Democrats Say This Might Be An Abortion Election After All
If Kamala Harris is elected the first woman President, it will be because women voters put her in the Oval Office. And if women voters put her there, it will be in large part because of abortion.
In the final days of a deadlocked campaign, the Vice President is heading to Texas—a state her campaign calls “ground zero of extreme Trump abortion bans”—for a speech Friday evening on reproductive freedom. By leaning into abortion, Harris is attempting to activate the voters who have powered Democrats to a series of election victories since former President Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016: pissed-off women.
When voters are asked in surveys about the issues that are very important to them, abortion lags behind topics like the economy. But it is a galvanizing subject on which Democrats have a clear advantage. The Harris campaign sees abortion as key both to turbocharging its base and persuading swing voters. And it believes that reproductive rights are the most salient issue for voters who are still undecided, especially white non-college women.
“Abortion works as both a persuasion and mobilization issue,” says veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “The last voters who need to be mobilized are very low information, and the abortion issue is very clear.”
Read More: Harris Battles For the Bro Vote.
Harris’ late visit to Texas isn’t a long-shot bid to win a red state. It was hatched as a way to highlight the additional attacks on reproductive rights that voters could face in a second Trump presidency. The Vice President will be joined by people who have experienced a range of devastating consequences from abortion bans, including Amanda and Josh Zurawski, a Texas couple who challenged Texas’s restrictive law after Amanda was denied reproductive care, and Shanette Williams, the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, who died after she was denied abortion care in Georgia.
The campaign is also running new ads about the impact of abortion bans on women’s health and future fertility. One features a woman named Ondrea, who nearly died of sepsis after being denied a medically necessary abortion and now may never get pregnant again. Another highlights Trump’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade.
The abortion-focused event in Houston is part of a broader push to activate her female base and persuade swing voters to turn out. While she’s in Texas, Harris will sit down with the popular podcaster Brené Brown, who has a mostly female but nonpolitical audience. Beyonce is scheduled to perform in support of the Harris-Walz ticket at the Houston event on Friday, bringing a dose of star power from one of the biggest pop stars in the world.
It’s all part of a closing argument to galvanize women in an election that has featured a striking and consistent gender gap. Women favor Harris by a 54% to 42% margin, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll released Friday, while men favor Trump 55% to 41%. And while Trump has leaned into the “manosphere” in order to motivate low-propensity male voters, Harris’s closing pitch is aimed at women voters with a track record of showing up in elections. There are early signs her strategy could pay off. Women voters are far outpacing men in early voting in battleground states, according to data collected by NBC News.
For many of these women, abortion is a powerful persuasion tool, says Lake, because it can create a justification to break from their husbands who may be voting for Trump. Their husbands may believe Trump might be better for the economy, but “but abortion is something you know more about,” says Lake. “It empowers women to stand up to the subtle or not subtle pressure from their husbands.”
Harris is hoping the issue could help her make headway with non-college white women in particular. Trump won women without a college degree by 27 points in 2020. But this time around, the Harris campaign believes they are significantly cutting into his lead. While 70% of non-college white men say they plan to vote for Trump, only 55% of non-college white women do, according to an early October poll by Marist, while 42% plan to vote for Harris. It’s unclear whether those gains are real, though: another recent Marist poll had white non-college women behaving roughly the same as white non-college men.
Read More: Harris Intensifies Pitch to Disaffected Republicans.
Winning back some of the white women who tilted towards Trump in 2016 and 2020 could be enough to swing the election in Harris’s favor, especially in the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which have high proportions of voters without a college degree. By presenting economic plans tailored to middle-class women, like relief for caregivers, alongside abortion rights, the campaign believes they can win over undecided women voters. As one campaign official puts it: "We're trying to tell these women: you actually don't have to choose; you can have both." And if enough non-college white women reject Trump, the campaign official says, “that’s the ballgame.”
Carolyn Eberly, who runs a local chapter of the progressive Indivisible group in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, says the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision led to an influx of new members for her group, which is now canvassing in their district to oust a local anti-abortion state lawmaker. Eberly says that she hears a lot about abortion as she knocks on doors, even from her more conservative neighbors. “They’re unaffiliated but would lean to the right,” Eberly says. “But they’re saying to me, ‘This isn’t right, women need to be able to choose.’”
Women have been core to Democratic victories in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and some Democratic strategists suggest that pollsters may be underestimating the likelihood that they turn out in force against the former President once last time. “I don’t know if all of these polls have captured the intensity of women voters this election cycle,” says Democratic strategist Rebecca Katz. “I think they have undercounted Trump voters two cycles in a row; I dont think they’re going to make the same mistake this time. I think they’re under-counting the intensity of women voters. And I think women are going to show up.”
Write to Charlotte Alter at [email protected].