According to recent reports, former U.S. President Donald Trump has concerns about whether the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade will help the GOP and his chances for reelection in 2024.
Publicly, he said the ruling was a “win,” but privately The New York Times and The Washington Post both report on Trump’s doubts. According to the Times, Trump privately told friends and advisers that overturning Roe would be “bad for Republicans” because it would anger suburban women. This could impact both the November midterms and the 2024 Presidential race by voters leaning against conservatives in retaliation.
Many predict that the November midterms will go in favor of Republicans over Democrats. Still, the Post noted that Trump’s response to many key political issues, including abortion and gun control, has a more muted tone than many of his potential 2024 opponents.
“These were not things that were ever firmly in his wheelhouse, and I think Trump in his pre-presidential days was pro-gun safety and pro-choice,” Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, told the Post. “But it made sense for the coalition he was trying to build in right-wing politics that he changed.”
The Post also reports that Trump told advisers at Mar-a-Lago that he wondered if he should change his stance to be more in favor of moderate gun control. He considered this change in the wake of the Uvalde mass school shooting that killed 21 people, mostly children.
The Republican party is inching ever further to the right. However, Trump’s wavering stance on these issues is in large part because he knows that the majority of those in the U.S. support abortion access and reasonable gun control measures.
Recent polling shows that faith in the Supreme Court is at an all-time low, according to Gallup. Multiple polls show a majority of people in the U.S. support the right to abortion, with a surge in support coming after the leak of SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll.
Gallup also found that a majority of people also support reasonable gun control policies, and support for this issue also surges after mass shootings like the two more recent ones in Uvalde and Buffalo. President Joe Biden signed a bi-partisan gun control bill on Friday that signals the first gun control measures taken by Congress in decades. Meanwhile, SCOTUS just ruled that people can carry handguns in public for self-defense.
These two issues will likely spark a surge in voting for the upcoming midterms.
Former White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway recently said that “both pro-lifers and pro-choicers will be super motivated to vote in the fall election . . . The difference may lie in the number of would-be Democrat voters who would be apathetic, and they will turn that apathy into anger and action, given the two Supreme Court cases,” referring to gun control and abortion.
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