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Yesli Vega, a Republican running for the U.S. House in a competitive Virginia district, no longer mentions her connection to former President Donald Trump in the bio section at the top of her Twitter page.
Colorado state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, who is also in a battleground House race, has stopped promoting language defending the “sanctity of life” on her campaign website. Now, there is no mention of abortion, a review of the website showed.
And the campaign of Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, has removed from his campaign website references to strict anti-abortion positions he advocated, along with references to false claims that the 2020 election will be stolen from Trump.
At least nine Republican congressional candidates have deleted or changed references to Trump or abortion from their online profiles in recent months, moving away from divisive issues that some Republican strategists say are two of the party’s biggest liabilities before the post-Labor Day sprint. on election day.
“The Dobbs The decision has clearly energized Democratic voters to the point where they’ve closed the enthusiasm gap with Republicans,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, referring to the Supreme Court ruling that ended to the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Asked if it hurts the GOP that Trump is back in the news, Ayres said, “The best case for Republican midterm candidates is to make the next election a referendum on the Biden administration.”
He added: “Anything that distracts from that focus weakens the Republican position.”
Returning to the political center after a primary is a common practice used by candidates of both parties. But attempts by Republicans in competitive contests to distance themselves from abortion and Trump have encouraged Democrats to mount an aggressive offense on those issues, which they see as key to their efforts to beat expectations previously shown in the primary. congressional races.
A Pew Research Center poll earlier this summer found that 57 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court’s decision. Dobbs a Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 65 percent said the court’s decision represents a significant loss of rights for women in the United States. Some states do not allow abortion when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest; a Washington Post-ABC News poll this spring found that 79 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in such cases, a finding consistent in polls for more than three decades.
Both President Biden and Trump, who received renewed attention recently after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate, are unpopular, making them targets of the opposing party in the midterms. Trump’s approval rating was only 38 percent and Biden’s was only 43 percent, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.
But during the primaries, Trump was a big draw, as he remains popular with many Republicans. Many Republicans ran as candidates aligned with him, a dynamic that has caused some discomfort as the pivot to the general election began.
Vega, who is trying to unseat Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) in one of the key seats Republicans hope to flip to regain control of the House, used to say in her Twitter bio that she was a “Pres. Trump appointee” , a reference to his December 2020 appointment to the President’s Advisory Commission on Hispanic Prosperity. A few weeks ago, after Vega clinched the GOP nomination, he disappeared.
Asked about the change, Vega’s campaign consultant, Sean Brown, shrugged off the question and responded with an apparent reference to Biden’s recent announcement that he would write off some of the student loan debt of many Americans. “Is it safe to tell the story of Democratic candidates refusing to say whether they support Biden’s blatantly political tuition giveaway?” Brown wrote.
Kirkmeyer is running in a newly opened seat in Denver’s northern suburbs after Colorado’s delegation gained an extra seat due to the state’s population growth in the 2020 census. He once featured in a section called “The Conservative Fighter ” that “I would defend the sanctity of life”. Now, a similarly placed section at the top of the page is called “Colorado’s Choice.” It does not mention abortion.
“Our campaign recently completed a complete redesign of Barb’s website. Instead of covering many issues (among them abortion), we focus on the three issues that voters are most interested in,” said Alan Philp, a campaign consultant. The page now refers to spending and inflation , energy and crime as main themes.
The two Democrats who ran against Vega and Kirkmeyer have attacked them on abortion. Spanberger recently ran an ad slamming Vega for comments she made inaccurately suggesting pregnancy cannot result from rape.
Some Republican strategists warned against getting into abortion debates with Democrats. Such strategies will only turn midterms into opposition-friendly contests, they said.
“The more Republicans explain their position on the Supreme Court ruling, the more they’re playing the battleground that Democrats want,” said John Brabender, a veteran GOP communications consultant. “I think we’re letting the Democrats frame the issue and the candidates fall into that trap en masse in our races.”
National Democrats have been quick to try to capitalize on these apparent attempts by Republicans to suppress their less popular positions. David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, said in a statement: “The Republican Senate candidates will not be able to run away from their records. The truth is that they have made their positions clear, and in many cases, we have them on videotape”.
Helen Kalla, spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, issued a statement Tuesday saying, “No matter how fast Republicans run to erase their toxic, unpopular and dangerous positions, Democrats will make sure voters know exactly the threat that the Republicans represent to our liberties”.
Spokesmen for the Republican National Congressional Committee and the Republican National Senate Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
Masters’ campaign, which is running against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in a race seen as central to the Senate majority fight, has removed hardline abortion positions from its campaign website , including his support for a federal “personhood law.” Now opens a section on abortion attacking Kelly’s position instead of calling Masters “100% pro-life.” Now he’s specifically calling for a national ban on third-trimester abortions, an alteration first reported by NBC News. During the primaries, he suggested support for a much stricter ban on public comment.
Zachery Henry, a spokesman for Masters’ campaign, said the website was “updated after the primary to mark a sharp contrast to Mark Kelly’s radical left-wing views on a range of issues, including support for Kelly to Extreme Abortion Policies Without Limits.”
Kelly voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have codified Roe v. Wade — ensure access to abortion up to the point of fetal viability and beyond when a health care provider believes a pregnancy would endanger a person’s life or health. “If Blake Masters thinks he can quietly delete passages from his website and disguise how out of touch and dangerous his position on abortion is, he’s in for a rude awakening,” spokeswoman Sarah Guggenheimer said. from Kelly’s campaign, in a statement.
Masters’ website also said that “if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today.” On August 25, that line disappeared from a section on “election integrity,” a change first reported by CNN.
Shortly after winning Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for US Senate in May, with the help of Trump’s endorsement, Mehmet Oz removed many references to the former president from his website and social media. Trump is still listed on the page under Oz’s endorsements, and the two are scheduled to campaign together later this week.
“I think you’re seeing some early candidates who realized that maybe they weren’t very cautious during their primaries and now they’re trying to correct that. They played a role in the primaries, they got Trump’s endorsement, they made calculations to win the primaries that are not so good in the general,” said a former Trump campaign official who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about the Republican candidates.
Asked whether Trump’s enhanced presence hurts Republicans, the former official said, “Yes.”
Jim Bognet, who is running in a competitive US House district in Pennsylvania against Democratic Rep. Matthew Cartwright, once plastered his campaign website with references to Trump. Sometime after the election, he removed all but two. Among the deleted passages is one that read: “In 2020, I ran for Congress to fight the Democrats’ witch hunt to remove President Trump from office. In that election, we saw Democrats break every rules they could to manipulate those elections”.
A spokesperson for Bognet did not respond to a request for comment, but told HuffPost, which first reported the changes, that “the entire campaign website was rebuilt and redesigned.”
Other Republican candidates have tried to soften their language around abortion. Michigan state Sen. Tom Barrett (R), who is trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, had said on his website that he would “protect life from conception.” It replaced it with a section called “Life,” which calls him “a consistent pro-life state lawmaker” and then focuses on Slotkin’s abortion positions, as first reported by the Detroit News.
“The website is regularly…