Doug Mills / New York Times, file
President Joe Biden pauses speaks in Washington on June 11, 2024. Biden and Democrats are embracing variations of arguments about abortion rights that have propelled a number of electoral victories in the past two years.
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a cascade of state-level abortion bans and prompting an angry political backlash, Democrats are marking the anniversary by highlighting the role former President Donald Trump played in ending the constitutional right to an abortion.
Through advertising, campaign events and news conferences, Democrats at every level of the party are fanning out across the country, working to remind voters that it was justices nominated by Trump who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
“Donald Trump is the sole person responsible for this nightmare,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Monday, also filming a video for social media. “My message to Americans is this: Kamala and I are fighting like hell to get your freedom back.”
The messaging push is unfolding during a tight presidential race, as Biden confronts weak approval ratings and the coalition that propelled his 2020 victory shows signs of fraying.
As they seek to reinvigorate their voters, Democrats are embracing variations of arguments that have fueled other victories in the past two years: that the Republican Party is ever more extreme and infringing, to an extraordinary degree, on some of the most personal health care decisions Americans can make.
“Donald Trump hand-picked three members of the United States Supreme Court because he intended for them to overturn Roe v. Wade — and as he intended, they did,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at a campaign event Monday in College Park, Maryland. “In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty.”
She was also expected to speak in Phoenix to “remind voters that Donald Trump is responsible for overturning Roe and the chaos that has followed” and to “highlight the threat a second Trump presidency would pose to reproductive freedom nationwide,” according to the Biden campaign.
Her husband, Doug Emhoff, was headed to Flint and Clawson, Michigan, with a similar message, and top Biden surrogates around the nation seized on the issue as they seek to frame the contrast in the election.
“It’ll be a binary choice on who’s going to restrict your rights,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who is the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, said in an interview Sunday. “This will just be a narrative of their extremism, but this one is baked in because it’s real. It’s not theoretical.”
Trump has said he is “proudly the person responsible” for overturning Roe v. Wade — a line Democrats are eager to highlight — and has suggested that, if elected, he would allow states to prosecute women who violate abortion restrictions. He has also said he believes abortion policy should be left to the states, disappointing some on the right.
“Some states will be more conservative, and some will be more liberal,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, said in a statement, but Trump “supports the rights of individuals to determine their laws.”
“President Trump also strongly supports ensuring women have access to the care they need to create healthy families, including widespread access to IVF, birth control and contraception, and he always will,” she added.
Democrats successfully deployed messaging around abortion rights in critical races during the 2022 midterm elections a few months after Roe was overturned and in a number of special elections since.
This year, campaigns including Biden’s are highlighting women’s personal experiences with abortion bans championed by Republicans.
On Monday, the Biden campaign released a television ad highlighting the experience of Kaitlyn Joshua, who said in the spot that when she had a miscarriage early in pregnancy, she was turned away from two Louisiana emergency rooms, “a direct result of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade.”
An advocacy group started by Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois also announced a digital ad effort aimed at swing and independent women in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, highlighting the health risks facing pregnant women in the post-Roe era. The House Democratic campaign arm is running mobile billboards in five competitive districts, blaring positive comments that Republican incumbents made about the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning Roe.
And major abortion rights groups are also mobilizing.
Planned Parenthood advocacy and political organizations said they planned to spend $40 million this election cycle. Planned Parenthood Federation of America also joined a coalition of other abortion rights and progressive groups, which plan to raise and spend $100 million to devise a federal strategy aimed at clawing back abortion rights.
In the two years since Roe fell, abortion rights organizations have focused on combating state-level restrictions in court and promoting ballot initiatives to enshrine abortion rights at the state level, along with engaging in key campaigns.
Democrats are also arguing that a second Trump administration would go further in restricting abortion rights and access by imposing sweeping new federal restrictions on the procedure.
Last week, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., introduced legislation that would repeal the Comstock Act, a Civil War-era statue that abortion rights supporters worry could be used to ban abortion medication — even in states where it remains legal.
Smith, a former Planned Parenthood executive, said the law offered a powerful argument for Democrats, underscoring the contrast between a second term for Biden or one for Trump.
“It’s such a clear choice on the issue of abortion rights,” she said. “Understanding how a future Trump administration could use the Comstock Act makes this a salient issue in our state, too, where people might they think they are safe.”
Rep. Pat Ryan, a Democrat running in a swing district in New York, said his party should explain Comstock as a “hidden ticking time bomb” for Trump. Ryan, who won his seat with an aggressive embrace of abortion rights, is encouraging his fellow Democrats to lean into Comstock and the future threats it may pose to abortion access.
But in this election, Americans are weighing a broad range of other considerations, too, and polls show that on a number of key issues — though not abortion policy — voters say Trump would do a better job than Biden.
“Polling has consistently shown Biden and the Democrats already have an issue advantage on abortion, and yet Trump continues to lead in the battleground states,” said Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster. “They will certainly lean in on abortion, but unless Democrats find a way to puncture Trump’s legacy on the economy, they will continue to struggle.”
Voters are also assessing the personal characteristics of Biden, 81, the oldest American president in history, and Trump, 78, who is the first American president convicted of a crime.
Many of these issues are likely to come up at their debate Thursday, the first of the general-election campaign.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
