Kamala Harris Could Make 2024 the Abortion Election
6 min read
Of all the reasons Kamala Harris is better equipped than Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November—her relative youth, the fact that she’s a former prosecutor challenging a convicted felon—her biggest advantage may be her record on abortion. Harris served as the Biden administration’s de facto advocate for reproductive rights; it is her voice, not Biden’s, that’s been loudest in objecting to abortion bans and conservative efforts to curtail IVF and contraception. According to the White House, she is the only vice president to have paid an official visit to an abortion clinic. As a senator, she famously grilled the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on abortion, asking him, “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” (He could not.)
As California’s attorney general, Harris investigated the anti-abortion activists who pretended to be researchers from a biologics company and illegally recorded videos that were edited to suggest that Planned Parenthood sold fetal parts. (After Harris left the AG’s office for the Senate, her successor brought criminal charges, and Planned Parenthood eventually won more than $2 million in damages from a lawsuit against the activists.) It also doesn’t hurt that Harris is running against a notorious misogynist who selected for his running mate a man who said as recently as 2022 that he would support a nationwide abortion ban.
In the tiny sliver of time in which she’s been the potential presidential nominee, Harris has already reenergized Democratic voters, especially abortion-rights advocates. Laudatory press statements have been issued by abortion-rights groups including Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL) and EMILY’s List, which is planning to donate millions to her campaign. If Harris is the nominee, Democrats will have the opportunity to make reproductive choice the leading issue of the 2024 campaign. And that might be enough to win.
Since the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump-appointed justices, issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, Americans’ support for abortion rights has soared to the highest levels since Gallup began measuring abortion attitudes, in 1995. Over the past two years, seven states, including solidly red ones, have asked their citizens to vote directly on laws either expanding or constricting abortion rights, and every single time, abortion rights have won. Only about one in 10 Americans think that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances—about as many as believe Jesus will return to Earth in their lifetime. So many voters are in favor of at least some abortion rights that Republican lawmakers across several states are trying to make it more difficult or even impossible for citizens to vote directly on ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments, even as they continue to push unpopular abortion bans through legislatures and the courts.
Abortion bans have irrevocably altered the lives of untold American women, but they’ve been political gifts to Democrats—one of the few advantages the party has this year. Voters have clearly expressed their displeasure with the current state of the economy, the border, and public safety, all of which have dragged down Biden’s approval ratings. Polling from early July (before Biden dropped out) showed that Trump had more voters’ trust on the border, the economy, the war between Israel and Hamas, and crime and safety. But abortion was the issue for which Trump received the least trust, and Biden the most.
And that’s polling on Joe Biden, a man who has been at best uncomfortable with and at worst hostile to abortion rights for most of his career. As a young senator, he groused that the Supreme Court had gone too far in Roe v. Wade. In the 1990s, he boasted about voting some 50 times against federal funding of abortions; in 2006, he said, “I do not view abortion as a choice and a right.”
By 2012, Biden was emphasizing his support for a woman’s right to choose. As Barack Obama’s running mate, he maintained his belief that life begins at conception but said, “I just refuse to impose that on others.” And after the Supreme Court overturned Roe during his presidency, he called on Congress to codify that right. But he still takes pains to avoid even uttering the word abortion, skipping over it in his State of the Union address despite its inclusion in the prewritten text. His June 27 debate performance reached its nadir when he was asked an easy-win abortion question and responded by bungling the premise of Roe, struggling to rebuke a Trump fantasy about abortions “even after birth” (which do not exist), and saying that “the deal” with abortion was at least partly about “young women who are being raped by their in-laws.” When Florida banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, Biden gave a sprawling speech in Tampa in which he used the word abortion just twice and quickly moved on to other issues, according to a Politico analysis. When Harris appeared in Jacksonville for a Biden-campaign event the next week, she spoke almost exclusively about reproductive rights, and said abortion 15 times.
Trump, like Biden, has proved malleable in his abortion politics, seesawing from “I’m very pro-choice” in 1999 to “I am pro-life” in 2011. In 2016, he said, “There has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions if the procedure ever became illegal (then quickly reversed his position), and he has more recently deemed himself “the most pro-life president in American history” and boasted that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade.” But this year, public opinion has swung so hard against abortion restrictions that even Trump, who said in 2016 he was sure that voters would look the other way if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, pushed his party to scale back its stated opposition to abortion in its 2024 platform. Trump didn’t mention abortion once during a record-length convention speech in which he found time to pontificate on Hannibal Lecter and a potential RNC in Venezuela.
That say-nothing strategy might have worked if the contest had remained between Trump and Biden. But instead, Harris seems poised for the nomination, and Trump picked a staunchly anti-abortion running mate in J. D. Vance. Although he started trying to soften his stance when he became Trump’s VP pick, Vance previously voiced support for a national ban on abortion (though he acknowledged that it was unlikely in the current political climate) and for state laws that outlaw the procedure without exceptions for rape or incest.
Against these candidates, and with a single-issue advantage like this, talking about abortion nonstop is in Democrats’ best interests. Abortion is certainly not the only issue voters care about, or even the one they care about the most, so Harris would be remiss if she made it her campaign’s sole focus. Democrats have plenty of successes to tout from the Biden administration, including rescuing the post-COVID economy, investing big in infrastructure, and overseeing declining murder rates.
But focusing on abortion and reproductive freedom offers Democrats a rare opportunity to pick up swing voters and turn out dedicated pro-abortion-rights Democrats. Forty-one percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, including more than a quarter of self-described conservative Republicans, say abortion should generally be legal, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April. In a Wall Street Journal poll from March, 39 percent of suburban women in swing states chose abortion as their most important issue—more than any other option. And because many people seem to see abortion through the lens of health, family, and personal freedom, the issue dovetails quite neatly with Democrats’ other (limited) strengths: health-care access and protecting democracy from the threat of autocracy during a second Trump term.
A Democrat like Harris, who speaks forcefully and passionately about abortion rights, is an ideal foil for Trump and Vance. Her position is strong in a nation where anger over abortion bans remains vigorous. A candidate who can galvanize abortion-rights voters is exactly what Republicans fear and Democrats need. If Harris makes reproductive freedom a cornerstone of her campaign, she just may be the woman who finally breaks the presidential glass ceiling—and who keeps Democrats in the White House.
