In New Hampshire, DeSantis Avoids Talking About Florida’s Abortion Ban

 

In New Hampshire, DeSantis Avoids Talking About Florida’s Abortion Ban

 

As he traversed socially conservative Iowa this week, the 2024 contender highlighted his state’s six-week ban. But now, in more moderate New Hampshire, he is shying from the subject.

 

Nicholas Nehamas

By Nicholas Nehamas

Reporting from Rochester, N.H.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/us/politics/desantis-abortion-new-hampshire.html

June 1, 2023

 

At a stop on his first trip to New Hampshire as a presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis mentioned his efforts to provide tax relief for Florida families. He mentioned defunding diversity programs at public colleges. He mentioned his fight with Disney.

 

But what he did not mention was the six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida this year.

 

The ban — which Mr. DeSantis chose to highlight in his speeches to audiences in socially conservative Iowa this week — is a potential lightning rod for voters in more moderate New Hampshire.

 

One New Hampshire Republican, Bob Kroepel, approached Mr. DeSantis after his speech in Rochester as the governor signed baseballs and took selfies with the crowd.

 

“Would you support an abortion policy that would allow choice to a certain point?” Mr. Kroepel, who lost Republican primaries for governor in New Hampshire in 1998 and 2002, asked through the din of the crowd and speakers blaring country music.

 

Mr. DeSantis dodged the thrust of the question, talking instead about his efforts to help parents after they have children, including through health coverage and universal school choice.

 

“So my wife has a fatherhood initiative,” he replied. “We’ve also done a lot of stuff to help new mothers, like we now have a year of postpartum health coverage for poor mothers. Obviously, we have the educational choice and a bunch of stuff that we’ve done.”

 

The race begins. Four years after a historically large number of candidates ran for president, the field for the 2024 campaign is starting out small and is likely to be headlined by the same two men who ran last time: President Biden and Donald Trump. Here’s a look at some of the contenders who have entered the race so far:

 

President Biden. The president has cast himself as a protector of democracy and a stabilizing force after the upheaval of the Trump administration. Biden is running for re-election as the oldest person ever to hold the presidency, a subject of concern among many Democrats, though the party has publicly set aside those worries and rallied around him.

 

Donald Trump. The former president is running to retake the office he lost in 2020. Though somewhat diminished in influence within the Republican Party — and facing several legal investigations — he retains a large and committed base of supporters, and he could be aided in the primary by multiple challengers splitting a limited anti-Trump vote.

 

Ron DeSantis. The combative governor of Florida joined the race on May 24, but his official entry into the 2024 campaign was spoiled by a glitch-filled livestream over Twitter. DeSantis, who has championed conservative causes and thrown a flurry of punches at America’s left, is Trump’s strongest Republican challenger since 2016.

 

Nikki Haley. The former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador under Trump has presented herself as a member of “a new generation of leadership” and emphasized her life experience as a daughter of Indian immigrants. She was long seen as a rising G.O.P. star but her allure in the party has declined amid her on-again, off-again embrace of Trump.

 

Tim Scott. The South Carolina senator, who joins a growing number of Republicans running as alternatives to Trump, is the first Black Republican elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction and has been one of his party’s most prominent voices on matters of race.

 

Asa Hutchinson. The former governor of Arkansas is one of a relatively small number of Republicans who have been openly critical of Trump. Hutchinson has denounced the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and said Trump should drop out of the presidential race.

 

More candidates. On the Republican side, Vivek Ramaswamy and Larry Elder are also making a run for the White House, while Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have launched campaigns for the Democratic nomination. Read more about the 2024 candidates here.

 

“So we absolutely have a responsibility to help mothers, that’s without question, one hundred percent,” Mr. DeSantis said before moving on to the next voter.

 

Abortion is likely to be one of the most complicated issues for Mr. DeSantis to discuss, especially if he wins the Republican nomination.

 

Moderates and independents tend to be less supportive of bans as early as six weeks, when many women do not know they are pregnant, and Mr. DeSantis has sometimes avoided talking about abortion even in front of friendly audiences. So far, he has skirted questions about a federal abortion ban, suggesting that the matter should be left largely to the states.

 

“I think at the end of the day, fighting for life and protecting life really is a bottom-up movement,” he said in a Fox News interview last week. “I think we’ve been able to have great successes at the local level.”

 

His main rival, former President Donald J. Trump, has also not committed to supporting a federal abortion ban. Mr. DeSantis has used abortion to criticize Mr. Trump, after the former president suggested that Florida’s ban was “too harsh.”

 

Republican leaders in New Hampshire say a six-week ban is too extreme for voters in their state, which has a 24-week limit.

 

Jason Osborne, the state’s House majority leader, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview that he hoped the governor would state at some point in the campaign that he would not try “to make Florida’s abortion policy countrywide.”

 

A national six-week abortion ban “would go over like a lead balloon” with New Hampshire voters, Mr. Osborne said after Mr. DeSantis’s Rochester event.

 

“People don’t want it,” he added. If Mr. DeSantis were to propose such a ban, he said, “I think you’d see a lot of people jump ship. I would lose a lot of faith in him.”

 

Mr. Osborne said he agreed with the governor’s strategy of not taking a louder stance on abortion.

 

“I think abortion is one of those issues that should not be talked about in a presidential campaign,” he said.

 

While Mr. DeSantis’s stump speech typically varies little from stop to stop, he does appear to be calibrating his message on abortion. In Iowa on Wednesday, he talked about Florida’s six-week ban, known as the Heartbeat Protection Act, during a lengthy recounting of his record as governor. “We have enacted the heartbeat bill,” he told a crowd in Cedar Rapids before being drowned out by cheers and applause.

 

But he did not mention the bill at several stops in New Hampshire on Thursday.

 

Even New Hampshire voters who said they support a six-week ban said they understood why Mr. DeSantis was unlikely to talk much about the issue.

 

“I mean, my gosh, there’s so much blowback, right?” said Jennifer Hilton, 56, an independent who is open to supporting Mr. DeSantis and heard him speak in Rochester. “And it’s so taken out of context, and such an emotional issue, that people can’t hear you.”

 

Sue Collins, an attendee at a DeSantis event in Salem, N.H., said, “I’ll be honest, I’m not strict pro-life, but I was not happy to see the six-week ban.” She added, “I wish it wasn’t that strict, but it would not prevent me from voting for him.”

 

Mr. Kroepel, the Republican who approached Mr. DeSantis, said that “on balance,” he was not satisfied with how the governor had answered his question. Even so, he acknowledged the difficulties of the discussion.

 

“I understand how delicate this whole situation is,” Mr. Kroepel said. “So I give him credit for at least listening to me.”

 

Ann Klein contributed reporting from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Amanda Pirani from Salem, N.H.

 

Nicholas Nehamas is a campaign reporter, focusing on the emerging candidacy of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Before joining The Times in 2023, he worked for nine years at The Miami Herald, mainly as an investigative reporter. More about Nicholas Nehamas