Trump Won’t Commit on Florida Abortion Vote
Trump Won’t Commit on Florida Abortion Vote
Sunshine State voters will decide whether abortion belongs in the state constitution. But one Florida Man won’t weigh in on the “A-word.”
DONALD TRUMP IS SO FREAKED OUT about the potency of abortion as a political issue that he sometimes refers to it as the “A-Word” to avoid naming it.
Anti-abortion activists have tried to persuade him to back a 15-week limit, but for now, Trump is keeping quiet about his policy preference. His campaign says the former president believes it’s an issue best left up to the states.
But his home state just threw him a curveball on the issue. On Monday, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that a ballot initiative for a state constitutional amendment protecting access to the procedure can go to a vote this fall. The Republican Party of Florida opposes the measure, which will be on the same ballot as Trump.
That raises the question: Will Florida’s best-known Republican vote yes or no?
Trump isn’t saying.
A written statement from his campaign on Monday evening avoided taking a position on the Florida initiative: “President Trump supports preserving life but has also made clear that he supports states’ rights because he supports the voters’ right to make decisions for themselves.”
As one Trump adviser who has discussed the issue with the former president put it, “There’s no point weighing in, at least not now.”
WHEN IT COMES TO THE POLITICS of the A-Word, Trump is content to say that the justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which then struck down Roe v. Wade with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in 2022, represent his great, completed work on behalf of the anti-abortion movement. In his view, it’s now up to voters and legislators at lower levels of government to decide limits across the various states.
“This is what Dobbs was. He’s staying close to that,” the source said, adding that Trump is “committed to the exceptions [in cases involving rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother]. Every state is so different. At his heart, he’s a federalist, and he thinks the states are better suited to handle this. He is not interested in this nonsense about prohibiting women from going across state lines [to get an abortion].”
Trump, who had described himself as “pro-choice” before he ran for president in 2016, is reluctant to weigh in not because of his prior views but because of a basic political calculation: Voters who say abortion is their top concern tend to support President Joe Biden by much larger margins than Trump. In contrast, inflation and immigration, which rank as more important issues in the minds of voters overall, tend to play to Trump’s strengths.
Also, Trump believes, Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections because they didn’t know how to handle abortion as an issue after Roe was struck down. (Of course, others blame Trump’s meddling as a major factor.)
Last year, after a spokesman said Trump thought abortion should be decided by the states, SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser blasted him for his “completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision” and for taking “a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.” She said her group “will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections.”
But after she called him out, Trump invited Dannenfelser to Mar-a-Lago, charmed her, and proceeded to win the GOP presidential primary with outsized support from abortion opponents. Today, according to an operative who works with SBA Pro-Life America, “We’re following Trump’s lead.”
But what exactly that entails isn’t easy to determine.
WHEN I INTERVIEWED TRUMP LAST MAY about his position on abortion, the closest he would come to a position was saying that Florida’s 6-week abortion ban, signed into law by his then-primary rival Gov. Ron DeSantis, was “too harsh.” (The Florida Supreme Court also allowed that ban to go into effect Monday when it struck down a precedent concerning the state’s privacy amendment.)
What does Trump support?
“I’m looking at all alternatives. I’m looking at many alternatives. But I was able to get us to the table by terminating Roe v. Wade. That’s the most important thing that’s ever happened for the pro-life movement,” Trump said at the time. He then posted on his Truth Social media platform that “Without me there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to. Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing.”
Not much has changed in his messaging since then.
Privately, Trump has expressed some support for federal legislation limiting abortion at 15 weeks or 16 weeks. He has told others that he believes it is not an intrusive limit, since some 90 percent of abortions occur in the first 15 weeks and since doctors generally agree that a fetus at that stage of development does not experience pain.
After Trump’s musings about backing a 16-week federal abortion limit were leaked to the New York Times in February, a broad circle of advisers and his campaign team shared polling with him that showed him his instincts about not weighing in were right.
“He was getting worked over by people on 15 weeks,” said another adviser who spoke to him about the issue. “He was floating ideas the way he does. He has not definitively said he likes 15 weeks or 16 weeks. He’s thinking out loud, saying, ‘Well, a lot of people are for 15 weeks,’ or ‘I like 16 weeks because it’s an even number.’ But there’s nothing definite. He may decide ultimately to stick with this being left to the states. And I think he’s done that,” the adviser said. “But you never know.”
THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WANTS TO DEPICT the other side as dominated by extremists. “Where President Trump thinks voters should have the last word, Biden and many Democrats want to allow abortion up until the moment of birth and force taxpayers to pay for it,” the campaign said in its Monday-evening statement—a characterization that amendment supporters said was a gross exaggeration.
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign wants to keep the pressure on Trump and has repeatedly called him out for “running scared” by not specifying his position on abortion.
“He’s afraid the women of America are going to hold him responsible for taking away their rights and endangering their rights at the ballot box in November,” Biden said in a statement in February. “Which is exactly what’s going to happen.”
Despite his silence, however, Trump’s refusal to weigh in on Florida’s potential constitutional amendment isn’t rooted in concerns about losing the state.
During his presidential tenure, the former swing-state swung hard in a Republican direction, and it’s not clear that it will ever swing back. Today, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in the state by more than 850,000. As recently as 2008, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost 700,000 in the state, and Barack Obama won it that year by three points.
Florida Republican pollster Ryan Tyson, who worked for DeSantis’s presidential campaign and consistently produces some of the most accurate polls in the state, said his models indicate Trump could win Florida by more than 10 percentage points. He said his national polls also indicate that Trump’s caution about abortion is prudent.
“Donald Trump is right where the American people are on the issue,” Tyson said. “No one should take the bait. He always has 15 weeks—with exceptions—that’s a safe harbor because it’s a 60-plus percent issue that people support in some states.”
Tyson’s surveys show the abortion amendment polling at 70 percent in Florida.
Social conservatives aren’t thrilled with Trump’s silence regarding the ballot measure, but they’re not saying so on the record now that he’s the de facto GOP presidential nominee.
“The problem with Trump is his base doesn’t care about policy,” one activist said. “Trump is an entertainer. This is a giant Jerry Springer Show. And we’re unfortunately along for the ride.”
Despite the polling and the trendlines, Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez issued a memo Monday claiming that Florida is “winnable” for Biden, in part because abortion is on the ballot.
“From a cruel and dangerous abortion ban and overt attacks on seniors to soaring costs caused by Republican policies, Donald Trump’s platform is uniquely unpopular with the voters who will decide this election in the Sunshine State—and our campaign is primed and ready to seize on the opportunity,” she wrote.
WHILE DEMOCRATS HOPE Florida’s abortion amendment will drive turnout and give Biden a better chance there—he lost the state to Trump in 2020—Florida voters remain purple in a way that doesn’t bode well for the president: They have a history of backing liberal-coded ideas (such as medical marijuana or anti-gerrymandering laws) while also voting for Republicans (DeSantis, Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, Trump himself).
“Reading this abortion issue nationally and in Florida through a politically partisan lens misreads the entire matter,” said Anna Hochkammer, executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition. “This is not a Trump-Biden issue.”
Still, Hochkammer said, if Biden wants to support the amendment and Trump wants to be quiet about it, that’s fine with her.
The sponsors of the amendment also want to downplay partisan politics because state constitutional amendments in Florida need 60 percent of the vote to pass. Organized partisan opposition can doom an initiative, as happened in 2014 with a proposed amendment concerning medical marijuana. And Republicans are vowing to stop this one.
The A-Word initiative was the product of extensive polling, focus-grouping, and discussion among state and national abortion groups. The text demonstrates its sponsors’ own canniness about the political uses of vagueness: In deference to supporters who felt using the term “women” needlessly excluded transgender people, the amendment instead talks about the rights of “patients,” and it casts abortion as a healthcare issue under threat from “government interference.” The measure also doesn’t specify a number of weeks at which the procedure would be banned and instead sets the limit at “viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” Neither “viability” nor “healthcare provider” is explicitly defined.
John Stemberger, an anti-abortion activist with the new group Florida Voters Against Extremism, said the amendment is actually vague enough to entail “essentially abortion on demand up until the moment of birth.” Hochkammer said this is an exaggeration.
But to the degree the amendment leaves some things implicit, others unsaid, and still others completely untouched, it might just be perfect for Trump.
“He really doesn’t want to get into the issue of weeks,” one of his advisers said. “If you look at what’s on the ballot across the country and pick, say, 16 weeks, you’re either too strong or too weak. And if you think of all the restrictions that have passed or are being proposed with less than 15 weeks, you’re pissing off all the conservatives. You are literally getting hit by both sides, and it’s not smart.”
Trump is not a “federalist.” He has no conception of what that means. He’s a sociopath.
“At his heart, he’s a federalist, and he thinks the states are better suited to handle this.” - Ummm, no. This would require thoughtfulness. We all know “at his heart” he’s a deluded, nasty, narcissistic, psychopathic moron who blurts out whatever thought enters his sick mind.