First, Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds announced a special legislative session that ended with GOP lawmakers rushing to pass a six-week abortion ban.
He then signed it at a prominent conservative summit with half a dozen Republican presidential candidates.
Now, he has invited even more of those candidates back sitting at the Iowa State Fair next monthwhere, invariably, his six-week ban could be a prominent topic of discussion.
It’s a series of moves, six months before the Iowa caucuses, that in many ways challenge a key point of the 2022 legislature: that talk of abortion restrictions is political poison for Republicans.
However, the strategy is not likely to hurt Republican candidates in Iowa, which has a very religious conservative base in the GOP. But appearing to embrace a six-week abortion ban or focusing too much on the restrictions could cause them headaches in the future, state policy watchers said.
With the issue escalating and his advocacy of a strict ban, Reynolds is pushing candidates to pursue his strategy in the 2022 midterms. It was an election in which he made his support for a six-week ban a major part of his campaign, winning by 18 percentage points, despite national trends showing the issue was a problem for Republicans.
“One of the things we know from last year’s midterms is that Kim Reynolds did very well, and abortion was definitely an issue that really helped,” said Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa and an expert on state politics. “This was something that Kim Reynolds was essentially running.”
“Democrats [nationally] he leaned heavily on the issue and was very successful for them in many places. But the ‘red wave’ still occurred in a couple of places: one was Florida, the other was Iowa,” Hagle said.
But that attitude carries substantial risks for any candidate who can advance beyond the caucuses, and many Republican candidates seeking to match Reynolds’ touch on the issue have nonetheless struggled to find their footing.
NBC News reached out to the Republican presidential candidates for comment. Only the campaign of Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina responded, noting his support for a national ban at 15 weeks.
For one thing, aligning with Reynolds’ position gives the candidates a chance to reiterate a position that has been Republican orthodoxy for decades: Abortion laws should be left up to the states.
But the candidates haven’t really done that.
At the Family Leadership Summit last week, where Reynolds signed the bill during a special presentation on stage, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (who, unlike Reynolds, signed a six-week ban for his own state in a quiet, unpublicized ceremony) declined to answer moderator Tucker Carlson’s questions about whether he would ban a national six-week ban.
In meetings with reporters, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson touted their support for a 15-week national ban. Former U.N. ambassador (and former South Carolina governor) Nikki Haley said Reynolds “knocked it out of the park” after his signing, but she didn’t comment on her own position.
“You have to decide who you are. Are you a social conservative candidate or not? It can’t just be a tactic,” said Craig Robinson, a former Iowa GOP political director who now works as a political consultant in the state, referring specifically to DeSantis. While Reynolds has given him the opportunity to do so, “he’s not advocating as a strong social conservative candidate,” he said.
More broadly, Robinson continued, “Republicans still need to figure out how they want to send a message on abortion.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis poses with guests at the fundraiser in Ankeny, Iowa. Scott Olson/Getty Images
“Everyone wants to blame that we lost all these elections [in 2022] because Donald Trump is a piece of shit, right? I think we lost this whole election because … there was no message on abortion,” Robinson said. The rocky terrain underscores the struggles Republicans have endured more generally in talking to voters about abortion rights in the year since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v.
Reynolds’ law, the product of a marathon 15-hour special legislative session he said he sought with the “sole” purpose of “enacting pro-life legislation,” bans abortion in the sixth week of pregnancy, placing it squarely among the strictest state reproductive health laws in the country.
The measure includes exceptions for the woman’s life, miscarriages and fetal abnormalities deemed by a doctor to be “incompatible with life,” as well as for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. But for the latter two to apply, a violation must have been reported to law enforcement or a “public or private health agency” within 45 days, and incest must have been reported to any of those officials or entities within 140 days, limits that critics say are arbitrary and difficult to meet.
The law remains temporarily blocked by a state judge while an ongoing legal challenge brought by reproductive rights groups plays out.
A spokesman for Reynolds did not respond to questions from NBC News about his public approach to the law.
Republicans running on the right in Iowa’s GOP contest is nothing new: The state’s evangelical Christians are a key voting block that candidates must win over to place strongly in the caucuses. But by being forced to publicly take a stand on such a restrictive abortion law, the candidates’ path forward could be more complicated.
For example, support for a six-week statewide ban, as DeSantis has said, is almost certain to suit a candidate in the next 2024 primary state, New Hampshire.
The state’s libertarian-leaning Republican electorate tends to be more open about the issue; Gov. Chris Sununu, for example, is among a small list of Republican governors who support abortion rights.
And the lucky few who make it to Super Tuesday, or beyond, would have to contend with even less restrictive attitudes about abortion, even among Republican voters.
An NBC News poll released last month found that 61 percent of all voters disapproved of overturning Roe, while 57 percent said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who supported a six-week abortion ban (29 percent said they were more likely to support that candidate).
Former President Donald Trump skipped the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa.Charlie Riedel / AP
At least one candidate, however, seems poised to benefit from Reynolds’ approach: Donald Trump.
The former president has criticized the state’s six-week abortion ban as “too hard” skipped the Family Leadership Summit and blasted the popular Reynolds for staying neutral in the caucuses (a long-standing tradition for the state’s governor). It’s unclear if he will sit with her at the state fair.
While those actions don’t necessarily bode well for his support in Iowa, Trump remains well ahead in early voting for the GOP primaries, both nationally and in several other early voting states, including New Hampshire and South Carolina.
That could mean Reynolds’ actions don’t apply to Trump, which could further solidify his (very early) front-runner status.
“The safe position for Republicans is what Donald Trump says. That it’s a state issue,” said Robinson, who is not affiliated with either presidential campaign. Trump also hasn’t taken a clear position on abortion, although he has made it more clear suggested the issue is left up to the states, and he has blamed the hardline positions of Republican candidates for the party’s poor performance in the midterms.
“The guy who leads the race by a substantial margin is right on the subject,” Robinson said. “It’s the right thing, politically.”
