The encroaching stink of political sargassum
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David Shribman
SEBASTIAN, Fla. — Here comes the sargassum.
The seaweed blob that washes ashore here every April — University of South Florida specialists say this year’s harvest is a 13-ton wave-runner, maybe the biggest ever — creates a stink as it dominates the coastal environment and temperatures rise. The brown algae produce rashes and emit toxic fumes.
This year, the political equivalent of the sargassum is abortion, which is why the most important development of recent days in presidential politics didn’t happen in New Hampshire, where Donald Trump campaigned in the state with the smallest seacoast, nor in Iowa, where Tim Scott barnstormed through a state safely inland.
It didn’t happen in daylight, either. It occurred here in Florida on April 13 at 10:45 p.m., at the very juncture when the sargassum began its assault on the sunny coast that is home to the two leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.
That’s the hour Ron DeSantis signed legislation banning abortion after six weeks. And like the sargassum, which has its purpose and its peril — it offers shelter to marine life such as loggerhead sea turtles and mahi-mahi, but also has the capacity to smother valuable corals and seagrass beds — abortion has the potential of both boosting and dooming a presidential candidate. No presidential contender since the Rev. Pat Robertson, who came in second in the 1988 Iowa caucuses, has been as closely identified with opposition to abortion rights as DeSantis will be.
It’s the biggest political gamble of the season.
Top presidential candidates have made big gambles before. Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale vowed to raise taxes in 1984 at a time when tax cuts were proliferating. Bob Dole quit the Senate post that gave him national recognition in a 1996 bet that left him, he said, with “nowhere to go but the White House or home.” Sen. John McCain chose as his running mate an untested governor of Alaska whose main attribute was knowing how to field-dress a moose. None of them won the presidency.
DeSantis is facing the defining peculiarity of American politics, the two dimensions in the race for the White House.
The first is the struggle for a party nomination; that often requires veering to the extremes to catch the attention and the support of the slice of Americans who vote in primaries. The second is to win the general election, where the very things a candidate says and does in the early political season can make ultimate victory difficult. A telling example: Sen. George McGovern had to lean so far left to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 that he was doomed in the general election, eventually losing 49 states.
Now DeSantis, who had signed legislation lowering the abortion limit to 15 weeks a year ago this month, has gone a step further. His influence in Tallahassee is strong enough that he could have quietly pressed anti-abortion lawmakers to hold off slicing nine weeks from the abortion barrier. They went ahead. He signed the legislation.
This may help him in Iowa, the poster child for political polarization — and for political consequence. In that state, which Donald Trump lost in the 2016 caucuses, three out of five Republicans oppose abortion in most or all cases, according to an October 2022 Des Moines Register Iowa Poll. DeSantis is in the sweet spot there. Nationally, two-thirds of Republicans believe abortion should be legal only under some circumstances, according to the Gallup Poll. So the Florida governor is in sync with his party.
But if he defeats Trump for the GOP nomination, he faces a different universe of voters. The 2022 national exit poll found that three out of five voters believed abortion should be legal in most or all cases. That puts DeSantis outside the mainstream on an issue that is flaring in importance on the campaign trail, in the executive suites of the manufacturers of the abortion pill mifepristone, and in the Supreme Court.
Of course, being outside the mainstream on an ethical issue is no sin if the calculation is moral rather than political. That was the position abolitionists occupied in the first half of the 19th century. The mystery is whether DeSantis is motivated by abortion or by ambition. Only he knows for sure.
Nor do we know precisely how much Janet Protasiewicz’s triumph in the recent Wisconsin state Supreme Court race was powered by her support of abortion rights.
But when such a result occurs in a state where 2022 midterm exit polls showed that, by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, there is a good case to be made that abortion was a major factor. (If it walks like the mallards common in Wisconsin, swims like a mallard and squawks like a mallard, it probably is a mallard.)
Ryan T. Anderson, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative-leaning Washington think tank, argues that Republicans cannot prevail without high turnout from their anti-abortion constituents. That is indisputable. The question is whether candidates who make opposition to abortion a major element of their political profile put themselves at a disadvantage. “Running on an absolutist pro-life platform now is the mirror image of the mistake Democrats have made running on an absolutist pro-abortion platform,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal a few days ago. “Some tolerance for less-than-ideal laws is politically necessary. So, too, is a willingness to work incrementally.”
Anderson, the co-author of a book titled “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing,” believes Florida’s movement — from being a magnet for abortion-seekers to banning the procedure after 15 weeks to banning it after six — is incrementalism, all in the service of protecting life. DeSantis’ rivals have described it as extremism. It is on that axis that much of the caucus and primary season will turn.
Like Trump’s demand that his competitors weigh in on his legal difficulties by claiming he is the victim of a political witch hunt, DeSantis’ action is an implicit demand that the rest of the GOP field, including Trump, weigh in on the six-week standard that the Democrats are waiting to exploit. It isn’t only in Florida where the abortion sargassum is beginning to accumulate.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
