With abortion and Trump, GOP presidential hopefuls are stuck in a box of their own making

Republicans wanted Donald Trump, and they got him.

They wanted, for decades, a U.S. Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. They got that, too.

Now, in a vivid illustration of the “careful what you ask for” aphorism, the party is stuck with both, boxed in on the wrong side of issues that are bound to motivate voters in the 2024 presidential election.

As the field of Republican presidential primary candidates grows – with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott filing paperwork with the Federal Election Commission Friday and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expected to announce this week – all, including Trump, face an electorate that:

1. Doesn’t want Trump to be president again and has not bought into his ongoing 2020 “rigged election” nonsense.

2. Isn’t happy about Roe being overturned and broadly opposes GOP calls for stricter abortion laws.

Those two factors hurt the Republican party in the 2020 presidential election (remember, Trump started calling that election rigged months before it happened), in the 2022 midterm elections and in a variety of special elections and even recent mayoral elections in Florida and Colorado. The trend line for the GOP since Roe was overturned and Trump leaned in on harebrained election denialism has been what we in the political punditry biz call “not good.”

What can Republicans do when their dream of overturning Roe is an electoral anchor?

And an overview of polling on these issues suggests the “not good” categorization won’t be changing any time soon.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll this month found only 22% of U.S. adults strongly support the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Among independents, crucial in any presidential election, only 16% strongly support the decision.

In the same poll, 78% of Americans said the decision to have an abortion should be left to the woman and her doctor rather than regulated by law.

Gallup polling this year found that 46% of Americans want abortion restrictions to be less strict while only 15% want them to be more strict.

And a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll from April found 61% of Americans say they support abortion rights − a 6 percentage point jump since last June. Nearly 60% of U.S. adults say they oppose a six-week abortion ban, which is what DeSantis recently signed into law in Florida.

Any attempt to go soft on abortion will cost GOP presidential primary candidates

One of the more glaring examples of how toxic this issue is for Republicans came from deep-red Kansas last August. Almost 60% of Kansans voted against a ballot measure that would have removed abortion-rights protections from the state’s constitution.

So what’s a GOP presidential candidate to do? You can certainly win the Republican primary talking tough about a federal abortion ban, but it will haunt you in the general election.

And if you try to go squishy in the primary, the right’s powerful antiabortion groups will pin you down and label you too soft to serve.

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Nikki Haley learns that trying to be reasonable on the issue of abortion is 'not acceptable'

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, once the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now running for U.S. president, gave a speech last month saying a federal abortion ban wouldn’t be doable: “We have to face this reality. The pro-life laws that have passed in strongly Republican states will not be approved at the federal level.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, quickly knocked the candidate, saying Haley’s view was “not acceptable.”

Oops.

Trump’s campaign also tried to soft-pedal things, saying abortion laws should be decided by the states. According to The Washington Post, antiabortion leaders swooped down to Mar-a-Lago to set the former president straight: “Multiple people involved in the conversation say Trump got the message. Two days later, during a CNN town hall, he repeated almost word for word what they had discussed in his office.”

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is the biggest case of 'careful what you ask for' ever

So one of Trump’s biggest conservative accomplishments, selecting Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe, is wildly unpopular with a strong majority of Americans. DeSantis’ six-week abortion ban in Florida is even more strongly opposed. And any attempt to be remotely reasonable on the issue, as Haley showed, will get shut down by the party’s far-right flank.

In geometry, that’s called a box, and I wish all Republican candidates good luck finding their way out of it.

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And then, of course, there's the little problem of Donald J. Trump ...

Beyond the briar patch of abortion, there’s Trump himself and his unerring devotion to the ridiculous lie that the 2020 election was rigged.

For starters, Republican voters love Trump. A recent NPR poll found 71% of Republicans think the twice-impeached, one-term former president now under criminal indictment in Manhattan and facing other criminal investigations should be president again. And if Trump happens to get convicted of a crime, that number drops a measly 8 points to 63%.

Those are cult-ish numbers, and they make it tricky for candidates like DeSantis or Haley or Scott to really attack the former president and go after his most glaring flaws.

But in that same NPR poll, Trump’s overall standing among Americans is terrible. Asked whether they want Trump to be president again, only 34% of respondents said yes. So how does a non-Trump presidential candidate square that circle?

Maybe be nice to Trump but criticize his 2020 election denial? Not so fast.

In theory, DeSantis and the other candidates could be nice-ish to Trump and just say he’s too focused on 2020 election grievances. And that might resonate with the broader electorate.

Last November, Gallup found 63% of Americans are very or somewhat confident in election accuracy. Democrats’ confidence was at 85% and independents were at 67%.

But Republicans? Their confidence was only at 40%. And a CNN Poll in March found a whopping 84% of Republican and Republican-leaning adults believe Biden’s 2020 victory was not legitimate.

So if, for example, DeSantis goes hard at Trump, he’s going to lose Republican voters in the primary. If he tries to attack Trump’s election denials, he’s going to lose Republican voters in the primary. If he coddles Trump and his election denials and then somehow – miraculously – manages to win the GOP primary, he’ll get clobbered for his Trump-coddling in the general election.

Welcome to the box you built, Republicans. Good luck finding a way out

Again, it’s a box, and every exit from the box takes Republican candidates not named Trump somewhere unenviable.

Democrats certainly have issues of their own. President Joe Biden is the all-but-certain candidate, and he's riding consistently marginal approval numbers. About 53% disapprove of the job he's doing, according to FiveThirtyEight's polling average. A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found only 47% of Democratic voters want him to run. But when pressed, 81% of Democrats say they would at least probably support him in the election.

In terms of dilemmas, few would choose what Republicans are dealing with over the Democrats' situation.

My knee-jerk liberal compassion makes me want to feel bad for folks on the conservative side of the fence, but I can’t quite get there. These problems all stem from Republicans getting exactly what they wanted.

Careful what you ask for.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Twitter @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: DeSantis, Scott, growing GOP primary field boxed in on Trump, abortion