Republicans can’t run away from Dobbs, but it continues to weigh on them

On Saturday, the final night of the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference, Ralph Reed, the group’s head and a longtime stalwart of the evangelical Christian movement, was all smiles – his birthday would forever be the same day that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and the right to an abortion guaranteed under the decision for half a century.

Few people deny that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision cost Republicans many winnable races last year. Even Republican consultants and elected officials have openly admitted to me that it likely turned off many women and suburban voters. And that is likely to continue as more state legislatures pass abortion restrictions in the wake of the ruling.

But conservative evangelicals’ prominence within the GOP coalition means that Republicans need to appeal to them and cannot distance themselves from the unpopular decision. Indeed, every Republican presidential candidate ranging from former president Donald Trump, who closed out the weekend, to former vice president Mike Pence and Chris Christie, who was booed when he reamed Mr Trump, appeared at the gathering and many of them hailed the decision.

As a result, the conference became one of the few safe spaces for social conservatives to celebrate their victory last year.

“Thank God almighty for the Dobbs decision,” Sen Tim Scott (R-SC) told attendees on Friday in a clip that will certainly be played ad nauseam by Democrats. Florida Gov Ron DeSantis can point to his anti-abortion bona fides, given his signing of a six-week abortion ban in his home state.

Conversely, Mr Pence, an ardent social conservative who has long opposed abortion, sought to refute the idea that overturning Roe was an electoral albatross.

“Some have even gone on to blame the overturning of Roe v Wade for election losses in 2022,” he said. “But let me say from my heart, the cause of life is the calling of our time and we must not rest and must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in this country.”

But the fact is many voters don’t like the Dobbs decision. An NBC News poll showed that 61 per cent of voters disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision. And the survey shows that it’s even worse among the groups that many Republicans need to win in 2024. Republicans made large inroads with Latinos during Mr Trump’s presidency, but 70 per cent of Latino voters disapprove of Dobbs, refuting the idea that Latinos will embrace conservatives because of Catholicism. Republicans should also be alarmed that 67 per cent of women voters overall and 71 per cent of women voters between the ages of 18 and 49 disapprove.

Mr Trump’s presidency largely put the suburbs in play in states like Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Since then, Republicans have sought to win them back. But the survey showed that 57 per cent of suburban female voters disapprove of the Dobbs decision.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley seemed to acknowledge that public opinion is not on the GOP’s side since any federal legislation to restrict abortion would require a House majority and 60 Senate seats, so she said Republicans needed to focus more on supporting adoption care and restricting late-term abortions.

Conversely, Mr Pence leaned into the issue, announcing that he would support a 15-week abortion ban while his former boss Mr Trump, the man perhaps most responsible for overturning Roe, took credit for its demise given that he appointed three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who killed it.

“Exactly one year ago today, those justices were the pivotal votes in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision ending the constitutional atrocity known as Roe v Wade,” Mr Trump said on Saturday.

He tried to throw the issue back at Democrats and tried to paint them as extremists for supporting late-term abortion. But this will likely not make much of a difference since Republicans tried this strategy in crucial gubernatorial and Senate races in Arizona and Georgia and it didn’t move the needle much either way.

Most tellingly, Mr Trump, who has called Mr DeSantis’s legislation “too harsh” in the past, refrained from announcing support for any new abortion restrictions. Furthermore, Mr Trump received his biggest applause lines when he announced his support for restricting gender-affirming care for minors, banning transgender people from serving in the military and prohibiting taxpayer funding for gender-affirming care.

The gathering of social conservatives and evangelicals exposes the central problem for Republican presidential candidates: They cannot win the Republican nomination and get enough of their base out in November without at least a plurality of their support, meaning they need to support restrictions on abortion. But there simply aren’t enough base voters and, as a result, a hardline stance on abortion would alienate the voters they need to win over to win a general election.