Trump says everyone should vote on abortion. Mississippi leaders clearly disagree.

Mississippi Republican political leaders have continually expressed their unwavering support for the policies and actions of former President Donald Trump.

But on the hot-button issue of abortion, there seems to be some separation between the position of the state’s political leadership and the policy of the former president who aspires to win a second term.

Trump now supports, according to his campaign, a vote in every state on abortion.

A Trump campaign spokesperson told NBC News earlier this month: “As President Trump said, he wants ‘everyone to vote’ on the issue, reiterating his long-standing position of supporting states’ rights to make abortion decisions.”

However, Mississippi’s political leaders have taken extraordinary measures to ensure that their citizens are not allowed to vote on this issue.

For two consecutive legislative sessions, the state’s political leadership has proposed legislation that would prohibit Mississippians from voting on abortion.

In the 2023 and 2024 sessions, lawmakers attempted to pass a proposal to reinstate the ballot initiative process, in which voters can bypass the Legislature and gather enough signatures to put issues on the ballot for the electorate to approve or reject. Reinstating the initiative process was necessary because the state Supreme Court struck it down on a technicality in 2021.

At the time, state political leaders pledged to fix the technicality and restore the process that allows citizens to put issues on the ballot.

But as they worked to restore the process in the past two sessions, policy leaders opted to add a provision to the bills that would prevent the initiative from being used to get a vote on abortion. Those efforts to restore the process have been blocked at least in part because of opposition to including a ban on an abortion vote in the legislation.

But in something of a quandary, the fact that the initiative has not been restored means there is no mechanism for citizens to put abortion on the ballot.

Political leaders don’t want abortion on the ballot, at least in part because they would find it embarrassing if voters rejected the state’s strict abortion ban. After all, Mississippi brought the lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court that led to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which previously granted a national right to abortion.

It’s important to remember that the only time Mississippians voted on an abortion-related issue was in 2011. That year, the state’s electorate voted overwhelmingly against the personhood initiative, which would have made it law that life begins at fertilization.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, seven states have voted on abortion rights, and all seven, including Republican states like Kentucky and Kansas, have voted in favor of abortion rights.

At least nine more states will vote on abortion in November. Trump fears that those who turn out to vote in favor of abortion rights in those states will vote against him, because he has boasted that he was responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade thanks to the three conservatives he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court during his first term.

Among the states that will vote on abortion in November are the key states of Florida, Arizona and Nevada. It would be difficult to see a path to reelection for Trump if he loses Florida. So it is not surprising that the man who boasts of having repealed the national right to abortion is not saying how he plans to vote on the issue in his adopted state of Florida.

In neighboring Arkansas, where former Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders is governor, the Republican secretary of state blocked a vote on an initiative that would grant abortion rights up to 18 weeks of gestation. The initiative was defeated even though sponsors gathered the necessary number of signatures. Arkansas, like Mississippi, now has a ban on almost all abortions.

It’s also important to remember that Trump’s position on abortion has evolved dramatically over the years.

In 1996, she declared that she supported the right to abortion.

When he ran for president in 2016, he campaigned on overturning Roe v. Wade and expressed support for imposing national restrictions on abortion. He even briefly supported imposing criminal penalties on women who had abortions, though he retracted that stance shortly after learning how unpopular it was.

Trump recently appeared to leave open the possibility that his administration might ban the so-called abortion pill, though he later backtracked and his campaign said he had misunderstood the question.

Now, facing a tough campaign where abortion is a major issue, his latest stance is that he wants “everyone to vote” on the issue.

It remains to be seen whether Mississippi officials, who have been fully supportive of Trump for years, will accept that position.