America Moves Toward Consensus… Even On Abortion
You don’t hear the word consensus very often in American politics these days. But as the polls show Donald Trump moving up in these final weeks of the race, a consensus is indeed forming that he should be re-elected, perhaps the first consensus we have seen in a decade.
His upward momentum in the past two weeks is so broad and he is moving up among so many voters that consensus is the only word that describes what is going on.
But what is most interesting is how he has achieved this consensus. In our polarized politics, he is winning not so much because he is battering the Democrats into submission, finally winning the partisan debate that has sundered our country.
No, he is achieving consensus by triangulating on the thorniest issue in our politics: abortion.
We learned in the Clinton era that the candidate who can articulate the consensus that most voters feel, stepping over party lines, can prevail where partisan warfare fails.
In the 1990s, Democrats saw that saying “yes” to Republican proposals like welfare reform and a balanced budget without cutting entitlements, worked where saying “no” had not succeeded.
And so, this fall, Trump has found that triangulation on abortion is working where combat has failed. Politicians are good at handling “no” but when their political opponents start saying “yes”, they are dumbfounded.
As the autumn approached, Biden pulled out, and Harris was nominated, Republicans had grown concerned. Despite their advantage on the economy, immigration and crime, they could not put Kamala Harris away. She remained nipping at their heels, and the race seemed to settle into a nail biter.
Then, over the opposition of most of his own party, Trump triangulated. He pledged to veto a ban on abortion, backed in vitro fertilization, rejected a six week deadline for legal abortion and carved out exceptions to any abortion ban where the life of the mother was threatened or rape or incest was involved. And he deployed Melania to advocate women’s control of their own bodies.
His bright red posture on the issue began to look more like purple.
And the American people are responding. Trump began to seize leads in the popular vote and in most of the swing states. Democrats, totally invested in the abortion issue, felt the ground eroding under their feet.
Lamely, they fell back to saying Trump was lying and that, as soon as he won, the virulent pro-lifer Democrats feared would emerge and “turn the clock back.” But as Trump persisted in triangulating the issue, Harris lost ground and the momentum swung to Trump.
In the process,Trump looks like he has solved the biggest conundrum in our politics — how to find a center-right middle ground on abortion.
As this consensus gains ground, it looks like our most divisive issue has begun to moderate, creating a consensus on abortion.
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