Harris pushing abortion rights as the winning issue in campaign's final stretch

Last Friday, an estimated 30,000 people gathered in Houston's Shell Energy Stadium to support Kamala Harris as her historic presidential campaign entered its final days. Neither Harris nor anyone else expects her to carry Texas, but the vice president and a star-studded roster of supporters ventured to the Lone Star State for another reason, and with a national audience in mind. They delivered a warning that Texas' near-total abortion ban could become the norm nationwide if Donald Trump is elected. In other words, it was an attempt to focus attention on an issue the Harris campaign thinks can win her the White House: reproductive rights. 

“What we’re experiencing here is a health care crisis, and Donald Trump is the architect of it,” Harris told her largest rally crowd to date. “Let us be clear: If Donald Trump wins again, he will ban abortion nationwide.”

Pop music superstar Beyoncé put in an appearance to endorse Harris, telling the crowd she wasn’t there as a celebrity but as a mother, “who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in.” 

Addressing “all the men and women in this room, and watching around the country," Beyoncé said, "We need you."

She and Harris were joined at the rally by several women who have nearly died from sepsis and other pregnancy complications in Texas because the state's restrictive abortion laws meant they were unable to obtain appropriate medical care. Under a set of laws enacted in 2022, abortion is prohibited in Texas except when the life or health of the pregnant patient is at risk. But as in several other states with similar laws, such exceptions are not clear-cut. Women in Texas have reportedly been denied care for conditions like ectopic pregnancies — without doubt a life-threatening condition — and in other situations that clearly posed a threat to life and future health. If physicians violate the law in Texas, they face up to 99 years in prison, loss of their medical license and $100,000 in fines, which has created an obvious impediment to providing treatment to pregnant women. Todd Ivey, an OB-GYN in Houston, addressed the crowd at the rally, surrounded by other physicians. “These laws are designed to handcuff me – literally,” Ivey said. “There is no place for Donald Trump in my exam room.”

On Saturday, Harris held another large rally, this time in Michigan, a key swing state, where Michelle Obama spoke directly to men who may be considering voting for Trump, warning them that women’s lives will be at risk if the ex-president returns to power. ”If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage,” Obama said. “So are you as men prepared to look into the eyes of the women and children you love and tell them you supported this assault on our safety?”

Big rallies in the last stages of an election cycle are meant to signal a candidate’s final message, an effort to close the deal with voters. So it's noteworthy that Harris is pushing a forceful message on reproductive rights and the possibility of a national abortion ban, not high-priority issues in previous presidential elections. While polls continue to show that the economy is the biggest issue for voters in 2024, abortion rights are increasingly important as well, especially among Democratic voters. In August of 2020, Pew Research Center found that fewer than half of all voters cited abortion as a very important issue — and those people were more likely to be Trump voters. That all changed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the 2022 Dobbs decision. Now, 67 percent of Harris supporters say the issue is critical to them, while only about one-third of Trump supporters say abortion is important to their vote.

“Kamala Harris is leading the most unapologetic campaign on abortion rights in history," said Emily Martin, chief program officer of National Women's Law Center Action Fund, in a previous interview with Salon. “That's not only a winning strategy, as we've seen since the Dobbs decision, but it's also essential to destigmatizing this essential care.”

Throughout her term as vice president, Harris has been a leading voice on abortion access within the Biden administration. Last spring, Harris became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion provider at a Planned Parenthood clinic. While there, she met with about two dozen health care workers to thank them for their work. As Julie Burkhart, president of Wyoming’s Wellspring Health Access clinic and co-owner of Hope Clinic, put it in a media statement, the 2024 election is “the most reproductive rights-centered election in our nation’s history.”

“As the owner of multiple abortion clinics throughout the country, primarily in more conservative, underserved areas," Burkhart continued, "we see the direct impact caused by state abortion bans exacerbated by the overturning of Roe v. Wade." Not just abortion care but also contraception and IVF “would likely all be severely impacted" if Trump is elected, she said. 

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Some Democratic strategists believe that Harris’ final focus on reproductive rights could lead to victory on Nov. 5. As Salon has previously reported, campaign managers on the ground in red states seek to galvanize support for pro-choice ballot initiatives say they're hearing that many Republican and independent voters think post-Roe abortion measures are too extreme. Some experts believe this issue alone could motivate a significant subset of Republican voters to defect to Harris in this election. According to the latest New York Times/Siena poll, Harris leads among female voters by a 54% to 42% margin, which is about the same as the margin between Joe Biden and Trump four years ago.

It remains to be seen if a focus on reproductive rights can deliver key swing states for Harris, but abortion is also directly on the ballot in 10 states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and South Dakota — largely in the form of initiatives that seek to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has tried to downplay abortion as a salient issue in this year's campaign, claiming it has “dropped way down” and even suggesting he would veto a hypothetical national abortion ban. Pro-choice advocates say that rhetoric is deliberately deceptive.  

“Donald Trump is responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade and continues to brag about it, saying that abortion bans are a ‘beautiful thing,’” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All. “Don’t pay attention to what Donald Trump says, but what he’s done. If he is elected in November, he will do everything he can to ban abortion as well as IVF and contraception.”