Biden’s new plan to win votes
American President Joe Biden will deliver a landmark speech on abortion in Florida today, placing the battle over women’s rights at the centre of his election showdown with Donald Trump.
Days before Florida introduces one of the most draconian abortion bans in America next week, Biden will use the speech to blame his Republican rival for the “chaos” unleashed since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade two years ago.
The ruling struck down the constitutional right to abortion after almost half a century, returning power over the procedure to individual states. Democrats believe a groundswell of public anger at the fall of Roe v Wade will be decisive at November’s election, as it was in the midterms in 2022 and state elections last year.
Before the speech in Tampa, aides said Biden would lay out “the stakes of this election for reproductive freedom across the entire country”. The president will warn that Republicans would seek to introduce a nationwide abortion ban if Trump takes back the White House.
Biden’s campaign hopes that the speech will resonate in the battleground states expected to decide the 2024 election. They include Arizona, where the state supreme court has cleared the way to enforce a law dating back to the Civil War that criminalises abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
“From Arizona to Florida, more and more Americans are seeing up close the devastating impact of Trump overturning Roe v Wade,” said Morgan Mohr, the Biden campaign’s senior adviser for reproductive rights.
Trump, who appointed three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe, has been put on the defensive by the political backlash and by the looming ban in Florida, which brings the abortion issue to his own front door.
Florida’s conservative-leaning supreme court upheld a six-week abortion ban earlier this month, which comes into force on May 1. The ruling effectively cuts off access to abortion throughout the southeast of the country. But the court also gave Florida voters a chance to repeal the ban and protect abortion rights up to 24 weeks of pregnancy in a ballot initiative in November.
Trump denounced the six-week ban as “a terrible mistake” when it was signed earlier this year by his Republican rival Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor. As a resident of the state, the former president now faces questions about whether he will vote to support the ban in November.
Opinion polls show that abortion ranks below the economy and immigration on lists of voter priorities. But Democrats believe that the polls do not reflect the deep public anger that has only grown as the reality of life after Roe v Wade has set in.