%, compared with 70% overall) and said abortion should be legal in most or all cases (47%, compared with 74% overall).

Not all of these Republican women will vote for Harris, of course, even if they turn out to support abortion protections in their state. Still, Luntz said Wednesday on CNBC that Harris has transformed the electorate — that undecideds had shifted to her, and that voters who used to weakly favor Trump had shifted to undecided. And he said the change, though statistically small, could spell victory for Democrats.

That’s the data. Here’s how Luntz described the vibe: “I’m trying to do a focus group tonight with undecided voters under the age of 27 for a major news outlet. And I can’t recruit young women to this, because they don’t exist as undecided voters.”

The warning signs are in all caps. Even Trump can see them. What’s he going to do about it? Prediction: Nothing, but it doesn’t really matter. He’s a known quantity, politically and personally. And the fundamentals are not sound.

Jill Lawrence is a writer and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.” @JillDLawrence