Souter 2024

I’m going to have to save my views on the Harris interview for radio. I’ll just say now that Dana Bash is getting attacked for not having a lot of follow up questions. But I did not think she had to do them. Harris made her positions clear, and any follow-up would have run out the clock and reduced the breath of a pretty damning interview.

In 2000, a significant portion of evangelicals sat out the election. The Bush campaign thought they had them in the bag until too late. Bush came within 534 or so votes in Florida of losing the election. Evangelicals had decided they couldn’t necessarily trust that Bush the son wouldn’t stick them with another Souter, and perhaps he wasn’t what he claimed to be.

Over the next four years, Karl Rove and the Bush team worked incredibly hard to earn the trust of evangelicals. They gave the GOP adoption reform, a decrease in the marriage penalty, backed prohibitions on gay marriage, created PEPFAR, etc. In 2004, George W. Bush won not just a majority of the national popular vote but locked in evangelical support for him.

In 2016, Donald J. Trump won the evangelical vote not just because Hillary Clinton was on the other side but also because Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, shrewdly turned the election into a referendum on filling Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat. Evangelicals were willing to embrace Trump to fill that seat. Trump then locked in their 2020 support by adding Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court.

Those Justices, confirmed by Senate Republicans again led by Mitch McConnell, overturned Roe v. Wade, sending abortion back to the states.

Pro-lifers have been losing ever since.

Now, they are losing with Donald Trump, who yesterday, when everyone on the right had the opportunity to rally behind him and enjoy watching Kamala Harris beclown herself, had to interrupt the news cycle to announce he did not like a six-week fetal heartbeat ban in Florida — existing law that had broad appeal among conservatives.

Pro-lifers interpreted that as Trump endorsing the public abortion referendum on the ballot in Florida. His campaign tried to spin it, but the damage was done.

NBC: “So you’ll vote in favor of the amendment?”

Trump: “I am gonna be voting that we need more than six weeks.”

There is the six-week existing law, or there is the pro-abortion amendment. The amendment, to be voted on by voters on election day, would legalize all abortions until the moment the last toe of the child has left the birth canal.

The Trump campaign’s effort to clear it up is no different from John Sununu, then George H. W. Bush’s Chief of Staff, assuring everyone that Souter would be pro-life on the Supreme Court. And I’m not even talking about his idea for taxpayer-funded IVF.

For perspective, John McCain was better on the life issue. McCain betrayed conservatives on many things, but McCain never abandoned his pro-life position even when it would have benefited him politically in Arizona.

Trump’s signal to the pro-life community that he is not just pro-abortion at the federal level but also at the state level is a signal to evangelicals that their transactional relationship with Donald Trump is at an end and came to an end with the Dobbs decision.

Many pro-life activists will conclude there is no reason for them to side with Trump when they could wait out two years of Kamala Harris with a GOP Senate, see a bigger wave of Republican reinforcements in 2026, and then take back the White House in 2028.

What they are getting from Trump is a betrayal.

If social conservatives are willing to stand with a man who is willing to abandon them not just at the federal level but also at the state level, they will be very cheap dates who will increasingly be seen and not heard in the GOP.

Conservatives survived Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Some might conclude they’ll survive Harris, too. Only Republican Presidents have ever betrayed them and set back their cause.

Trump has real damage control to do.

And, for Trump fans, he needs to do this damage control because if these people do not vote for him in large numbers, he still has very good odds on getting prosecuted in Washington, D.C.

Trump cannot take these votes for granted. They are accustomed to the wilderness. They are unaccustomed to this sort of treatment from someone who needs them and takes them for granted.

If Donald Trump loses in November, this will be why. Too many evangelicals will leave the top of the ballot blank and trust Jesus for the next steps. It’s increasingly clear to a lot of them that God is smashing their idols and calling them to recognize a political savior is not happening. So why compromise their values and voice?

I cannot emphasize enough how damaging Donald Trump’s remarks were yesterday and screaming that Kamala is a communist isn’t going to work for a lot of evangelicals after going through Obama and Biden and coming out on the other side. Some of them will conclude the only way to show themselves as a real force is to withhold their vote as they did in 2000.

Trump should, before the weekend, announce he opposes the Florida referendum and that he will pardon those people in prison for praying at abortion clinics. He needs to do that. Those of you yelling that pro-lifers need to shut up and vote Trump would not have gotten Trump in 2016 without them. They don’t care about your bullying. They are used to it. But they are tired as hell of betrayal from those they have supported.

Even John McCain understood that.

Side note: If Trump can do this damage control fast, Harris gave him a huge opening last night. She, a woman who has been running for president since 2020, could give no answer on her day one priorities.