Jamie Kelter Davis / New York Times
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, campaigns in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, April 2, 2024. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, the leading anti-abortion group supporting Republican candidates, says she is “deeply disappointed” in Trump’s position that states should decide abortion rights.
Wednesday, April 10, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Multiple Republican candidates in swing-state races aligned themselves with former President Donald Trump after he said abortion access should be left up to the states, avoiding mention of a national ban and laying bare the party’s rift over the issue.
The pivot was particularly pronounced among at least a couple of GOP contenders for the U.S. Senate, which Democrats control by a thin 51-49 seat majority.
Republicans would need to flip just one seat in the chamber if Trump prevails in the November election, but they have watched the losses pile up for the party’s candidates since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In the midterm elections that year, a widely predicted “red wave” failed to materialize for Republicans, who missed opportunities in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona to flip the Senate and dropped key governor’s races, including in Michigan.
“I agree with President Trump that the issue of abortion should be decided at the state level,” Mike Rogers, a former longtime House member from Michigan whom Trump endorsed in that state’s open-seat U.S. Senate race, said in a statement.
As a House member in 2013, Rogers was one of 131 Republican co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act, a fetal personhood bill that did not pass.
In Ohio, Bernie Moreno, a wealthy former car dealer who rode Trump’s endorsement to a victory last month in a contested Republican primary for the Senate, staked out similar ground as the former president.
“Bernie has always said it should be primarily decided at the state level,” Reagan McCarthy, communications director for Moreno’s campaign, said in an email. “He’s comfortable with any path forward that ends elective, late-term abortions with reasonable exceptions and saves as many babies as possible.”
But during a Republican primary debate in March, Moreno pledged to support restrictions after 15 weeks at the federal level, but objected to calling it a ban.
Trump, who has vacillated over the years on the issue of abortion, often takes credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a result of his appointment of three anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court during his presidency. His new stance Monday was met by fierce dissent from some other Republicans, like Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Vice President Mike Pence — though notably, Graham isn’t on the ballot this year, and Pence isn’t running for office, after he dropped his own presidential bid last fall.
Kari Lake, a Republican who is running for the Senate in the battleground state of Arizona after her failed bid for governor in 2022, also fell in line with Trump.
“I agree with President Trump: I do NOT support a federal abortion ban, policy should be up to individual states,” she wrote on Monday on the social platform X.
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, a former two-term governor of that state and former chair of the Senate Republican campaign arm who is running for reelection, shares Trump’s view that states should decide abortion access, McKinley P. Lewis, a spokesperson for Scott, said in an email.
During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about a month before the midterm elections in 2022, Scott said that he supported “reasonable” abortion restrictions, and that “there’s arguments to do it at the federal level.”
David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive who is running for the Senate in Pennsylvania for a second time since 2022, is echoing Trump, too.
“We agree,” Elizabeth Gregory, a spokesperson for McCormick, said in an email Tuesday. She did not offer further comment.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who is running for reelection in a race that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report classified as a “solid Republican” seat, also endorsed a state-by-state approach.
“We don’t have a national referendum system, so the way voters get to vote is they’re going to vote in the states,” he told reporters Monday on Capitol Hill. “I just see this as a voter issue. And to be clear, I’m pro-life. I’m going to argue for pro-life laws. If I get the chance to vote in my state, I’m going to vote for what I think is the most pro-life position with exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
