Among the many critical issues at stake in the 2024 election, one will be central for many Americans: Whom do you trust to make medical decisions — women and their doctors, or Donald Trump and JD Vance?
Vice President Kamala Harris cast the issue of abortion in stark relief in her first debate with former President Trump last week, striking a chord with voters across political lines. Ms. Harris’s answers on abortion emerged as her strongest moments onstage in a strong night for her overall — and provided a glimpse of a winning strategy for this election.
That involves the Harris-Walz ticket turning the volume up to 11 on abortion. Ms. Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and their campaign surrogates must keep emphasizing — on the stump, in ads and at every chance they get — how Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are impossible to trust on these issues.
They must refuse to let Mr. Trump and other Republicans suggest that leaving decisions about abortion up to the states is a benign proposition and continue to point to the wide-ranging impact of abortion bans on pregnancy care, miscarriage treatment and training opportunities for an entire generation of doctors.
Ms. Harris would do well, even, to devote an entire speech to the issue, laying out her plan to take action in support of abortion rights, with or without Congress.
At the same time, she should keep deploying campaign surrogates such as Kaitlyn Joshua, a mother from Baton Rouge, La., who described being denied care at not one but two emergency rooms in the midst of a painful miscarriage because of her state’s abortion ban. Personal stories like these can break through and reach voters more effectively than any campaign talking point. According to PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, exposure to these stories is helping to shift public opinion in support of reproductive rights — an imperative in this election and beyond.
As my mother, Ann Richards, a former governor of Texas, liked to say, it’s only when you’re getting sick of saying something that people really start to hear it. And Americans need to hear this message.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Ms. Harris has become one of the Democratic Party’s most skillful communicators on reproductive health. She doesn’t shy away from using the word “abortion” or trot out tired political rhetoric. She talks about these issues the way millions of Americans understand them: in terms of freedom, health and family.
Earlier this year, Ms. Harris is believed to have been the first sitting vice president or president to visit a health center that provides abortions, Planned Parenthood in St. Paul, Minn. With her were some of Minnesota’s fiercest champions for reproductive freedom, one of whom seems to have made an impression: Mr. Walz.
Ms. Harris understands that our country will never reach its full potential as long as half of its citizens are denied the most basic right to make their own decisions about their lives and futures. Simply put: She gets it.
Compare that to Mr. Trump, who for months has struggled to walk a fine line: convincing voters he’s actually not so bad on abortion while signaling to anti-abortion groups that he’ll deliver for them again as president. When asked whether he would sign a national abortion ban, his answers are unintelligible. He bends over backward to distance himself from Project 2025, a 900-plus-page plan written by some of his closest allies filled with deeply unpopular proposals, including effectively banning medication abortions nationwide and forcing states to monitor pregnancies. Scrambling to make up lost ground after Alabama’s abortion ban led the State Supreme Court to temporarily halt fertility care, he has claimed to be “a leader in fertilization” and promised to pay for Americans’ in vitro fertilization treatments.
As tempting as it is to dismiss the blatant lies and desperate pandering, this strategy has worked for Mr. Trump before. That’s why it’s so important between now and November for Ms. Harris to relentlessly remind voters of Mr. Trump’s past actions and hold him accountable for the suffering caused by overturning Roe. And she should keep relying on specific, real-world examples, such as the story of a 12-year-old in Mississippi who was raped by a stranger in her yard. Because of her state’s abortion ban, the girl started seventh grade as the parent of a newborn.
For decades, conventional political wisdom within certain Democratic circles went something like this: It’s all very well to talk about abortion in New York and California, but that will never fly with voters in the South or the Midwest. Ms. Harris has wisely rejected that premise. And for the next seven weeks, she must push as hard as she can.
I’ve seen firsthand why addressing this issue head-on matters. When I was president of Planned Parenthood, one of the first big fights in my time with the organization happened after the South Dakota legislature passed a near-total abortion ban. The local Planned Parenthood chief executive at the time, Sarah Stoesz, suggested we take the matter directly to the voters.
I’ll never forget the campaign organizers I met who were going door to door, talking to complete strangers about abortion. They described connecting with voters who were personally opposed to abortion but believed the government should never interfere in such a personal matter. One of the most important stories in that election cycle was Tiffany Campbell’s. Ms. Campbell, a mother of two, had been delighted to learn she was pregnant with twins. But after discovering a serious medical complication, she and her husband made the heartbreaking decision to have a selective abortion to save the life of the healthy twin. At the time, she considered herself a staunch Republican.
Sure enough, when South Dakota voters went to the polls, they overwhelmingly voted down the legislation. Two years later, when the issue appeared on the ballot a second time, the result was the same. That was nearly two decades ago, in what had previously been considered one of the most anti-abortion states in the country. More recently, in every state where abortion has been on the ballot since Roe was overturned — California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio and Vermont — abortion rights have won. With abortion on the ballot in Ohio, voter turnout in an off-year election reached levels typically reserved for significant statewide races. Again and again, we’ve seen that when reproductive freedom is on the ballot, Democrats, Republicans and independents turn out in droves to send a clear message that the government has no place interfering in personal decisions about Americans’ health and families.
A growing number of voters now say abortion is their top issue in 2024. Voters in 10 states will have the chance to weigh in on abortion-related measures this fall, including key battlegrounds such as Arizona, Florida and Nevada. If Ms. Harris can make a case to voters that reproductive freedom is on the ballot in every state this year, the overwhelming majority of Americans who want to see abortion rights restored will have reason to celebrate in November.
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