MANASSAS, VA — President Joe Biden‘s 2024 campaign is launching a full frontal attack on the threats former President Donald Trump poses to reproductive rights as a core through-line of the final months of his reelection push.
Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and national Democrats have consistently pointed to abortion rights as the top motivating issue for liberal voters, dating back to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022 that overturned the federal right to abortion.
But this latest push won’t necessarily be about Biden’s personal beliefs on the topic so much as the national conversation. The campaign plans to leverage Harris in particular, who has rapidly become the public face of the Biden team’s abortion rights push, Trump and Republicans’ “own words,” and the stories of “real women suffering due to extreme Republican abortion restrictions” to bombard voters between now and November, Biden officials and Democratic strategists familiar with the president’s reelection strategy tell the Washington Examiner.
“Abortion will be a key issue in every single presidential battleground this year. Headed into the 2024 general election, abortion rights remain salient and top of mind for our voters,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris Campaign will be spending the next ten months highlighting the impact that Donald Trump’s abortion bans in the states are having on women and providers and reminding voters exactly what is at stake for reproductive freedom in 2024.”
On Monday, Harris delivered a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, commemorating what would have been the 51st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. Democratic operatives believe that abortion becoming a chief pillar of her portfolio is a deliberate choice.
“President Biden is an 81-year-old Irish Catholic who has spent much of the past half-century talking about how he is personally opposed to abortion, even if he respects women’s right to choice,” one operative told the Washington Examiner.
A second Democratic operative added that Harris’s championing of the issue would reassure women that the campaign’s messaging is “genuine,” and not something the president is backing for political reasons.
“President Biden is a steadfast ally in the fight for reproductive rights,” that person continued. “But let’s be honest. He can’t possibly understand the issue in the same way Vice President Harris does, and female voters can see that.”
Furthermore, the Biden campaign landed a potential boon with Trump’s own campaigning throughout the Republican primary cycle. The former president, and likely 2024 GOP nominee, was quick to blame Republican attempts to ban abortion at the state level for the results of the 2022 midterm election but has openly taken credit for “killing Roe” as he has ramped up his own campaigning.
In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly earned cheers from crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire when discussing the Supreme Court Justices he nominated, eventually paving the way for the Dobbs decision.
“For 54 years, they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it,” the former president stated in response to a question on abortion during a Jan. 10 town hall in Iowa. “And “I’m proud to have done it.”
Trump has backed abortion exceptions for rape, incest, and some other situations, but the Biden campaign will likely package clips like the one from the January town hall, in addition to a May 2023 social media post where he bragged about being “able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” into ad campaigns that run after the party nominating conventions this summer, without having to show the president himself at all.
Biden, Harris, first lady Jill Biden, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff all participated in a rally at George Mason University in Virginia on Tuesday calling on the federal government to “Restore Roe,” though coordinated protests both inside and outside the speech venue by pro-Gaza activists pulled some of the focus away from abortion rights.
The rally, held the same day as the New Hampshire presidential primaries where Biden was not on the ballot, underscored the emphasis the Biden team is placing on the issue. All four principals discussed “that the only way we can restore our fundamental rights is by re-electing President Biden and Vice President Harris and giving them a Democratic Congress to pass federal legislation restoring Roe.”
Harris also specifically outlined “her work with state leaders to hold Republicans accountable and protect reproductive freedom across the country.”
Prior to the rally, the principals met with Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who sued the state government after she was blocked from having an abortion amid serious pregnancy complications. Zurawski eventually introduced the president ahead of his Tuesday remarks.
Grassroots organizing groups, including “Reproductive Freedom For All,” were onsite discussing “why the fierce advocacy of POTUS and VPOTUS are more important now than ever before” with rally attendees and members of the media.
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Tuesday’s event follows the official kickoff of a weeklong campaign by the administration and reelection team, tacked to what would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe on Monday. That included a convening of Biden’s Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access at the White House and Harris’s standalone speech in Wisconsin.
The campaign also launched a new television spot that debuted on Monday’s premiere of The Bachelor on ABC and will hold 11 state-level events with local Biden surrogates and activists in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.