two thousand attendees at the National Pro-Life Summit cast their votes Saturday for their likely favorite Republican candidate for president in 2024. The winner is: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. It was the first opinion poll of 2024 conducted among anti-abortion voters, one of the most loyal voting blocs in the Republican Party.
DeSantis accumulated more than half of the votes cast, 53.73 percent. Former President Donald Trump came in a distant second with just 19.22 percent. His former representative, Mike Pence, who has often called for a national ban on abortion, took home about 8 percent. Those three were followed by former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, with 1.57 and 1.37 percent, respectively. Everyone else, Kristi Noem, Greg Abbott, Glenn Youngkin, Liz Cheney, Larry Hogan and Tim Scott, in that order, got less than one percent of the votes cast. About seven percent of voters in the poll remain undecided on their preferred potential candidate.
The results are further evidence of what has been a slow and sometimes bitter break between the former president and the anti-abortion movement that embraced his candidacy in 2016 and 2020. “There are a wide variety of candidates that the pro-life movement can get . back, and that’s exactly what we intend to do,” says Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, one of the summit’s sponsors. Rolling Stone.
The poll’s function is twofold: to take the temperature of a key Republican constituency while igniting a pressure campaign on anyone considering running in the race. “We are in a position as a movement, thanks to a strong pro-life platform that the Republican Party has put in place, to demand action from the candidates,” Hawkins explains. “Our candidate polls ask directly what they are willing to do when they say they are ‘pro-life.'”
“Ticking the box and saying you’re ‘pro-life’ isn’t enough” in this “new era,” he adds.
Grassroots activists are watching how Republicans defend their demands. At Friday’s March for Life on the National Mall, the first of the post-Roe was: Several expressed their frustration with the GOP-controlled House. The chamber passed two anti-abortion measures in its first week of legislation, but they were largely token votes aimed at telegraphing abortion as a top priority for the new Republican majority. Republican lawmakers also failed to include the demand that drew protesters to DC this week: a national ban on abortion. “They talk a lot and they don’t act a lot,” says Laura Brown, an attendee with the Milwaukee March for Life. “I want them to practice what they preach and be courageous,” adds Christina Johnson, who traveled from Ohio. “If they’re ‘pro-life,’ they need to mean it when they say it.”
Activists are increasingly unsure that Trump, the only Republican to formally declare his candidacy, is willing to make further progress on his goals, poll results confirmed on Saturday. Trump, who once identified as pro-choice, fully embraced the anti-abortion movement as a candidate, before naming three of the six Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn. Roe. Now, as members of the movement look beyond RoeTension is building between Trump and the evangelical leaders and anti-abortion activists who once supported him. As Stephen Imbarrato, a Catholic priest and co-founder of Men’s March for Life who attended Friday’s event, says, the gulf between the former president and voters who identify as “pro-life” is “getting bigger and bigger.”
Anti-abortion protesters march towards the Supreme Court during the March for Life, Friday, January 20, 2023.
Alex Brandon/AP
Trump, for his part, has considered a “sign of disloyalty” that anti-abortion groups have so far failed to quickly align behind his campaign. “No one has ever done more for [the] right to life than Donald Trump,” he declared during a radio appearance last week. Students for Life and the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) are two of the prominent groups that have stood on the sidelines thus far, waiting to see what other candidates emerge and how far those candidates are willing to go to advance the goals. group politicians.
Trump seems to have little appetite for any more bans or restrictions. Earlier this month, he blamed the disastrous performance of the Republicans in November squarely on the “abortion issue,” which he said “lost a large number of voters.” The SBA responded with a scathing statement and, in an early sign of a schism in the making, Pence retweeted her, with a brief “[w]He said, @SBAProLIfe.”
For some in the movement, none of the potential 2024 contenders, including De Santis, go far enough. Imbarrato wants a candidate who believes that personality begins at conception and recognizes that right enshrined in the founding documents of the United States. “There is no one,” he says. “Not Pence. DeSantis is so strong on other issues and so weak on abortion that he needs to do something to show that he means business.”
DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban into Florida law last April and recently suggested he would support a more restrictive six-week ban. The impact of such a law would be devastating for those seeking an abortion. Before Dobbs, Florida had one of the highest abortion rates in the country. Now, surrounded on all sides by states that have banned the practice, it has become a critical point of access for millions of women across the Southeast.
Opinion poll results show that not everyone is disenchanted with Trump, a sentiment echoed by some March for Life attendees on Friday. “He did a lot during his lifetime in office,” says Anna Bingman, who flew in from Ohio for Friday’s march, highlighting Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments. A young woman on “Make America Great Again” says she thinks Trump would still be an advocate of abortion bans if he were re-elected. “He spoke at a March for Life and he spoke it from the White House,” she explains.
But it’s DeSantis who is the unequivocal early favorite among voters at the National Pro-Life Summit; a distinction can only increase the pressure on the Florida governor to pass tougher restrictions. If the protesters were sure of anything on Friday, it was that the end of Roe it was just the beginning: they want to see politicians doing much, much more. “There’s a part of it that’s a celebration,” says Brian Gibson, a Minnesota activist, “but a part of it that’s not because abortion is still legal in many parts of the country.”
