President Joe Biden is hoping that his campaign’s focus on abortion will overshadow concerns about his advanced age and his handling of the illegal immigration crisis, according to a new report.
The Washington Post wrote last week that Biden campaign organizers “see a potential silver bullet that they hope supersedes all of the president’s challenges in his rematch against former president Donald Trump: abortion rights.” The outlet reported, “The Biden campaign plans to spend every day until Nov. 5 reminding voters of Trump’s record on abortion, hoping the issue will mobilize their core voters, bring disaffected voters back into the fold and make inroads with voters whom Democrats have often struggled to win.”
Jen O’Malley Dillon, chairwoman of Biden’s reelection campaign, said, “There is no doubt that this issue is central to the contrast between us and Trump. There is no way he can wiggle out of his ownership of this issue.” According to the Post, O’Malley Dillon added that voters “are being reminded more and more of things they hoped to forget — the chaos and the pain that have come in the wake of Trump’s leadership. Abortion is central to that.”
The Biden team has already begun its pro-abortion campaign in Arizona, in the wake of a state Supreme Court ruling upholding a pro-life law. Last week, Biden’s campaign launched a series of ads in which the president blames his immediate predecessor for the ruling, referring to Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court appointees who ultimately undid Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies,” Biden says in the first ad in the series. “The question is — if Donald Trump gets back in power, what freedom will you lose next? Your body and your decision belong to you, not the government, not Donald Trump.”
Another ad in the series depicts a Texas woman, Amanda Zurawski, who alleges that a pro-life law in her state resulted in her developing a life-threatening infection after her doctors refused to commit an abortion. The ad claims that Zurawski may never be able to get pregnant again due to the infection, concluding with the words, “Donald Trump did this.”
Vice President Kamala Harris also visited Arizona last week, as part of her “abortion tour” to promote ballot initiatives enshrining a right to abortion in state constitutions. Harris told Arizonans that Roe v. Wade “recognized the fundamental constitutional right to reproductive freedom.” She claimed that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision “took a constitutional right that it didn’t recognize from the people of America, from the women of America, and now we must speak of Roe in the past tense.” The vice president added, “Former President Donald Trump did this.”
The next stop on Harris’s “abortion tour” was Nevada, where she is helping pro-abortion groups gather signatures for a ballot initiative to enumerate a right to abortion in the Nevada state constitution. An unnamed Biden-Harris campaign official told CBS News that the president and vice president see pro-abortion ballot initiatives as “an important step to protect against extremist state lawmakers who may try to adopt another ‘Trump abortion ban’ in the future.”
According to The Washington Post, Biden campaign pollster Molly Murphy said, “[W]hile we all know … that Trump did dismantle abortion rights and protections — especially with Dobbs but also in many different ways — the average voter didn’t pay close attention to that, and it was a long time ago.” She added, “This is a new opportunity to frame him as the architect behind the overturning of Roe, which was meaningful to people, and more importantly, someone who will continue to take away and dismantle these rights if he’s let back into the Oval Office.”
Biden and his fellow Democrats may be aggressively focusing their campaigns on abortion, but polling suggests that inflation, immigration, crime, and even climate change are more motivating issues for voters heading into November.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
