Trump and his veep nominee Vance try to circumvent abortion controversy by making it a states’ rights issue

Donald Trump and his policy mavens have decided to change tack on their earlier commitments to banish abortion rights on a federal level. They’ve taken the position that the issue should be settled on a state-by-state basis. Trump (changing his tune since he backed a federal abortion ban as president in 2018) has said, “you don’t need a federal ban. Roe v. Wade ... wasn’t about abortion so much as bringing it back to the states. So the states would negotiate deals. Florida is going to be different from Georgia and Georgia is going to be different from other places.”

Trump’s just-announced VP pick J.D. Vance (who in 2022 said he would favor a national ban on abortion) said at the RNC convention that he accepted Trump’s view that abortion is a state  issue.

The Trump team (long identified with the pro-life movement, as shown by the public domain image above of a 2020 campaign ad posted in wikimedia commons), in its zeal to avoid the issue by pushing it off to the states, has really only modified the political problem that they’re trying to eliminate.

The trouble for them is that even in its modified form they can’t skirt the issue, mainly because this is a country where a strong majority believes that abortions should be legal in all or most cases. People know their anti-abortion views. Understanding that they can’t win on a macro level, the new “let the states decide” approach is the Trump/Vance way of remaining true to their anti-abortion beliefs without having to deal with the political messiness of it all.

That’s a desperate and clumsy gambit, and I don’t think it will work very well.

The problem with Trump’s approach is that there are large numbers of pro-choicers in those ultra-crucial battleground states that are likely to make or break Trump’s campaign. What Trump and Vance don’t seem to get is that reproductive rights advocates seek the reassurance of federal protection – something like Roe v. Wade – and will no doubt support a Democratic ticket that promises to work toward that end. 

I don’t know of any pro-choicers who believe that settling the matter at the state level is a way of resolving the issue. Trump and Vance are kidding themselves if they think sloughing it off to the states will soften the determination of pro-choicers to make their statements at the polls.

Last May, Time magazine pointed out that in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a collective 64% of residents say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. To top that off, even in red states, according to Time, 57% of residents say abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

Republicans should be wary of Trump’s overly simplified view that this is a states’ rights issue.

They need only look at the recent past when, because of a strong showing from abortion rights advocates, things turned out favorably for Democrats in off-year elections. Despite the Trump/Vance effort to keep the matter at arms length, it seems likely that abortion rights will  be a top-of-the mind issue in November and that Republicans will be hurt as a result.  

Trump and Vance can run from it, but they can’t hide.

John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.