When it comes to policy matters, polling shows that Vice President Kamala Harris has lots of vulnerabilities. But where she stands on abortion isn’t one of them.

So, it was no surprise that the moderators of Tuesday’s presidential debate raised the topic early, before a lot of Americans tuned out.

Whether her exchange with rival Donald Trump on abortion did what she (and apparently the moderators) had hoped — paint the former president as an extremist who wants to turn women into handmaidens — was less clear.

On abortion, Trump has been all over the place — from “the most pro-life president in history” to a supporter of all kinds of exceptions; both an opponent and a supporter of a six-week ban; and, according to his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance, a president who would not support a national abortion ban.

And that’s just during the past couple of months.

Trump’s lack of principles on the matter is clear, but it’s a problem mostly for those in the pro-life community who have lost someone whom they believed was a stalwart ally.

Indeed, Trump’s movement on abortion since the fall of Roe v. Wade has been notably leftward.

Still, Harris (and the moderators) tried to capitalize on Trump’s inconsistencies during the debate, arguing that his capriciousness instead makes him a threat to those who favor a so-called right to abortion.

Harris called states that have passed restrictions on abortion since the fall of Roe, places with “Trump abortion bans” and tried to make the case that American women can no longer access the procedure, even after having a miscarriage, in half of the country.

It was an interesting argument given that the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reported that in the first full calendar year after the fall of Roe, there were, quite sadly, more abortions in the U.S., not fewer, than in the previous year. There has also been an 11% increase in abortions nationwide since 2020 — a reality that the otherwise overzealous-to-fact-check moderators conveniently failed to mention.

Harris also insisted that Trump would pass a national abortion ban as part of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation policy proposal that Trump and his campaign team did not develop and the former president insists he hasn’t read. To be honest, given his lack of interest in policymaking in general, we should probably take him at his word about that.

When asked directly about whether or not he would support a national abortion ban, Trump hedged, insisting that such a measure from Congress won’t ever come to pass.

“We’ve gotten what we wanted,” Trump said, referring to the fact that Roe returned abortion policy decisions to the states.

No doubt that disappointed pro-life advocates, but what else is new? They are no longer Trump’s target audience.

To no one’s surprise, Trump got derailed by being Trump. He talked somewhat incoherently about former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s comments that doctors might not be required to provide life-saving care to babies born alive after botched abortions. The comments were exaggerated but describe a legitimate sentiment on the progressive left about the latitude doctors and women should have in making decisions about abortion.

Trump should have instead nailed Harris on her and her party’s insistence that abortion be available to women without any restrictions at all, a position about as out of sync with Americans as a total abortion ban.

Harris performed better in the debate, less on account of her own brilliance and more due to Trump’s maddening penchant for taking whatever bait she tossed at him.

But if she was seeking to scare moderate suburban women into thinking that Trump would make them handmaidens, she failed.

The real question is, will it matter in November?

___

©2024 Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Visit at star-telegram.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.