One hour after news began circulating that an abortion law written in 1864 would take effect in Arizona, Vice President Kamala Harris announced she was traveling to the state to make a speech.
She had visited Phoenix just one month prior to talk about the threat of abortion bans, and Harris went to the Grand Canyon State again three days after the ruling. This time in Tucson, for an appearance focused on the same topic.
“This fight is about freedom,” Harris said. “And the freedom that is fundamental to the promise of America. … That includes the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body and not have the government telling people what to do.”
“Former President Donald Trump did this,” she added.
Trump has worked to distance himself from the ruling, calling for the law to be overturned in a typically caps-filled social media post.
“The Governor and the Arizona Legislature must use HEART, COMMON SENSE, and ACT IMMEDIATELY, to remedy what has happened,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Remember, it is now up to the States and the Good Will of those that represent THE PEOPLE.”
But Harris’s aggressive messaging, as well as Trump’s middle-of-the-road approach, has Democrats hoping they can win Arizona in the fall.
Trump holds a healthy 5-point lead in the state, per the RealClearPolitics polling average, and the Cook Partisan Voting Index still rates it as an R+2 state.
But Arizona, like other Sun Belt states such as Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, has shifted in the throes of Trump’s GOP takeover.
It was once solidly red, voting for every Republican presidential candidate between 1952 and 2016 except President Bill Clinton’s narrow 1996 win. Arizona even produced two GOP presidential nominees in the form of Sens. Barry Goldwater (1964) and John McCain (2008).
But things have been different since the MAGA movement got in full swing. Kyrsten Sinema won an Arizona Senate seat as a Democrat in 2018. President Joe Biden won the state two years later in the same election that saw Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) take McCain’s old Senate seat. In 2022, Democrats took the governor’s office with Katie Hobbs’s (D-AZ) defeat of MAGA firebrand Kari Lake.
Now, both Trump and Lake, who is running for Senate, are hoping to avenge losses with a messaging game focused on inflation, immigration, and the high cost of housing. Democrats think the matter of abortion can sink both of them.
Harris was joined aboard Air Force Two for her Tucson trip by Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who promised that abortion would be a big part of his Senate campaign.
“Trump did this,” he told reporters on the plane. “We wouldn’t be having this issue at all if he didn’t appoint those three judges that ended up overturning Roe v. Wade. And you have Kari Lake, who was a cheerleader for this territorial law.”
The territorial law bans all abortions with exceptions in cases in which the mother faces immediate life-threatening conditions. And it mandates a prison sentence of between two and five years for a healthcare provider performing the procedure unlawfully.
Not only can the matter motivate abortion-rights voters on its own, but a ballot initiative that would specifically enshrine abortion rights in the Arizona Constitution could supercharge turnout from people who rate the matter highly.
Democratic strategist Brad Bannon sees it as a winning scenario for his party.
“My reading of the polls is that this race is between men and women,” Bannon said. “Women overwhelmingly support Biden, while men overwhelmingly support Trump. I think this will be a big part of the Biden strategy to maximize turnout among women.”
Biden has made that case himself.
“Trump and the MAGA crowd don’t have a clue about the power of women in America,” Biden said during a campaign speech on April 8. “But they’re about to find out.”
An April 24 Biden campaign speech in Florida included the word “women” 26 separate times.
Trump also isn’t doing himself any favors by trying to stand in the middle on the matter, longtime Arizona Republican consultant Chuck Coughlin argued.
“There are single-issue voters within the conservative right-to-life movement who will skip him now,” Coughlin said. “I think that’s a problem for him.”
The middle ground, he added, will lead to Trump getting hit by traffic from both directions.
Still, the makeup of the Arizona electorate seems to favor a generic Republican candidate. Six of its nine House members are Republicans, and Trump has won it before, defeating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by nearly 100,000 votes in 2016.
John Gillette, a Republican state representative, said it’s the other topics that will push Trump over the top in 2024. Still-high inflation, illegal immigration, and the rising cost of housing and mortgages will outweigh abortion in the minds of most voters, he argued.
“It’s the typical Left talking points,” Gillette said of Harris’s Tucson speech. “Abortion is the only item they have.”
Like Trump, Gillette argued that Democrats are the extremists when it comes to the matter, saying they support allowing abortion for any reason at any time within a pregnancy, a position he thinks is out of touch with where most voters are.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But he acknowledged that turnout would be crucial to the results in Arizona, saying that whichever party gets their people to the polls will emerge victorious.
“What’s going to determine this election is turnout,” he said. “I know everybody is tired of hearing that, but turnout is what’s going to win.”