Abortion is the safe wall behind which Joe Biden can age before our eyes, the struggling economy can keep gasping for breath, and Ukraine can worry not so much about its weapons, because abortion — its availability in some form massively popular with most Americans; its sanctioning viciously biting Republicans in the ass — is going to re-elect the Democrats.
Yes, but… here’s how it could make Donald Trump president.
Trump is further ahead of his competitors in the race for his party’s nomination than any other contender in the modern history of party primaries. This means he can afford to start running in the general election now. He no longer has to prove his Right-wing bona fides to his base. They are safely with him. The evangelicals can no longer defeat him, and will, as they always have, ultimately rationalise their magical draw to him. Nothing, at this point, can seem to turn his party against him, not 91 felony indictments, nor, even more startling, his strangely anomalous abortion views.
Donald Trump has become the most moderate voice on abortion among the Republican candidates.
He’s nearly a formal apostate, challenging the political logic of the Republican draconian views. He’s criticised his own supreme court for delivering the conservative dream of overturning Roe v Wade. He’s refused — even mocked — the conservative pledge for a federal anti-abortion law. He’s attacked his main opponent, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, for Florida’s six-weeks law. And he’s accused the pro-life movement of being “some kind of business”. That is, cynically in it for the money they can raise from the issue.
No American politician has ever pushed his party and much of the electorate as far Right as Donald Trump
For Trump, abortion has always been a kind of unvarnished raw politics. He was perfectly well for it when he was a high-profile New York figure with multiple wives and a media career. He was against it when he needed to make his deal with the religious Right. As president, he was happy to be the agent of a Republican party that wanted anti-abortion judges (although, on several occasions, he had to be talked out of appointing pro-choice Rudy Giuliani to the Supreme Court). He did not seem much to disguise that this was, for him, a wholly transactional issue — he wasn’t a hypocrite about being a hypocrite. What’s more, he reasonably figured, the court was never going to overturn the law. They weren’t that stupid. Now, clearly, after the reversal of Roe v Wade — what many conservatives consider his finest accomplishment — he’s looking at an issue which is a profound drag on the Republican party.
No American politician has ever pushed his party and much of the electorate as far Right as Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis has attempted to transform himself from a basic Yale-educated business conservative into a populist firebrand with absolutist policies, including his by-the-book abortion politics in Florida. He wasn’t doing this to oppose Trump, but to mimic him. Every viable Republican figure has had to make this journey.
But this has left them all blinking in the harsh light, not just having to defend abortion bans but once more shrinking before Donald Trump.
Trump, the counter-puncher, and contrast-gainer, has now — with his base neatly locked up — gone the other way. When you least expected it, Donald Trump is suddenly the sensible and realistic figure in his party.
What is the incremental value for Trump of even a smidgen of “sensible and realistic”?
The electoral rap against Trump is that he is Trump. Unable to be anything else, he has put himself into a corner, marginalised by not only his own behaviour — resulting in his blizzard of felony indictments — but by policies that have alienated mainstream Republicans as well as liberals.
The soft middle where close elections are won, has, since the 2018 midterm elections, and in every election since, been cold to him. But, in this, abortion occupies a curious place. The Right is absolute on abortion, and the Left as militant. Even Joe Biden, an apparently contended Catholic, long uncomfortable with the terms of the abortion debate, is forced into categorical mode.
But the soft middle is quite an equivocal place: Yes, abortion, under these circumstances, and okay, up to this point, maybe, but then… come on. Don’t make me go the whole 10 yards — in either direction.
Donald Trump whose hallmark is to express doubt about nothing, no matter how wrongheaded and preposterous he might otherwise sound, is the only national political figure expressing ambivalence about abortion. He has potentially found a sweet spot no one knew might exist in American politics.
The Right is not going to accuse him of being a flip-flopper on the issue, which he patently is, because they are reluctant to accuse him of anything. What’s more, the Left’s attack on the Trump court for overruling Roe v Wade is now confused by Trump attacking his own court as well.
Trump has potentially found a sweet spot no one knew might exist in American politics
What does it get him with the soft middle to have found an issue where he is, egads, something like the Solomonic voice?
The key advantage for an incumbent president is that you avoid a primary election and the necessity to appeal to doctrinaire primary voters before awkwardly having to tack back to those with more uncertain views. Joe Biden, from the White House, is in general election mode, counting on internecine Republican politics to further complicate Donald Trump’s life. But Trump, within the Republican party, has effectively been running as an incumbent too (indeed, spending more time playing golf than actually campaigning) with his eye on the general election.
The two toughest issues for the Republicans in 2024, issues on which they lose the soft middle, are Trump being Trump and abortion. Moderating the latter issue, an untested gambit in American politics with no candidate in recent years trying to find a centre space, might also help moderate the former issue. In 2020, Trump lost by 44,000 votes in three key states. Abortion, neither harshly this way nor adamantly that, might help find him those votes.
