The New York Times reports that the “cash-rich group aiding Jeb Bush’s White House run has filmed a provocative video casting his rival Marco Rubio as ultimately unelectable because of his hard-line stand against abortion.”
According to Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael Barbaro, the man running Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC recently showed the video to a focus group of Republicans in New Hampshire. During the first GOP debate, Rubio had this exchange with Megyn Kelly:
RUBIO: Well, Megyn, first of all, I’m not sure that that’s a correct assessment of my record. I would go on to add that I believe all–
KELLY: You don’t favor a rape and incest exception?
RUBIO: I have never said that. And I have never advocated that. What I have advocated is that we pass law in this country that says all human life at every stage of its development is worthy of protection.
Polls show that voters (83% of Americans overall and 76% of Republicans) want abortion to be legal in cases in which the pregnancy is the result of rape. And Hillary Clinton has pounced on Rubio’s remarks, likening the Florida senator and other pro-life Republicans to terrorists. So just how badly might Rubio’s position hurt him in the general election? That’s not entirely clear.
Although Rubio opposes these exceptions in principle, he has made it clear he’s willing to accept them in practice. And the only pro-life legislation that has a plausible chance of landing on a President Rubio’s desk–popular bills banning taxpayer-funded and late-term abortion–include those exceptions.
Expressing opposition to an exception for abortion in these circumstances has not, by itself, proven to be toxic for many political candidates. Rubio himself won the swing state of Florida while holding this position in 2010. Paul Ryan, who takes the same position as Rubio, won his swing congressional district repeatedly. Scott Walker was hammered explicitly on the issue of abortion exceptions in 2010, 2012, and 2014 and he scored solid victories each time in a Democratic-leaning state.
The only GOP presidential nominee since Roe v. Wade to oppose abortion in the case of rape was Ronald Reagan. “The president and I do favor a human rights amendment. I favor one that would have an exception for incest and rape, and he doesn’t,” George H.W. Bush said in his October 1984 debate with Geraldine Ferraro. Reagan went on to win 49 states that November.
Of course, Reagan was a popular incumbent who was staring down the Soviets and presiding over a rollicking economic recovery. Walter Mondale, like Jimmy Carter before him, was a weak candidate. And the political parties hadn’t sorted out in such a way that encouraged the Democratic party to make any aspect of the abortion debate a huge issue. (In the 1980 and 1984 elections, there were a lot more working-class pro-life Democrats than there are today.)
It’s important to remember that in 2016 Democrats are going to accuse the Republican nominee of wanting to ban abortion in the case of rape even if that’s not his or her position. That’s what Barack Obama’s campaign—which devoted 1 in 10 ads to the abortion issue—did to Mitt Romney in 2012. Romney essentially responded with silence, and one can plausibly argue that the failure to punch back is much more dangerous than holding a principled position identical to Ronald Reagan’s.
Rubio has so far proven himself to be quite eloquent when discussing the right to life and powerful when hitting back against Democratic extremism. “He gave the best pro-life speech I’ve ever heard at the Susan B. Anthony dinner a few years back,” Matt Lewis wrote in the Daily Beast this year.
When Rubio was asked about the issue on the campaign trail last week, he defended his position and quickly turned to highlighting Hillary Clinton’s extreme support for late-term abortion.
“I believe that it’s outrageous that Hillary Clinton supports partial-birth abortion, which is a gruesome process that’s been outlawed in the United States but she supports it as a process that should be legal,” Rubio said. “I believe that a child, an unborn child at 24, 25 weeks who is viable outside the womb, it should not be legal to abort. Hillary Clinton believes it should be. She’s in the minority on both of those issues. These are radical issues and I look forward to exposing them in the general election.”
Several polls have shown that voters oppose late-term abortion by a 2-1 or greater margin. As the editors of National Review noted back in August, “The other side of the abortion debate has its own extremism, its positions that most Americans reject but that it feels are entailed by the logic of its basic commitments on the issue. The difference is that this sort of extremism is enshrined in law.”
The editorial advised Rubio and other pro-life Republicans to emphasize the reality of late-term abortion-on-demand and point out that the debate about restricting abortion in the case of rape and incest is highly theoretical:
What then should a candidate say if he believes that in an ideal world, unborn children conceived in rape should be protected? Asked about abortion in the case of rape, the first thing that candidate should do is to express sympathy for the woman who was brutalized and put in a terrible position. It would be perfectly honorable for that candidate to say next that restricting abortion in that case is not part of his agenda — because in no serious sense is it part of any Republican’s agenda; and to say that by the end of his presidency abortion will be just as available in cases of rape as it is today — because that is true. Further questions could then reasonably be dismissed.
Even candidates who, like Rubio and Walker, have volunteered statements about their far-off ideals on abortion policy would be well advised to begin emphasizing just how far off they are. They should, that is, note that banning abortion in the case of rape would be a 50-year task of persuasion and not the work of a presidency. They should explain that their goal is to build a consensus on life, starting with the issues where the public supports life. A good time to adopt this approach would be now.
Rubio’s position on exceptions would be a liability in a general election, but he could probably overcome it if he focuses on talking about the actual pro-life agenda and contrasts it with Hillary Clinton’s agenda instead of getting suckered into a hypothetical debate about banning abortion in extreme circumstances.
