Earlier this month, Kari Lake—the right-wing candidate running for the United States Senate in Arizona—tried to distance herself from the Civil War-era abortion ban the state’s high court upheld. “It is abundantly clear,” the MAGA candidate said in a statement at the time, “that this pre-statehood law is out of step with Arizonans.” But in a recent interview, Lake sounded a different note—expressing frustration that the 1864 law has yet to be enforced by state leaders: “The Arizona Supreme Court said this is the law of Arizona, but unfortunately, the people running our state have said we’re not going to enforce it.”
“We don’t have that law as many of us wish we did,” she said during the visit to Idaho, which is at the center of the first major abortion case before the U.S. Supreme Court since its conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Lake’s remarks came as Arizona Democrats mounted a third push to repeal the 1864 ban after previous efforts were thwarted by state Republicans—underscoring the deceitfulness of the GOP’s efforts to clean up the abortion mess they made.
But Lake isn’t the only conservative trying to have it both ways on reproductive rights or to muddy the issue ahead of the November election. The Republican Party has tried to fix its “brand problem” on reproductive rights by discussing the issue with more “common sense” and empathy, as the Wall Street Journal reported last month, as its leader, Donald Trump, has sought to frame abortion as a matter of states’ rights. “It’s tailor-made,” Trump said of differing state abortion laws in an interview with Philadelphia’s Action News on Tuesday, during a break in his Manhattan criminal trial. “It’s really working out well for people,” Trump said. “And they’re very, very happy.” In reality, the state of reproductive healthcare in America has weighed down Republicans in post-Dobbs elections, in which voters—who overwhelmingly support abortion protections—have rejected both draconian restrictions and anti-choice extremists, which is why Trump and his fellow Republicans are so desperate to obfuscate their position.
“Donald Trump is worried voters are going to hold him accountable,” President Joe Biden said during a campaign stop Tuesday in Florida, where the six-week abortion ban Governor Ron DeSantis signed last year is set to take effect May 1. “Look, I don’t think we’re going to let them get away with it.” Holding Trump and the GOP accountable in November will require Biden and the Democrats to continue hammering on the issue: Though Democrats mobilized voters on abortion in the midterms and off-year elections, the dynamics of the presidential election could be different, as Rachel M. Cohen pointed out in Vox last month. Where midterms and special elections tend to draw highly-engaged voters, presidential elections also bring out less-engaged voters, who may not view Trump as the threat to abortion rights he is—even though he has rightfully claimed credit for the fall of Roe.
That’s precisely the kind of confusion Trump and Republicans are trying to foster with their misleading, inconsistent rhetoric on abortion. The task ahead for Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their surrogates is to break through the noise. “There’s one person responsible for this nightmare, and he’s acknowledged, and he brags about it,” Biden said in Tampa on Tuesday. “Donald Trump.”