Former President Donald Trump has long lamented the Republican Party's messaging on abortion and GOP pollster Frank Luntz is now urging the party to adopt presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley's "language" on it.
"Nikki Haley has the best Republican answer on abortion," Luntz wrote Wednesday night on X. "The @GOP would be stronger if they used her language."
Abortion has been a divisive issue that Democrats have long weaponized to win elections, according to Trump, who has long hailed having helped position the Supreme Court to kick abortion laws back to the states.
"I would support anything that would pass, but you have to be honest with the American people," Haley said during Wednesday night's GOP primary debate in Miami. "I would sign anything that would get 60 Senate votes. Don't make the American people think you're going to push something on them when you don't even have the votes in the Senate.
"This is a personal issue for every woman and every man. So when we're looking at this, there are some states that are going more on the pro-life side. I welcome that. There are some states that are going more on the pro-choice side.
"I wish that wasn't the case, but the people decided. We don't need to divide America over this issue anymore."
Trump has hailed himself as the most unabashedly pro-life president in U.S. history, even as his GOP primary challengers have sought to suggest he is capitulating to Democrats on the issue.
"You have to know how to discuss this, giving pro-lifers a tremendous power to negotiate and moving this issue back to the states where legal scholars and almost all others think it should be," Trump told a July campaign rally in Pickens, South Carolina, that aired live on Newsmax.
"But we now have an absolute power to negotiate. We didn't have that power, and people that believe in life will be able to stop radical left Democrats from killing babies in their fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth month and even killing babies after birth, because they are the radical ones.
Democrats, he added, "want to sell it differently. They are the radical ones. ... That's a great issue. The Republicans have to understand that issue better. They have to speak about it better. That was a big, big win. For years they were trying, 50 years they've been trying to get it. I got it done and it's a great issue for us, but more importantly from the standpoint of the heart, from the standpoint of your soul. It is what you believe in, so you now have a great power to negotiate.
"Before with Roe v. Wade you had no power."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.