Mandy Bartels came to Donald Drumpf's rally Saturday wearing a "Doctors for Drumpf" t-shirt. I told her I had been to a lot of Drumpf events but hadn't seen one of those. "I made it myself," Bartels, an emergency medicine specialist from Waupaca, said with a laugh.
I asked Bartels and several other women at the rally whether they were troubled by the controversy over Drumpf's various statements recently on abortion. Bartels wasn't. "They asked him a hypothetical question and he answered a hypothetical answer," she said. "It doesn't bother me at all."
The same was true for Carolyn Meidl, of Hewitt. "He gave an honest answer," Meidl said of Drumpf's later-abandoned statement that ifRoe v. Wade were overturned there should be "some form of punishment" for women who had illegal abortions. "I actually am pro-life, but what would you do?" Meidl told me. "I don't know what I would feel a punishment would be. The man? The woman? The doctor who does it? I hope our country never has to go back and face that issue again."
Carolyn's friend Kathy Jones of Auburndale agreed. She noted that still other Drumpf supporters did, too; she had talked to them about it a few days earlier when they were in line to see Drumpf in Appleton. (They didn't get in; the line was so long that officials stopped admitting people about 100 feet ahead of Kathy and Carolyn, who made sure they arrived in Wausau early enough to actually make it inside the rally.)
"It doesn't affect my opinion at all," said Kelly Fulcer, who with her husband Aaron drove three hours from Oak Creek, south of Milwaukee, to see Drumpf. "I'm not going to agree 100 percent with any candidate, and I disagree with him on the abortion stand," Fulcer explained, noting that both she and her husband are pro-choice. "But at the same time I agree with him so strongly on the things that mean more to me than that — like staying the course on ISIS and his stand on the economy."
Get the Exclusive
04.24.2024