In all eight of the nation's most competitive Senate races, Republican candidates have shifted their approach on the abortion issue, softening their rhetoric, shifting positions and, in at least one case, embracing policies promoted by Democrats.
From Michigan to Maryland, Republicans are recasting their positions to soften an issue that has hurt the party at the ballot box since the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights. The shifts are coming in battleground state elections, but the most striking changes are coming from candidates who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in their home states just two years ago and are now expressing very different views on abortion.
Republican businessman Bernie Moreno described his views as “absolutely pro-life, with no exceptions” when he ran for Ohio Senate in 2022.
“Life begins at conception,” he says, and “abortion is the murder of an innocent baby.” Said On social media.
Trump has since softened his stance, saying in March that he would support a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks, but a Trump spokesman said abortion “should be decided primarily at the state level” and that Trump supports “reasonable exceptions,” a position he plans to maintain during the 2024 election.
Republican businessman David McCormick, who ran for the Pennsylvania Senate in 2022, demonstrated his firm opposition to abortion. When asked at a Republican primary debate in April that year whether he would support exceptions to the abortion ban if Roe v. Wade were overturned, he responded that exceptions should be allowed in “very rare cases” where a woman's life is at risk.
Now, as he makes his second bid for the Senate, he urges Americans to “find common ground.” His website has removed the “life begins at conception” phrase and now says abortion is legal in the state up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy, the federal standard under Roe. A campaign spokesman also told CNN in April that McCormick “inadvertently omitted” the rape and incest exceptions from a debate answer two years ago.
The shift marks the latest effort by Republican candidates to reconcile their party's decades-old opposition to abortion rights with the changed political realities of an issue that has underpinned Democratic electoral victories since Roe expired.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to rally Republicans around a 15-week federal abortion ban, arguing that voters would accept what some Republicans characterize as a “reasonable” restriction. But that position hamstrung Democrats in key elections, and Republicans lost seats in battleground states such as Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Many Republicans now adopt former President Donald J. Trump's position of leaving the issue up to the states.
“They're repeating themselves,” said Angela Kuchler, a Democratic pollster who has worked on Senate races in Florida and Arizona. “They're realizing how taxing their position has been in the last few elections since the demise of Roe.”
Some candidates have taken seemingly contradictory positions, such as calling themselves “pro-life” while supporting their state's abortion laws that legalize abortion in almost all cases.
National Republicans say their position is clear and that Democrats are trying to overcome poor polling ratings on the economy, inflation and border control by focusing on abortion rights in the Senate race.
“Republican Senate candidates have made it clear that they oppose a nationwide ban on abortion and support exceptions in cases of rape, incest and to protect the mother's life,” said Tate Mitchell, a spokesman for the Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans. “We intend to vigorously combat Democrats' attempts to inflame the issue.”
A few Democrats have also changed their stance on abortion in recent years.
The incumbent Democrat trying to fend off McCormick, Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, voted to advance a federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in 2018 and frequently describes himself as a “pro-life Democrat.” But after a draft Supreme Court decision ending Roe was leaked in 2022, he joined the effort to codify those protections into law.
“No senator has changed his position on abortion more radically than Sen. Bob Casey Jr.,” said Elizabeth Gregory, a spokeswoman for McCormick. “His extreme stance is out of step with Pennsylvania's.”
But Casey is an outlier in his party, having made abortion rights a central part of his message for the 2024 election. Nearly all Democrats support legalizing abortion at the federal level and generally do not support restrictions on abortion procedures, such as how many weeks into a pregnancy they can have, saying the decision should be left to women and their doctors.
This is a position supported by one Republican running in a heavily Democratic state. Larry Hogan, a former governor of Maryland and a moderate Republican running for U.S. Senate, recently said he also supports codifying Roe, a new position he took just days after winning the primary. Hogan has also said he supports enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution, a measure that will be on the November ballot.
When asked by The New York Times how he would describe his views on abortion, Hogan replied, “If you define what I support – a woman's right to make her own decisions – I would say that's pro-abortion.”
Other Republican senatorial campaigns declined to make their candidates available for interviews on the issue, and some did not respond to general inquiries about the issue.
Other candidates have not gone as far on the abortion issue as Hogan, but several have backed away from the more staunch anti-abortion positions they espoused before seeking office.
Former Rep. Mike Rogers, a former front-runner in Michigan's Republican Senate primary, co-sponsored several anti-abortion bills in the House, including one that would give fertilized eggs constitutional rights at conception. But now as a senator, he says he won't support federal proposals that would roll back protections Michigan voters enacted to make abortion legal up to 24 weeks.
“Michiganers have spoken out loud in 2022 and this is a settled issue in our state,” Rogers said in a statement. “As their voice in Washington, I will not take a position that is at odds with the rights guaranteed to voters in the Michigan Constitution.”
And in Wisconsin, Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who told reporters in 2012 that he was “totally opposed” to abortion, now says women have a “right to choose” early in their pregnancy, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“Eric Hovde cannot get away from the fact that he supports abortion bans and believes politicians like him should be in charge of women's health care,” his Democratic opponent, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, said in a statement.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, urged anti-abortion candidates to “get aggressive” to expose the “extremism” of their opponents.
“We know what doesn't win elections: the 'ostrich strategy' of burying your head in the sand and hoping the issue goes away,” she said in a statement.
Abortion remains one of the few politically favorable issues for Democrats, who get poor marks for the economy, foreign policy and immigration. Some Republican strategists question whether the issue will have the same resonance as it did in the past two election cycles, when abortion rights led liberals, independents and even moderate Republican women to support Democratic candidates.
A series of polls conducted in battleground states by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer found that when voters were asked what issue was most important in deciding their vote, abortion ranked lower than the economy and immigration.
However, 11% of voters in battleground states and 17% of women cited this as the most important issue, indicating that there is still a core of voters who care deeply about the issue.
With a flurry of abortion referendums expected in states across the country, Democrats believe the issue will remain central to voters in the fall. They have spent a lot of time and money reminding voters of Republicans' past support for abortion restrictions and bans, and have played up their opponents' records on television. More than a quarter of their ads in the first four months of the year focused on the issue.
“Republican Senate candidates have made it clear on record and on video that they support strict restrictions on abortion and oppose women's rights to make their own health care decisions,” said David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Republican candidates know their policies are unpopular, and their pathetic attempts to hide their positions only reinforce why voters don't trust them.”
Democratic efforts have been focused in Arizona in recent weeks, where party leaders and allies have spent millions of dollars pushing a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The issue became a political hotbed this month after lawmakers repealed a near-total ban on abortion but enacted a 15-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest.
For the past two years, Kali Lake, a Republican currently running for Senate, has appeared to take positions on all aspects of Arizona's abortion bill.
During her 2022 gubernatorial run, she praised the state's 1864 abortion law, which banned nearly all abortions in the state, as a “great law.” She also said she would sign a bill to ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
But last month, when the state Supreme Court reinstated the 1864 law, she denounced it as “out of step with Arizonans” and called Republicans in the state Legislature directly to say she supported repealing it. videoShe said she not only opposes a federal ban on abortion, but also federal funding of abortion.
The shifts in rhetoric among Republicans haven't always been so dramatic: Kuchler said some candidates have simply quietly changed their tone by avoiding graphic discussions of abortion and adopting warmer language.
Tim Sheehy, a Republican running for U.S. Senate in Montana, accused Democrats of “murdering our unborn children” on a local radio show in 2023 before announcing his candidacy. He said earlier this year that he supports “common sense protections” for the procedure, that further restrictions should be left to states, and that he supports exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.
Sam Brown, the Republican front-runner in Nevada's 2022 Senate primary, has been appointed chair of the state's chapter of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. In his appointment announcement, Brown said one of the group's aims is to “protect life.”
But as a Senate candidate, he gave an emotional interview in which his wife, Amy Brown, spoke about her own experience with abortion, and said he respected Nevada's state law allowing abortion up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy and opposed a federal ban on abortion.
“Amy and I have spoken extensively about this issue, and I believe, first and foremost, that mothers facing unplanned pregnancies deserve the utmost compassion and understanding,” Brown said in a statement. In a statement, he described himself as “pro-life” but supported exceptions. “Like President Trump, I believe this issue should now be appropriately handled at the state level, and I applaud his leadership.”
