Former President Donald Trump advised Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for Governor of Michigan in the 2022 election, to dial it back on abortion during her campaign, Dixon revealed on her podcast that aired Tuesday.
Dixon, who ran unsuccessfully against Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, had Trump on “The Tudor Dixon Podcast” to discuss the 2024 race and how she came up short in 2022. Dixon, who is pro-life, took heat from the Left during her campaign for saying she did not believe in any exceptions for abortion. Dixon noted that Trump told her to be careful on the abortion issue as it gave Democrats momentum.
“You came to me and you said, ‘You got to talk differently about abortion.’ And we could not pivot, we could not pivot in time,” Dixon told Trump during the interview. She added that Trump was “absolutely right” to give her the advice.
“I hope that you are able to navigate that issue in ’24 and that we can win those women back because they are already putting out attack ads, and it is not a fair issue for them to attack on,” Dixon said.
Trump told Dixon that he didn’t receive the same backlash that she did for his stance on abortion because he was careful with how he addressed the issue during his campaigns. “There’s a way of talking about it,” he said, adding that Democrats “are the radicals” on the issue.
“Exceptions are very important. I think you need the exceptions. You and I talked about that,” Trump added.
Abortion played a pivotal role in the Democrats’ domination in Michigan elections in 2022 just months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. The issue was also directly on the ballot with Michigan voters choosing to make abortion a constitutional right. Whitmer won re-election with nearly 55% of the vote while Democrats also won the election for attorney general, gained control of the state legislature, and took multiple key U.S. House races.
In a Fox News interview last week, Dixon said the Left and the media jumped on her abortion stance early, which “absolutely” hurt her in the election.
“No one really understood how important abortion would be in 2022 because no one had run in a post-Roe world,” Dixon said. “So we suddenly got viciously attacked by the Democrats, and it is a winning message for them.”
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Dixon praised Nikki Haley for her answer on abortion during the first GOP presidential debate, arguing that Republicans need to take a state-by-state approach to the issue.
Trump, currently in command of the polls for the GOP primary, has not said if he supports the 15-week federal ban on abortion that some Republican candidates have advocated for. The former president said the U.S. government has “a vital role” in opposing abortion and touted his crucial Supreme Court appointments, which ultimately led to the overturning of Roe.
“One of the reasons they wanted Roe v. Wade terminated,” he said, “is to bring it back into the states where a lot of people feel strongly the greatest progress for pro-life is now being made,” Trump said in June. “There of course remains a vital role for the federal government in protecting unborn life.”