Chuck Todd: Politicians need the middle to win. It’s getting harder for them to find it.
It’s not easy leading a political party these days.
It’s not easy leading a political party these days. In a world where the expectation is that political positions are binary, with nuance not allowed, trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all position, be it on Middle East policy or reproductive rights, is quite the challenge.
No longer can someone paper over an actual point of view with the “spirit” of a political position. President Joe Biden has long been a supporter of Israel, but that hasn’t bought him much time with a Democratic base that’s growing increasingly skeptical of the Israeli government’s ability to carry out a just war.
And that brings me to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to soften opposition to him over the rise of restrictive abortion laws around the country.
Ironically, Trump’s controversial position shouldn’t, in theory, be controversial in the GOP. Trump is simply espousing what the party said it supported for decades before the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision: Leave it to the states. But abortion conservatives want to go further with a federal limit. As is now fairly clear, simply returning the decision over reproductive rights to the states wasn’t really the goal of the anti-abortion movement pre-Dobbs. The goal was to roll back access to abortion, in whatever expedient way they could find.
Yet saying that last sentence as directly as I wrote it is unpopular. Had the GOP owned the idea of rolling back access more directly, instead of hiding behind its states-rights position, it would most likely been forced to reckon with its unpopular abortion position sooner.
Rating: 5