Republicans who previously campaigned on a pro-life position are now ‘in a tough spot,’ experts say. Kelly Rissman speaks to GOP strategists and campaign managers about what’s going on behind the scenes.
Following the November 2023 elections, Utah Republican Sen Mitt Romney admitted: “The more we talk about abortion, the worse we’re doing.”
The idiom “the dog that caught the car” often comes up when discussing conservatives’ aspiration-turned-reality of dismantling the constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 Dobbs decision. “We caught the car, it doesn’t sell,” Ariel Hill-Davis, co-founder of Republican Women for Progress, told The Independent. “Almost no Republicans are out there touting [Dobbs ] as a victory.”
Republican voters made it clear they don’t actually want to see a federal abortion ban. Even in deep-red states, reproductive rights have won at the ballot box since Roe was overturned. Yet it looks increasingly likely that Trump will be the GOP candidate this year — and his repeated boasts about the Dobbs decision put congressional Republicans who want to hold onto their jobs in a tricky spot. What does one do in such a situation? Perhaps quietly start deleting references to being anti-abortion off their websites.
Texas Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz recently deleted mentions of her pro-life stance on her website, The Daily Beast reported earlier this month. “Monica believes in finding common ground on this issue. This includes protecting sensible exceptions for women in heartbreaking situations and improving access to prenatal care,” her campaign manager Andrew Baughman told The Independent in a statement.
Biden warns against Trump’s threat to abortion rights
She’s not alone. The Independent found three other Congressional Republicans who removed all vestiges of their once-vocal pro-life stance, eliminating terms like “abortion” or “pro-life” or “protecting the unborn” from their re-election campaign websites.
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