Such rulings provide a perfect opportunity for candidates to stake their ground and rally their supporters. This becomes particularly urgent when some of those supporters—say, religious conservatives—doubt your convictions on the issue. And it becomes almost mandatory to make a statement when your opponent uses the decision to bludgeon you. “We’ve seen a concerted, persistent attack on women’s health and rights at the federal level,” Hillary Clinton said. “Meanwhile, Donald Trump has said women should be punished for having abortions.”
Trump later walked back that statement, but you wouldn’t know it from the response from his camp, which has been silence. One possibility is that he doesn’t know what the game plan is going forward, given that the court fully repudiated the main method by which conservative statehouses have attempted to limit access to abortions. He is, after all, famously ignorant about abortion politics. But still, it’s very odd that he wouldn’t issue a pro forma statement promising to put conservative justices on the bench. Is it possible that it’s an oversight? Did it not come up when his team searched Google News?