It was the moment Democrats across the country had been waiting for. About 13 minutes after CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash kicked off the first presidential debate of the season, Bash brought up the issue of abortion, asking former President Trump: "As president, would you block abortion medication?"
Trump said he would not, and went into a rambling answer about an issue that consistently ranks among President Biden's strongest.
Trump claimed (falsely) that the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was something "everybody without exception" wanted, saying (falsely) the Court "approved the abortion pill," calling it a state's rights issue and claiming (falsely) that some Democrat-run states allowed babies to be executed after birth.
Here was the 81-year-old Joe Biden, already off to a halting start on the most important night of his political life, with an opportunity to turn things around. Would he mention the reams of polling showing a growing majority of Americans in favor of abortion rights? Would be bring up the unpopular abortion bans already passed in several red states? Or some Republicans' even more unpopular messaging around IVF?
Instead, Biden delivered his own rambling, often incoherent answer on a topic supposed to be his party's biggest electoral advantage. He then ended his allotted rebuttal time with the following, according a CNN transcript of the debate:
Look, there's so many young women who have been... Including a young woman who just was murdered, and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, they talk about that, but here's the deal. There's a lot of young women who are being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by... It's just ridiculous, and they can do nothing about it. And they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.
The sitting president, a man steeped in politics his entire adult life who has debated countless times, behind in the polls, took a question about his strongest issue and pivoted to his weakest.
"Nothing explains why, when handed a perfect abortion question on a silk pillow, Biden started talking about a woman raped and killed by an illegal immigrant," Davie Weigel, a veteran political reporter, wrote on X, channeling the astonishment of analysts, Democratic operatives and voters around the country.
"I was just stunned," said Tresa Undem, a partner at the non-partisan public research firm Perry Undem who has done polling on abortion for 20 years. "It was incomprehensible. Every single poll, internal or elsewhere, shows this is the number one issue for Democrats and young people. There is not an easier issue to message on."
Bash, the moderator, stuck with the line of questioning, asking Biden a follow-up about whether he supported any limits on how late a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy.
The president's response to that question started with a confusing mention of his support for the three trimester framework codified in Roe: "The first time is between the woman and the doctor, second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation, the third time is between woman and the state."
The only time in the 90-minute debate that Biden even mentioned the word "abortion" was after Trump claimed that the former governor of Virginia was willing to "rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby."
The president responded to that falsehood by saying, "Only if a woman's life is in danger, she's going to die, that's the only circ*mstance when that can happen," before adding: "We are not for late-term abortion, period."
"I don't know how he ended up talking about late-term abortion," said Undem, noting it is not a medically recognized term.
"When Trump mentioned post-birth abortion and Biden said that only happens when a woman's life is at risk? I was speechless."
In March, a memo prepared by House Republicans and leaked to the Wall Street Journal suggested that, when it comes to abortion, the GOP had a "brand problem, not a policy problem." The memo urged candidates to take the issue head on, under the theory that many moderate voters have a more nuanced view than either narrative that Democrats are in favor of no abortion restrictions while Republicans want to ban the procedure outright.
While Trump did indeed take the issue head on Thursday night, Undem said that the polling post-Roe shows voters firmly to his left.
"The biggest shift I'm seeing in the data is that [abortion] is now not only a rights and freedom issue but a healthcare issue too. People do not want the government involved in any point, that is what's shifting."
"This should be very simple [for Biden] to communicate," she added. "Most of the electorate is with him."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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