Former President Donald J. Trump made a brazen appeal on Monday to women voters, claiming at a rally that he would protect them by making their communities safer and that they won’t “be thinking about abortion.”
“You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” said Mr. Trump, who polls have shown is struggling to cultivate support among women, for whom abortion rights remain a top issue.
Speaking in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Vice President Kamala Harris has a slight edge in recent polls, Mr. Trump bristled at the notion that his struggles with women voters could cost him the election and suggested that his tough talk about immigration and economic proposals would resonate with them.
“I always thought women liked me,” Mr. Trump said in Indiana, Pa., about 55 miles east of Pittsburgh. “But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me.”
Mr. Trump, who last year was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll and who has a history of making demeaning remarks about women, has been seeking to cast himself as a safeguard for women, posting similar comments on his social-media platform.
“Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free,” he said during an extended riff at the rally.
And then he asserted: “You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, Sarafina Chitika, said that “women know better.”
“He tries to tell us what to think and what we care about,” Ms. Chitika said. “We will vote like our lives depend on it this November.”
The former president has frequently bragged about his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who helped to overturn Roe v. Wade. On Monday night, he repeated that the court’s ruling returned authority to the states to determine their own limits on abortion, a move that he said that many Americans had favored for decades.
“Everyone wanted abortion out of the federal government and into the states,” he said.
Mr. Trump also repeated a falsehood that he amplified during his debate against Ms. Harris earlier this month, saying that Democrats had been demanding abortions in the ninth month of a pregnancy or “an execution of a baby after birth.”
A growing share of voters in swing states now say the issue is central to their decision this fall, according to New York Times/Siena College polls earlier this month.
During the midterm elections in 2022, the first political cycle after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion played a key role in many races. Republicans underperformed their expectations for that year, with a so-called red wave failing to materialize.
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