One of the surprising elements of the first Republican presidential primary debate was the candidates’ apparent eagerness to talk about abortion. “I am unapologetically pro-life,” former Ambassador Nikki Haley said. “I am 100 percent pro-life conservative,” Sen. Tim Scott added. “I’m a pro-life governor,” former Gov. Asa Hutchinson declared at the same event.
Soon after, Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, told Fox News how “very pleased“ she was to hear the White House hopefuls “talk about abortion.” She added, “If our candidates aren’t able to find a response and put out a response, we’re not going to win.”
The problem for the party, of course, is that reproductive rights are already preventing the party from winning. As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, not only is there extensive public opinion research to consider, but there are also recent election results in Ohio, Wisconsin, Kansas, and New York, on top of the 2022 midterm elections in which the GOP fell far short of expectations — due in large part to the party’s opposition to reproductive rights.
There are apparently some Republicans, however, who believe the party’s fortunes will improve if only they used different words related to abortion. NBC News reported:
Republican strategists are exploring a shift away from “pro-life” messaging on abortion after consistent Election Day losses for the GOP when reproductive rights were on the ballot. At a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans this week, the head of a super PAC closely aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., presented poll results that suggested voters are reacting differently to commonly used terms like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, said several senators who were in the room.
Evidently, party strategists have found that the phrase “pro-life” isn’t resonating with voters, because much of the electorate perceive it as support for a total ban on all abortions. (For some opponents of reproductive rights, of course, it does mean a total ban on all abortions.)
“Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things,” Sen. Josh Hawley told NBC News. The Missouri Republican added, “So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted. So if you’re going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific. … You can’t assume that everybody knows what it means. They probably don’t.”
After this week’s presentation, another GOP senator, Indiana’s Todd Young, went so far as to use the phrase “pro-baby policies.”
Broadly speaking, there are a couple of key details to keep in mind. The first is that Republicans can’t credibly make the shift to “pro-baby” phrasing because the rest of the party’s agenda gets in the way. This is, after all, a party that has long been staunch opponents of new child-care programs, increased food stamps, family-leave programs, and the Affordable Care Act.
But the other dimension to this is the faulty assumptions at the heart of the inquiry. Republicans don’t have a branding problem; they have a policy problem.
Most voters don’t want GOP officials imposing restrictions on Americans’ reproductive rights. It’s against this backdrop that Republicans not only want to impose restrictions anyway, they’re also now exploring how to describe their regressive agenda in ways the public might find more politically palatable.
But there is no magical phrase that will make such policies popular. There is no spin on abortion restrictions that will somehow turn the GOP’s disadvantage into an advantage.
