CNN
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Months after Donald Trump declared the debate over reproductive rights in America settled, the former president is still straining to navigate the new era of post-Roe politics that he helped create.

The latest display of his unease came Thursday, when the former president infuriated religious conservatives with an inartful attempt to sidestep questions about a Florida referendum that will decide the future of abortion access in his home state. The campaign quickly clarified in a statement that Trump had not, in fact, picked a side.

Later that day, surrounded by steel and machinery inside a Michigan warehouse, Trump abruptly detoured from remarks on manufacturing to offer women a new incentive to vote for him: a promise for universal coverage of in vitro fertilization if he is elected. But senators in his own party, including his running mate, JD Vance, had defeated a bill with a similar provision earlier this summer.

Trump, whose ever-evolving views on reproductive health have traversed every side of the debate, has long expressed concerns about the political fallout from the 2022 Supreme Court decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion. Though he has sought credit for installing the three conservative justices that tipped the court to overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump earlier this year said future questions about access should be left to the states.

But that position, intended to end the conversation, has done anything but, and Trump has strained to appease activists in his party as he stares down an electorate that remains overwhelmingly troubled by the current state of abortion access in many GOP-led states. A new survey from Quinnipiac University found 55% of voters think Vice President Kamala Harris is better equipped to tackle the issue, compared with 38% for Trump. Meanwhile, nearly 7 in 10 voters focused on abortion favor Harris over Trump, according to a recent CBS News poll conducted by YouGov.

Democrats, newly enthused by Harris’ rise to the top of the ticket, have doubled down on putting abortion at the center of their pitch to women in key states. The Democratic National Convention earlier this month featured emotional stories of women who couldn’t access potentially life-saving care when their pregnancies took a turn for the worse. On Friday, Harris’ campaign announced the launch of a 50-stop bus tour — starting in Trump’s backyard of Palm Beach, Florida — focused on reproductive health care.

Harris’ campaign also quickly responded to Trump’s proposal to mandate IVF coverage by arguing the GOP’s recently passed platform — heavily influenced by the former president – includes language supportive of states passing personhood legislation that would give 14th Amendment protections to life beginning at conception. Such laws could potentially make IVF procedures difficult in those states.

“Voters aren’t stupid,” Harris campaign spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika said in a statement.

With the race tightening in critical battlegrounds, Trump has all but dared single-issue anti-abortion voters to sit out the election. He wrote on social media last week that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” Vance followed up in an interview by saying Trump as president would veto a federal ban on abortion even if one managed to pass Congress — a 180-degree turn from the former president’s past promise to sign national restrictions on the procedure into law.

Religious conservatives, some of whom accepted Trump’s “states’ rights” position as political pragmatism, have lately cautioned that Trump risks losing their support. Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action, responded online to Vance’s remarks by warning: “If you don’t stand for pro-life principles, you don’t get pro-life votes.”

“Trying to sound like a Democrat on abortion isn’t going to help Trump,” she said in another social media post. “It hurts him. It’s politically unwise and morally wrong.”

Trump’s efforts are further complicated by what’s happening in his home state of Florida, where abortion is now illegal in most cases after six weeks. Voters in the state — including the former president — will decide on the future of access this fall through a ballot measure that would make abortion legal in the state up to the point of viability, which many experts believe is around 23 or 24 weeks of a pregnancy.

Trump had repeatedly declined to weigh in on the referendum, but on Thursday, he told NBC that Florida’s six-week ban was “too short” and added that he would be “voting that we need more than six weeks.”

During the GOP primary, the former president called the decision by then-rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign a six-week ban “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

Anti-abortion advocates interpreted Trump’s latest remarks to mean he intended to vote in favor of the referendum — though his campaign said that was not the case — and immediately vocalized their frustrations. Kristen Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said on X that her phone was “blowing up” with “volunteers who no longer will door knock for President Trump if this is not corrected.”

“If Donald Trump loses, today is the day he lost,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote in a social media post. “The committed pro-life community could turn a blind eye, in part, to national abortion issues. But for Trump to weigh in on Florida as he did will be a bridge too far for many.”

The cleanup for Trump’s campaign continued Friday, with Vance telling CNN that the former president will “make an announcement” soon on Florida’s referendum.

“I think what he’s saying is that he doesn’t like doing it at just six weeks,” Vance told CNN’s John Berman on CNN News Central. “Obviously, he’s going to make his own judgment on how he ultimately votes on the amendment.”

Trump’s comments quickly reverberated around Florida, where DeSantis is leading the Republican effort to defeat the referendum. Taryn Fenske, a spokeswoman for DeSantis, responded to a clip of Trump’s remarks about the state’s referendum by saying the proposed constitutional amendment was “extreme and must be defeated.”

DeSantis is actively raising money to fund a campaign in opposition to the amendment. The commitments he has received from Republican leaders include $100,000 from state Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson.

Simpson hosted a fundraiser for Trump on Thursday that Vance attended, a fact pointed out by Democrats.

“Donald Trump may be trying to hide his extreme Project 2025 agenda to outlaw abortion in Florida and across the country,” said Aida Ross, spokesperson for the party, “but JD Vance is making the Trump-Vance ticket’s anti-choice extremism clear, cozying up to an architect of Florida’s cruel abortion ban.”

CNN’s Kit Maher contributed to this story.

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