WASHINGTON (CN) — As a group of presidential candidates seeking to sway evangelical Christian voters made their case during a political action conference Friday, panelists on the sidelines drilled down on a few policy issues key to securing the conservative voting bloc’s support.
Every one of the Republican Party’s presidential hopefuls spoke, or was scheduled to speak, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference — a two-day event that saw candidates jockeying for approval from a crowd of evangelicals gathered in the Washington Hilton Friday morning. The annual meeting is one of the first opportunities for the field of would-be nominees to roll out their platforms.
While the morning’s speeches saw leading GOP candidates, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, lay out campaign promises and appeal to professed conservative values, the policy discussions didn’t end after the stage lights dimmed. Conferencegoers gathered in breakout sessions throughout the afternoon, where a slate of panelists dialed in on issues that are already proving vital for any would-be Republican nominee looking to curry favor with evangelicals.
Perhaps the most central policy issue for the voting bloc was abortion, which dominated both the candidates’ remarks and the proceeding panel discussions. Pence, leading the charge, demanded that every Republican running for president publicly support a 15-week ban on abortions, should they be elected.
The focus on abortion comes as the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s’ Health Organization, which overturned judicial precedent guaranteeing abortion rights, turns one year old this month. Although opponents of the ruling have derided it as an attack on a woman’s right to choose, the mood was celebratory among evangelicals Friday.
“This is just political hygiene 101,” said Patrick Purtill, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s legislative affairs director, during a panel discussion on the Dobbs decision. Speaking to a full house of attendees, Purtill proclaimed that overturning abortion rights means “we can govern ourselves again, act like adults. We can make grown-up decisions.”
Purtill applauded what he said was the precipitous drop in surgical abortions since the Dobbs decision last year in the more than two dozen states that have clamped down on the practice. “There’s another thing to celebrate,” he said.
Members of the panel included state lawmakers from North Carolina and West Virginia — both of which have enacted restrictive anti-abortion policies over the last year. The discussion largely centered around how the conservative movement could crystallize the rollback of abortion rights.
“I do think there’s still a federal role to play in legislating on these issues,” said Chelsea Sobolik, senior policy director at Lifeline Children’s Services, which provides adoption and pregnancy counseling aimed at dissuading women from getting abortions. Urging more action from lawmakers, Sobolik pointed to efforts from some congressional Democrats to enshrine abortion rights into federal law, such as the 2022 Women’s Health Protection Act which would have blocked the government from restricting abortion access.
The panelists also appeared to back away from using ballot initiatives — which ask voters to weigh in on specific issues — as a mechanism for rolling back abortion rights on the state level.
“I think we’re going to have to do it in steps,” said West Virginia state Senator Jack Woodrum, arguing that ballot initiatives have backfired in some states. During an August 2022 referendum, voters in Kansas rejected a proposal for an amendment to the state’s Constitution making abortion illegal.
Purtill concurred, adding that it would be easier for pro-choice groups to drum up opposition to ballot initiatives than it would be to get such measures passed.
“The other side has a boatload of money, to be totally candid,” Purtill said. “If you’re going to run a statewide ballot initiative, that is mostly a money game.”
Since the Dobbs decision in June 2022, conservatives have been working to chip away at abortion access. The newest front in that fight, under litigation in federal court, is a medical abortion drug known as mifepristone. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is currently weighing a lawsuit against the Justice Department filed by a coalition of anti-abortion doctors which challenges federal approval of the drug. The Biden administration has argued that the risk of complications from using mifepristone is less than 1%.
Meanwhile, the evangelical conference also held up crime as a key issue for 2024, and a separate group of panelists touted the Trump administration’s 2018 criminal justice reform bill as a conservative win and criticizing Democrats’ handling of the Justice Department and the U.S. prison system.
“The country has no idea how destructive Biden and Clinton were to the criminal justice system in this country,” said Brett Tolman, executive director for conservative advocacy group Right on Crime and former U.S. attorney for the District of Utah.
The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland took several dings during Friday’s panels, with Tolman taking aim at the agency’s recent plea deal with Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. The former U.S. attorney towed a similar line to many Republican lawmakers, arguing that the charges brought against Biden for tax violations was evidence of a “two-tiered” justice system.
“To this day, we do see that there are those that believe that the justice system is theirs, and they should be able to operate it the way they want to operate it,” Tolman said.
None of the panelists Friday gave any hint about which of the Republican presidential candidates present at the conference should have evangelicals’ support — despite displays of affection for former President Trump from many conferencegoers. However, some speakers expressed an urgent need to put the GOP back in charge.
“We have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the White House,” Tolman said. “If we do that, we might be able to bring back law and order in this country.”
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