Biden, Trump, and the Abortion Issue

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade has injected the abortion issue into the upcoming presidential campaign to an unprecedented degree. Both of the two major parties’ presumptive nominees have struggled to adjust to that situation because both of them have a somewhat varied past on that issue. A look at how both Biden’s and Trump’s views on abortion have evolved over time helps make clear why abortion has the potential to play an outsized role in determining who wins the 2024 election.

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Roe decision in January 1973, the same month that Joe Biden first took his seat in the U.S. Senate. Raised as a practicing Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era, Biden, like so many liberal Catholic male politicians of his generation, responded to the Roe ruling with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm. His stance on the issue shifted somewhat over time, as it became clearer that the Democratic Party was evolving into a staunch defender of reproductive rights. Harboring presidential ambitions by the 1980s, Biden understood that he needed to accommodate the pro-choice forces in his party. Even so, Biden continued to communicate his qualms about the issue, which appeared to stem from the Catholic church’s strong moral objections to abortion. In his case, those reservations took the form of saying as little about abortion as possible, something that was very noticeable because Biden is naturally loquacious.

And then came the Dobbs decision in June of 2022, which, by overturning Roe and thus turning the issue of reproductive rights back to the states, compelled Biden to speak more about that issue. Biden’s essentially centrist orientation became clear as he criticized proposals in the states to outlaw abortion altogether, or severely limit its legality. When the November 2022 midterm elections went unexpectedly well for the Democrats and surveys indicated that backlash against the Dobbs decision had helped produce that outcome, Biden began speaking out a bit more forcefully on the issue. He also encouraged his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to take the lead for the administration in criticizing anti-abortion measures in the states. More strongly pro-choice than Biden has ever been, Harris has taken her assignment to heart. Whether that kind of balancing act will produce the desired electoral outcome in the fall, i.e., a boost for the Democrats’ chances in swing states especially, remains to be seen.

Complicating that situation are the shifting views of Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump. Trump is, of course, a native New Yorker, which meant that he came from a state that had legalized abortion even before the Roe decision. For a long time Trump appeared to have had essentially pro-choice views of the sort that were common in New York City. Having grown up attending Marble Collegiate, a leading mainline Protestant (Presbyterian) church with a nationally famous pastor (Norman Vincent Peale), Trump was not as instinctively averse to legalized abortion as were so many Catholic men of his generation. And as he came to adulthood in the later 1960s, Trump gravitated toward the revolution in morals in New York City, something that inclined him even more toward a pro-choice position.

What appears to have changed his public stance on abortion when he ran for president the first time was Trump’s hardheaded sense that he couldn’t hope to unite the Republican Party behind his candidacy unless he espoused strongly pro-life views. That same kind of calculation seems to have informed his choice of Mike Pence as a running mate in 2016. Raised as a Catholic who then moved on in college to become a Protestant evangelical, Pence has apparently always had strongly pro-life views. Thus, Pence became Trump’s emissary to white evangelicals and conservative Catholics during that campaign, and again in 2020. Trump and Pence promised that their administration would appoint only pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who would vote to overturn the Roe decision, and, unlike the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes, fully kept that pledge.

One of the interesting things about the Dobbs decision is how it has revealed the underlying difference between Trump’s and Pence’s views on abortion. For Trump, supporting the overturn of Roe was a carefully calculated political stance, which meant that the states would again have great freedom to legislate in that area. Seemingly not someone who thought that abortion would (or should) become completely illegal everywhere, Trump apparently envisioned a return to the state of affairs in the abortion realm that existed in the early 1970s, when states such as California and New York were beginning to allow abortion in certain circumstances even before Roe was decided. Pence, on the other hand, was a moral absolutist on the issue, who took a much more pro-life stance. Thus, when Trump, after a certain amount of hesitation following the Dobbs decision, recently announced his support for letting the states decide about abortion, Pence harshly condemned Trump’s stance as a betrayal of the pro-life movement.

That split, which reflects a basic division in the anti-Roe forces that only became visible after Dobbs was decided, is complicating Trump’s bid this year for another term as president. On the one hand, he cannot afford to alienate the kind of pro-life voters that Pence speaks for, lest they stay home on election day and hand Biden a re-election victory. But at the same time, Trump cannot come across as too strongly anti-abortion lest that alienate swing voters in such battleground states as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That dilemma makes Trump’s choice of a running mate in 2024 especially tricky, because there will be a natural tendency on the part of journalists, politicians, pundits, and, most importantly, voters to compare his new VP candidate’s views on abortion with those of Trump’s previous one.

The likely closeness of the election has increased the importance of Biden’s and Trump’s stances on abortion. Ordinarily, a single issue such as that one would not prove to be decisive in a presidential election. But with the polls essentially tied, the road to victory for both Biden and Trump appears to run through a small number of battleground states, where abortion could make the difference at the margins. And ongoing legislative activity in the states with respect to abortion has kept the issue in voters’ minds, with swing state Arizona as the latest example. Heightening the uncertainty over how much of an effect the abortion issue will have on the electoral outcome in 2024 is the fact that the two major party presidential candidates are both elderly white men whose emotional distance from the passions aroused by abortion is palpable. All of this suggest that the abortion issue might just be the wild card that decides who wins.