How Republicans Watered Down Their Abortion Message

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, Republicans suddenly faced a conundrum.

They could embrace the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reversed a nearly 50-year precedent and eliminated the federal right to an abortion. Or they could tack toward the political center and alight on more of a consensus, as Chief Justice John Roberts unsuccessfully sought to do within the court.

Instead, many Republican candidates tried to pull off a magic trick by doing both. And, with just six days before Election Day, there are signs some of them have managed to pull a rabbit out of the proverbial hat.

The emotionally fraught issue of abortion put Republicans in a bind. The party’s base was ecstatic at achieving a long-cherished goal. But the middle-of-the-road voters who often decide elections were decidedly less enthused, and Democrats had found a topic that could mobilize their otherwise dyspeptic partisans.

The court’s timing was not propitious for Republicans. A leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion, which hewed closely to the final text, hit the internet in May — in the heart of a primary season when candidates were competing to win the right’s favor. And yet polling showed that it was strikingly unpopular, with nearly 60 percent of the public disagreeing with the high court’s ruling.

Even anti-abortion groups, such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, advised Republican candidates in a leaked memo to focus on “Democratic extremism” and “avoid traps laid by the other side and their allies in the media.”

Shaking up the Etch A Sketch

So, what was an aspiring Republican officeholder to do?

As an adviser to Mitt Romney once said during the 2012 presidential race, running in a general election is “almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”

They shook it up and tried to start over.

In August, Blake Masters, the G.O.P. nominee for Senate in Arizona, scrubbed his website of comments calling for a 100 percent abortion ban and a federal “personhood” law. Instead, in a video he posted to Twitter, he said, “I support a ban on very late-term and partial-birth abortion.” (Very few abortions take place after the first 21 weeks of a pregnancy, and when they do, it’s often when the pregnant woman encounters health complications.)

During his Senate primary in Georgia, Herschel Walker initially opposed any exceptions to banning abortion, even for rape, incest or the woman’s health. On at least one occasion, he told reporters, “There’s no exception in my mind.” But he later said he supported a Georgia bill that would ban abortions after fetal cardiac activity.

Adam Laxalt, who is hoping to unseat Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, has called Roe v. Wade “a joke” and a “total, complete invention.” Now, he points to the legality of abortion in Nevada to inoculate himself from Cortez Masto’s attacks.

Some of these pivots have been clumsy. Bo Hines, a former college quarterback who is running for a House seat in North Carolina, backs creating a panel that would decide whether to allow abortions in case of rape or incest. But he’s been vague about how it might work.

“There are certainly legal mechanisms you could place legislatively that would create an individual basis,” Hines told Spectrum News. Democrats blasted out a news release calling the idea “post-Dobbs rape panels.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is running against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman for Senate in Pennsylvania, says he opposes a federal abortion ban. But he implied during their lone debate that “local officials” should be involved in the decision of whether to terminate a pregnancy. Whom he meant was a mystery — the alderman? county assessor? — and Democrats pounced.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin took a novel approach. Although he has backed a federal abortion ban in the past, he now calls for “a one-time, single-issue referendum to decide the question.” His campaign even released a sample ballot with a multiple-choice quiz, asking: “At what point does society have the responsibility to protect the life of an unborn child?”

The Burger King strategy: Have it your way

Tudor Dixon’s journey might be the most instructive. She’s running for governor of Michigan against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has aggressively positioned herself as a defender of abortion rights. Whitmer has asked for an injunction to stop a 1931 “trigger law” criminalizing abortion that took effect after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs.

A grass-roots coalition on the left, meanwhile, is pushing a ballot measure that would make abortion legal again in Michigan. In response, anti-abortion groups have claimed it would invalidate laws requiring parental consent and even permit children to have gender-reassignment surgery without their parents’ permission. Legal experts say all that would be for courts to decide, but Democrats have griped that the right “has done a good job of muddying the waters.”

During the primary, Dixon said she opposed abortion in the case of rape or incest, remarking in one interview that in conversations with rape victims, she had found “there was healing through that baby.”

Now, Dixon warns that the ballot measure would invalidate parental consent laws. And if Michiganders want to protect abortion rights but oust Whitmer, they can vote for her and the ballot measure.

I know you are, but what am I?

As they walked back positions they took during the primary, Republicans accused Democrats of trying to distract from topics that played more to their advantage: inflation and crime. Judging from the recent comments of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, some Democrats even agree.

Many Republicans also followed the Susan B. Anthony group’s playbook and portrayed Democrats as the true extremists. Saying that Democrats support “abortion on demand” has been a frequent Republican talking point. That has occasionally tripped up Democratic candidates, but it has rarely done real damage.

For instance: Clips of a Fox News interview pinged around social media in May in which Representative Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Ohio, was asked whether he supported “any limits to abortion at any point” and said it was entirely the woman’s decision. But Ryan has clawed his way within striking distance of his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance.

In libertarian-ish Arizona, as Dave Weigel recounts on Semafor, Republicans seized on Planned Parenthood’s support for defunding the police and its use of gender-neutral language to try to delegitimize the abortion rights position writ large.

It’s hard to say whether these tactics have worked. But they do seem to have helped take abortion from a lopsided issue to a more neutral one. They also have prevented Republicans who took hard lines in their primaries from suffering the fate of Todd Akin, whose “legitimate rape” remark immediately placed him on the fringe during the 2012 Senate race in Missouri.

But abortion hasn’t been the disqualifying issue some Democrats hoped it would be. A Wall Street Journal poll published on Wednesday found that white suburban women, a key target of the Democrats’ abortion message, were swinging back toward Republicans.

Republicans who haven’t shaken up the Etch A Sketch have had a tougher time.

Consider the plight of Doug Mastriano, who has stuck to his no-exceptions guns and is down by nearly 10 percentage points against Attorney General Josh Shapiro in the Pennsylvania governor’s race.

Or look at Representative Ted Budd, the Republican nominee for Senate in North Carolina, who supported a federal abortion ban that Senator Lindsey Graham proposed even as other Republicans distanced themselves from the idea. Before inflation came roaring back to the forefront of voters’ concerns in late September, Budd’s race against Cheri Beasley, a moderate former judge, had tightened considerably.

Democrats have spent nearly $320 million on commercials focused on abortion rights, my colleagues noted yesterday. That’s 10 times as much as they have spent on inflation ads.

Much of that has been aimed at holding Republicans accountable to their previous stances. But while there’s been some second-guessing about the wisdom of that approach, many in the party insist it was worth it.

“It competes with a lot of other motivations,” said Christina Reynolds, the communications director of Emily’s List, an abortion rights group that backs female candidates. “But this is an issue that has put us in the fight in many ways.”

What to read

• President Biden will give a speech tonight about protecting democracy and the threats that election deniers pose to the voting process, Katie Rogers writes. Follow live coverage on NYTimes.com.

• A federal judge in Arizona sharply curtailed the activities of an election-monitoring group in the vicinity of ballot boxes, including taking photos or videos of voters and openly carrying firearms, Ken Bensinger reports.

• Cecilia Kang outlined five of the biggest unfounded rumors that have been circulating about voting.

• Congressional Republicans, looking toward election victories, have embraced plans to reduce Social Security and Medicare spending. Jim Tankersley writes that Democrats have seized on that to galvanize voters.

• The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered election officials to refrain from counting mail-in ballots that lack a written date on their outer envelope, siding with Republicans, Neil Vigdor writes.

Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — Blake

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