The longest-tenured Republican in the US Senate has pledged to vote against a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy which a prominent fellow party member and chamber colleague proposed last month, joining a growing chorus of conservative lawmakers opposed to that idea.

Chuck Grassley, who’s been one of Iowa’s senators since 1980 and is seeking an eighth term in his seat during November’s midterms, expressed his opposition to such a ban during a televised debate Thursday night with his Democratic challenger Mike Franken.

“I would vote ‘no,’” the 89-year-old lawmaker said in the verbal faceoff with Franken, a retired Navy admiral who’s thought to be more than 9 percentage points behind Grassley in the polls, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.

Grassley’s remark during the recent debate is by no means an indication that he’s softening an anti-abortion stance that is typical among Republicans. He was among 43 GOP co-sponsors of a federal ban on aborting pregnancies beyond 20 weeks that was pitched last year by Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina.

Graham last month introduced a bill aiming to ban abortions after 15 weeks with few exceptions, and just nine Republican senators co-sponsored the measure. Grassley was not among those nine.

Graham’s fellow Republicans likely have met Graham’s bill with a cold reception because polling data show many voters disapproved of the US supreme court’s decision in June to eliminate the nationwide abortion rights that had been established by the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade. In fact, one poll found that as many as 60% of voters support abortion rights in most are all cases.

The Hill reported on its website that Grassley may have adopted his position on Graham’s more recently proposed ban out of fear for motivating opposition among Democratic voters in Des Moines and Iowa City, areas that are significantly more liberal than the rest of the strongly conservative state.

Donald Trump won Iowa when the Republican captured the Oval Office in 2016 and then lost it to Joe Biden in 2020. The state had gone to Biden’s fellow Democratic president Barack Obama in the previous two elections.

During the midterms, the Democrats are trying to preserve their advantage in a Senate that is evenly divided but which they control because of a tiebreaker vote in Biden’s vice-president Kamala Harris.

Nonetheless, even if they lose the chamber to the Republicans, the party’s Senate leader Mitch McConnell has said that he doesn’t envision bringing Graham’s 15-week ban up for a vote in 2023. McConnell, of Kentucky, has said he believes each state should determine the legality of abortion in their jurisdiction.

Since the supreme court’s controversial abortion ruling in June, the legislatures of 26 states have prohibited, severely limited or were expected to impede access to the termination of pregnancies, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Meanwhile, just 21 American states had laws protecting abortion access.

The co-sponsors of Graham’s proposed 15-week ban are Steve Daines of Montana, Marco Rubio of Florida, Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven of North Dakota, John Thune of South Dakota, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Roger Marshall of Kansas, and Josh Hawley of Missouri.