‘Trump did this’: Biden strikes GOP weakness on abortion
President spends on ads to tout rights agenda
It’s perhaps the only hot-button issue on which Donald Trump plays defense. It has forced even MAGA acolyte Kari Lake to ask Democrats for help. And just last month, it lost the Republicans a state seat in otherwise ruby-red Alabama.
Such is the power of the politics around abortion.
Going into the 2024 presidential election, it’s threatening to undermine the GOP’s upper hand on immigration and the economy against the Democrats and Joe Biden. The issue again cast a pall around Republican strategy this week after Arizona’s top court said an 1864 law that criminalized nearly all abortions in the state can take effect.
That ruling came just a day after Trump attempted to solve his party’s messaging problem by proclaiming the matter should be left to the states: a move that brought backlash from Democrats as well as those in his own party advocating for a strict federal ban.
By Wednesday, the court’s move had pushed Trump — who has sought to portray himself as resilient in the face of a litany of criminal court cases — further on the backfoot.
Moments after landing in Georgia for a campaign fundraiser, he told reporters that the Arizona law went too far. “As you know it’s all about states’ rights,” he said. “That’ll be straightened out. And I’m sure the governor and everybody else are going to bring it back into reason.”
President Biden, meanwhile, is spending a chunk of his $30 million spring advertising budget to tout his abortion-rights agenda. “Donald Trump did this,” read the white words against a stark black background at the end of a 60-second video released this week, telling the story of a Texan woman who said she almost died when she was denied medical care to prevent infection after a miscarriage.
The ad is the latest sign that the Biden campaign is planning to squeeze every drop of momentum out of the drama around abortion rights, in an attempt to capitalize on the consistent success the issue has brought Democrats at the polls.
What’s harder to predict is how significant a factor it will be when voters show up on Election Day: While 73 percent of swing state voters said abortion is important in deciding who to vote for in November, according to a March Bloomberg News/ Morning Consult poll, only about 7 percent said it’s the most important issue, above their opinions on the US economy, as well as immigration and protecting democracy.
Still, “abortion remains political kryptonite, electoral kryptonite, for Republicans,” Democratic strategist Maria Cardona said. “The vast majority of Americans do not agree with the extremist Republican agenda on this.”
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, at least 14 states have enforced total abortion bans. Seven others restrict the procedure in ways that would previously have been unconstitutional, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research organization that tracks state policy.
At the same time, ballot initiatives that seek to add abortion protections into state law will appear before voters in Maryland and New York this year, buoyed by the success of the eight states where similar contests have ended in wins for reproductive rights.
Florida could be next, after the state’s Supreme Court ruled Monday to allow a ballot initiative that will ask voters whether to enshrine abortion access in the state’s Constitution. Groups in several other states are working to follow suit.
The successful initiatives are giving the Biden administration clear guidance on where to focus, especially as national data show extreme abortion bans aren’t widely popular. On top of this week’s ad spend in Texas, campaign events that center around reproductive rights are regularly taking place in battleground states.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who is taking on a large role in the campaign’s abortion rights platform, is headed to Tucson, Ariz., on Friday to discuss the issue. The stop is part of her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour that has included events in Wisconsin, California, Georgia, Michigan, and Minnesota.
“Polling consistently shows a majority of Americans support legal abortion in most/all cases, especially early in pregnancy,” said Landon Schnabel, assistant professor of Sociology at Cornell University, adding that in close races abortion could boost Democratic turnout. “There is no public majority for strict bans.”