Republicans from across the country will gather together for their national convention, where they will nominate Donald Trump for president.
Editor's note: As the Republican National Convention nears, here's what you can expect, how to watch speeches live and much more.
Republicans have suggested that inflation, immigration and foreign affairs will be the top three issues highlighted during the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee beginning on Monday. One issue voters likely won’t hear as much about? Abortion.
Amid in-fighting within the Democratic Party, Republicans made a move that political insiders say was strategic in trying to win over independents and potentially even soft Democrats.
Former President Donald Trump has said repeatedly this year that abortion laws should be left to the states, many of which have enacted new restrictions since he appointed Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn federal protections for the procedure under the Roe v. Wade decision.
This week, the Republican National Committee adopted a party platform that reflects Trump’s position, omitting the explicit basis for a national ban for the first time in 40 years.
Mordecai Lee, a political analyst and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, called it “a classic political move” to try and straddle a position that is unpopular with a majority of voters.
The overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision helped boost Democratic candidates during the midterm elections in November 2022. After the elections, Trump blamed Republicans who held strict anti-abortion positions for the party’s failure to secure a larger House majority.
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More recently, in May, 67 percent of about 2,000 U.S. voters between 18 and 40 years old who participated in a GenForward survey backed by the University of Chicago, said they either strongly or somewhat disagreed with the decision to overturn the court ruling.
“If there's one issue in contemporary American politics that's impossible to straddle, it's abortion,” Lee said. “The only good comparison is 100 years ago, and that was prohibition. In those days, politicians were either known as ‘wets’ – in other words, they were pro-liquor – or they were known as ‘dries,’ which means that they were pro-prohibition … You couldn't be half and half.”
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The Republican Party’s current policy platform, unchanged since 2016, says the GOP supports a “human life amendment” to the U.S. Constitution. The proposed changes this year say the 14th Amendment inherently offers protections for life at conception and that “states are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”
The Trump campaign also released a statement highlighting 20 key issues, including immigration, the economy, energy, taxes and crime, but the list did not mention abortion.
Republicans in Illinois signaled they support Trump’s position on the issue.
“That's the best way to do it, in our opinion: Leave it back to the states. But from a national perspective, I think that it's going to be a challenging issue for a lot of voters,” said Aaron Del Mar, a delegate and member of the Cook County GOP.
U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil from Wisconsin, the state where the convention will be held, said he believes in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, and said he also supports the decision to leave abortion law up to the states.
“Often at the federal level, what we're doing is working to prevent things like taxpayer dollars from being utilized for abortion. So, I think it makes a lot of sense: the language that is in the Republican platform,” Steil said.
Alvin Tillery, the director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, is a Democratic pollster who believes Trump has been tampering down some of his more extreme policies in recent weeks, in part to try and win over Black voters. That includes distancing himself from the Project 2025 proposal aimed at overhauling the federal government.
"I know nothing about Project 2025," Trump said in a Truth Social post. "I have no idea who is behind it.” However, many of Trump’s key allies have been directly involved in producing the project.
“It's just a wildly unpopular policy agenda: national abortion bans. So, to the extent that he can distance himself from any of that stuff, it helps him,” Tillery said.