Image Credits: Joyce Boghosian/White House.
I have some thoughts on Donald Trump’s decision to tell NBC News on Thursday that “if he is elected, his administration would not only protect access to in-vitro fertilization but would also have either the government or insurance companies cover the cost of the expensive service for American women who need it.” He also intimated that he might vote in favor of repealing Florida’s six-week abortion ban when he casts his ballot in November. His campaign later walked that back a bit by saying he had not made up his mind.
It’s a fairly standard practice for politicians to pander to their party’s base when running in a primary and then to pivot to more widely appealing policies and messages when trying to win a general election. Sometimes this is called “moving to the middle,” but I think it’s really about moving away from the unpopular. For Donald Trump things are a bit more complicated because he really didn’t need to sweat too much about winning the nomination of the Republican Party in 2024, but he has a four-year record in office. So, there are some things in his record as president that are liabilities now, and one of those things is his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices who banded together to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Kamala Harris is in a pretty similar situation. She’s been vice-president for four years and some of the Biden administration’s policies and record are not popular. In addition, when she ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, she pandered pretty hard to the party’s base, and she’s walking back several of those stances now in an effort to appeal to a general election electorate. This pivot would be more pronounced if she’d just run in a partisan primary this year, but she avoided that complication.
Moving to the middle isn’t necessarily a no-brainer move. I think of it like Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t break promises you made to your base without consequences. For every vote you pick up in the middle, you might lose one from the right or left. So, to figure out whether a middle-moving action will benefit a politician, you have to understand the mass, or size, of the affected constituencies. If your base is bigger than the world of persuadable voters, you could wind up losing more support than you gain.
This is simplistic, I know, because base voters are harder to move than persuadables. They can be disappointed and even angry and still vote for you if they consider the alternative to be much worse. For this reason, the third law of motion isn’t a perfect analogy. At the same time, it’s called a law of nature for a reason. Disappointed and angry voters are less likely to vote at all, and much less likely to donate their money or time. It’s obvious that a happy and enthusiastic base is preferable to one that feels betrayed.
And, to be clear, Trump’s shift on in-vitro and abortion is a giant betrayal to his most loyal constituency. Abortion-obsessed white evangelical Christians have stuck with Trump fully knowing that he’s a terrible human being because he’s delivered on the issue they most care about, while previous Republican presidents provided little more than lip service. But if you think every fertilized egg is a human being and that discarding unused fertilized eggs is murder, then it’s not possible to countenance government-funded in-vitro fertilization. And that’s not even getting in the expense of such a proposal. Kamala Harris hasn’t made any proposals this offensive to the worldview of these evangelicals. And if Trump opposes a six-week ban on abortion, that just compounds the problem, because he can’t be trusted to continue to advance their crusade for a total ban.
So, this is a test. Trump feels like his base will never leave him, and given that they’ve stood with him through so many impeachments, arrests, and scandals, he has good reason to hold that belief. But perhaps he doesn’t understand that their loyalty isn’t all about him but in large part because he’s been a very effective vehicle for the issue that most motivates them to be politically active.
In the game of wink-and-nod, it’s possible for Trump to make all manner of flip-flops and empty promises without alarming his base. He can even commit sexual assault and business fraud and cuddle up to dictators. But this is potentially different. This is a direct attack on the reason they give him a pass on everything else.
So, this Trump action is going to have a strong reaction, and I think it will depress his turnout and overall margins in his strongest counties and communities. Will he make up for this by winning over persuadles? It’s possible, but I doubt it. This could be a catastrophic political miscalculation.
