GOP Chair Tells Candidates to Address Abortion. But Voters Don’t Like What They Have to Say

Seeking to avoid the political fallout over abortion the party suffered in 2022, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel urged GOP hopefuls to take a different tack on the issue in 2024: “The guidance we’re going to give to our candidates,” she told Fox News Sunday, “is you have to address this head on.”

“The Democrats spent $360 million on this and many of our candidates across the board refused to talk about it, thinking, Oh, we can just talk about the economy and ignore this big issue,” McDaniel continued. “They can’t.”

The warning comes after a midterm cycle that saw much of the country rebel against the GOP over its extreme position on abortion, which was restricted in a number of red states last year after the right-wing Supreme Court overturned Roe. It also comes as Republicans—including those vying for the party’s presidential nomination like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, who is expected to throw his hat into the ring later this month—remain loath to clarify their position on the issue. 

McDaniel—who has steered the GOP through three consecutive disappointing elections now—did not exactly offer up clear talking points for her candidates beyond stating the need to not be “uncomfortable” discussing the issue. However, she did hint at a goal for Republicans this cycle: to “articulate where you stand” and put Democrats on the “defensive.”

“Lies become the truth if you don’t fight back,” McDaniel said. “So you need to say it loud.”

Of course, the real trouble for McDaniel is that Republicans aren’t being smeared about their position on abortion: The GOP’s position on reproductive healthcare is so dangerous and so extreme that Democrats don’t need to “lie” to turn Americans against them. The country is already experiencing the consequences of the party’s radical anti-choice agenda in states where abortion access has been dramatically restricted or eliminated entirely. Americans are also already bracing for worse as abortion pills come under threat—and as federal Republicans like Lindsey Graham fantasize about a national abortion ban. “I believe that’s where the American public is,” GOP presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday.

But it’s not. Most Americans support the legal right to an abortion, and voters have made that clear on several occasions when they’ve had a say in the matter—including when they rejected a ballot measure to restrict abortion in Kansas last year and elected an openly pro-choice judge to the Wisconsin Supreme Court over an anti-choice conservative last month. Republicans’ discomfort around the issue of abortion—and the word salad they’ve served up in lieu of clear, substantive positions—doesn’t come from an inability to “articulate” their stance, as McDaniel suggested to Fox News. It comes from an awareness of how out-of-step their positions are with the American public. “We do know that banning abortion is unpopular,” as Ianthe Metzger, director of state advocacy communications at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told the Washington Post after two extreme anti-choice bills failed to pass the GOP-led legislatures in Nebraska and South Carolina last week. Were they to “address abortion head on,” Republicans would either have to alienate the right-wingers who steer the party agenda or alienate the more moderate and independent voters seeking an alternative to the demagoguery of Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. (Which is why you get the evasiveness of Haley’s pledge to “save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” or the syntactical maze of Scott’s recent answer to a reporter’s question on the matter.)