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Nikki Haley’s abortion message could catch on in the GOP

Aug 28, 2023, 6:37am EDT
REUTERS/Brian Snyder
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Republicans worried about Democrats leveraging abortion (again) to make gains in 2024 want GOP candidates to take a page out of Nikki Haley’s debate prep playbook.

Haley dismissed the idea that a 15-week national abortion ban could pass through Congress. Instead, she argued the focus should be on finding “consensus” around banning “late-term abortions,” sustaining access to contraception, allowing doctors who don’t support abortion refuse to perform them, and preventing women who get abortions from being penalized.


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Defeated Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon bluntly said on Fox News that Republicans would lose the messaging war in 2024 unless they followed Haley’s “perfect response” in the debate.

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“No one really understood how important abortion would be in 2022 because no one had run in a post-Roe world, so we suddenly got attacked, viciously attacked, by the Democrats, and it is a winning message for them,” she said. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer highlighted Dixon’s opposition to rape exceptions in abortion bans in their contest, which took place alongide a ballot initiative guaranteeing abortion rights that passed by a wide margin.

“The only candidate on the stage that talked about how we should protect women and not demonize them was Nikki Haley,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C. said Sunday on CBS of the first GOP presidential debate. “And that is a message that we have to carry through. We have to be pro-woman and pro-life. You cannot go after women and attack them because they make a choice that you don’t like or don’t agree with.”

And Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., who represents a district President Biden won in 2020, told Semafor at a watch party last week: “She had probably the best-packaged message on abortion that I’ve heard, I want to say, in my entire adult life.”

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Haley might have won herself some fans, but her position wasn’t a favorite within the anti-abortion movement, which has rallied around a 15-week federal ban as a minimum ask for candidates.

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