Seizing the advantage on abortion is a key thing Democrats need to do in 2024. Good news: That’s the plan.
“I think it’ll continue to be a really galvanizing issue, and we’ll continue to find ways to make it front and center,” Biden Campaign Manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez told Politico, as the campaign plans to deploy top surrogates to key 2024 states. Vice President Kamala Harris will be a key figure in this effort. She did an event with Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the ACLU immediately following the launch of the 2024 Biden-Harris campaign, and on Friday, she, President Joe Biden, first lady Dr. Jill Biden, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff rallied with reproductive rights groups to mark the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
Going forward, Harris will be part of an effort to target North Carolina, Politico reports. That’s a state Biden lost in 2020, but the campaign believes it’s in play following the passage of a 12-week abortion ban by Republican lawmakers. North Carolina is one of the battleground states targeted in a new six-figure digital ad and billboard buy from the Democratic National Committee this past week.
In 2022, the media and Republicans kept expecting abortion to fade as an issue in the months between the fall of Roe v. Wade and the elections. Instead, voters stayed angry and voted on reproductive rights. And polls show that the issue hasn’t faded.
As Kerry Eleveld reported Wednesday, multiple polls highlight the damage Dobbs and the ensuing state abortion bans have done and the political peril for Republicans who continue to push bans. A CBS News/YouGov poll found 57% saying Dobbs had been bad for the country, with half of those polled saying that abortion has been more restricted than they expected and 53% of women saying that it had made being pregnant more dangerous. Another poll from USA Today/Suffolk found that 1 in 4 Americans said state abortion bans had increased their own support for abortion rights. No wonder, when the horrifying consequences of banning abortion are regularly in the news.
Politico reports that a NARAL Pro-Choice America internal poll finds 69% opposition—including 48% of Republicans—to a national abortion ban.
The combination of their 2022 underperformance and these polls should have Republicans terrified, and maybe rethinking their extremism on the issue. Instead, they continue regurgitating the same tired and ineffective message that Democrats are the real extremists, running candidates who say things like “we have one party in this country that seems to be bent on murdering our unborn children,” and pushing abortion bans in the states.
Abortion rights matter as a political issue, because it’s been a winning one for Democrats, and as a policy issue, because women are being seriously harmed by abortion bans—whether the harm of being forced to continue pregnancies that endanger their lives or the harm of being denied the right to make their own medical decisions. Democrats spent too long afraid to make that case aggressively, convinced by Republicans or the media that it wasn’t a winner. Happily, while Republicans haven’t learned the lessons of 2022, Democrats have. “We do not see this issue dissipating,” Neera Tanden, Biden’s Domestic Policy Council director, told reporters on Wednesday. “This is not our perception in any way shape or form.”
