How big an issue will abortion be in the presidential election?

“Abortion is the number one issue in the 2024 campaign,” Gov. J. B. Pritzker (D) told the New York Times last year.

Since then, former President Trump has been at work countering the powerful momentum behind the abortion rights message to voters.

His strategy for dealing with the abortion issue is to scare voters with an issue that drives them to him — immigration.

It worked for him in 2016. Now, he is issuing a new round of alarms over migrants crossing the Mexican border, branding any crime by an undocumented immigrant as evidence of a nation being overrun.

To keep anxiety high over immigration, he ordered House Republicans to back away from an immigration reform deal. That historic agreement would have been good news for the nation, but it was bad news for Trump’s effort to blame President Biden for border problems.

Trump’s tactic has no chance with most voters. Since the 2022 Dobbs ruling, which ended the federal right to abortion, voters have proven strongly motivated to go to the polls to protect abortion rights. Trump recently tried to dance around the issue by suggesting that a ban on abortion after 16 weeks of pregnancy might be a compromise. But the idea of a ban is not a winner in a country where most voters support the right to abortion.

Even that Trump........

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