People who balk at voting Republican over abortion are objecting to the party’s long-standing positions, not to Trump or his political style or movement.
Katie Glueck of the New York Times looks at the Never Trump voters — current or former Republicans — who don’t want to support Donald Trump but have thus far balked at voting for Kamala Harris. In an election that could be very close, such voters may matter out of proportion to their numbers. But this part was discordant: “The party is betting that since Mr. Trump was last on the ballot, he has disqualified himself with more Americans who detest his election denialism and conspiracy theories, as well as his party’s abortion bans” (emphasis added). One of these things is not like the others. People who may be balking at voting Republican over abortion are objecting to the party’s long-standing pre-Trump positions (the Human Life Amendment was in the party platform from 1980 until Trump removed it), not to Trump or his political style or movement.
Equating pro-lifers with Trump is discordant with some of Glueck’s own reporting. She quotes Mesa, Ariz., mayor John Giles describing Trump objectors as “churchgoing, right-of-center people.” Gretchen Wolfe of Phoenix told Glueck that her objections to Trump were moral and not about voting “with my uterus”:
A two-time Trump voter who is worried about border security, she said she was still deciding between him and Ms. Harris, whose spending policies she questions. She trusts him to better handle foreign policy but finds his divisive style increasingly hard to overlook. “I don’t vote with my uterus, but when you have a candidate — and now not just a candidate, but a team — who continue to make comments and have actions that demonstrate they do not believe women are equal to men, it is really hard to support that,” she said. Ms. Wolfe added: “Holding my nose and voting for him one more time is just reinforcing bad behavior. We don’t do it as parents but we’re going to do it as voters?”
Glueck papers over this by citing a Republican politician who claimed to be anti-abortion until Dobbs:
Emily Brieve, a Republican county commissioner in Michigan, voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020. Her campaign website highlighted her opposition to abortion rights. And until this year, she had never considered voting for a Democratic presidential candidate. But to Ms. Brieve, 42, the people with whom Mr. Trump surrounds himself seem increasingly “extreme.” His running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, is “divisive” and “robotic,” ripe for caricature on “Saturday Night Live.” And after Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees helped overturn Roe v. Wade, she thought some state abortion restrictions went too far.
People vote for all sorts of reasons, so I don’t doubt that Republicans have lost some votes from people who dislike both Trump’s worst behaviors and the party’s preexisting stance on abortion. But given how hard Trump has backtracked on abortion in this campaign and the fact that a good number of his loud critics among long-standing Republicans have been social conservatives, it reflects Glueck’s own biases to just blindly assume that limits on abortion belong in the same deplorable basket of bad behavior as Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election.