Former President Trump and President Biden have set a late June date for their first debate of 2024. On the heels of the second anniversary of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, which returned the right to protect unborn children to the people and their elected representatives, abortion is guaranteed to be front and center as an election issue.
Biden and the Democrats are spending millions of dollars on attack ads centered around abortion. Vice President Harris travels the country as Biden’s abortion czar and campaigned at an abortion center. Failing on everything else, they think this issue is their silver bullet. They even believe it gives them a shot at flipping Florida blue.
Yet the Democrats have a big vulnerability, one that plays right to Donald Trump’s strengths.
Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put a glaring spotlight on this weakness when he said in an interview that he supported “full-term” abortion. Amid blowback from the Trump campaign and many others, he walked it back, but not before Biden’s camp chimed in, “The president doesn’t support full-term abortions, as he’s made clear many times. He thinks Roe [v. Wade] got it right.”
The debate is a prime opportunity to clarify for voters: Got what right?
Team Biden knows “full-term” abortion is unpopular. Three-quarters of voters would limit abortion by 15 weeks of pregnancy, a point when babies feel pain, at the latest. Yet Biden won’t say what limits, if any, he actually does support. He rarely says the word “abortion” at all.
The media mostly let this artful dodgery slide, but Trump can
