2024 Elections

The former president is under pressure to say how he’ll vote on the measure.

Former President Donald Trump has promised answers on thorny political questions surrounding abortion before, only to never actually say where he stands. | Alex Brandon/AP

By Natalie Allison and Arek Sarkissian

08/14/2024 12:00 PM EDT

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Donald Trump still doesn’t have an answer on how he’ll vote on an abortion measure in his home state. And it’s about to become a lot harder for him to avoid it.

Four months ago, Trump announced he favored leaving the issue of abortion to the states. Now, state-level referendums on the lightning-rod issue are making ballots across the country — including, on Monday, in the battleground state of Arizona, and on Tuesday in Missouri.

And in Florida, where Trump is a registered voter, the former president has yet to say how he’ll cast his own vote on the measure known as Amendment 4, which would abolish the state’s newly-enacted ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

The looming referendum is threatening Trump’s efforts, as he put it in April, to “make both sides happy” with his position, and it’s giving Democrats an opening to continue hammering him.

“It is clearly a massive narrative advantage for the Harris campaign to continue to make his life hell on this issue,” said Chuck Coughlin, a political strategist in Arizona who left the Republican Party after Trump’s election.

Coughlin said if he were Trump facing the question, “I’d transition off this topic as quickly as I could.”

Trump appears cognizant of the ongoing liability. After declining to directly answer a question from POLITICO at a press conference last week about how he plans to vote on Florida’s initiative, Trump later announced that he would hold a separate news conference “sometime in the near future” to reveal his position. Trump’s aides, while surprised by Trump’s announcement of a forthcoming abortion-themed presser, have said they take him at his word that he’ll hold such an event.

But Trump’s refusal so far........

© Politico