Republican Candidates Keep Straying Into Dangerous Territory: Abortion

In a campaign they would like to center on the economy and the border, Republican candidates keep drifting back to abortion rights, an issue that favors Democrats.

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Former President Donald J. Trump declared this week that women won’t “be thinking about abortion” once he’s elected.

Republicans don’t want to touch abortion, their most troublesome issue since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

But like a toothache they keep probing with their tongue, they just can’t seem to help it.

This week, it was Bernie Moreno, the Republican running to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, suggesting that abortion rights shouldn’t concern women over the age of 50 — “I don’t think that’s an issue for you,” he said on tape in Warren County, Ohio, over the weekend, as first reported by the NBC affiliate in Columbus.

On Monday, in Pennsylvania, former President Donald J. Trump simply declared that women won’t “be thinking about abortion” once he’s elected.

And before his porn website revelations, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the Republican candidate running to be the state’s governor, was seen in a newly resurfaced video from 2022 waving his hand in front of his groin, advising women seeking birth control that they just need to “get this under control.”

Republicans have been eager to campaign on a southwestern border that at times has seemed uncontrolled, and on the lingering sting of inflation, both issues where voters continue to prefer Mr. Trump. But the one issue surveys have shown the party should be steering clear of is abortion. In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 54 percent of registered voters trusted Vice President Kamala Harris on the issue, against 39 percent who trusted Mr. Trump.

And Democrats have fared well in virtually every election since 2022, when the Supreme Court repealed the constitutional protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade.

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