Harris is banking on one key issue

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — A fired-up Vice President Kamala Harris adopted a rapid-response mentality to seize on the key issue of abortion rights this week.

Referring to people behind abortion bans as “these hypocrites,” she argued at a hastily arranged campaign event in Atlanta that some US communities now dealing with abortion bans have for years been neglected on the subject of maternal care. “Where ya been?” she asked.

The pivot to an intense focus on abortion rights evolved over the course of the week after the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica published a report on two Georgia women who died as a result of delayed medical care linked to the state’s abortion ban.

By Thursday, the mother of one of the women was in the audience of an event livestreamed from Michigan, telling the story of her daughter’s tragedy to Harris and Oprah Winfrey.

On Friday, at the direction of Harris, according to reporting by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, the campaign had planned a last-minute rally in Georgia, where Harris spoke in front of signs that argued a third of women live under a “Trump abortion ban,” a phrase she repeated throughout the speech.

“It’s reminiscent of the type of quickly arranged travel that placed Harris at the center of President Joe Biden’s then-reelection effort and an example of the types of moments her campaign is seizing on to elevate – and amplify – issues it believes will galvanize voters and mobilize them to vote,” Alvarez wrote.

Former President Donald Trump has argued that he did the country a favor by appointing Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and return the abortion issue to state legislatures. Trump says that’s what “everyone” wanted, but polling and recent elections suggest the opposite is true.

Report of preventable deaths under abortion bans

The ProPublica reporting, along with any number of previous testimonials Democrats featured at their convention in Chicago in August, has elevated the issue of abortion rights, in particular in states where restrictions are in effect, including the battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina.

“I’m just so sorry,” Harris told Shanette Williams, whose 28 year-old daughter, Amber Nicole Thurman, died in 2022.

“And the courage that you all have shown is extraordinary, because also you just learned about how it is that she died,” Harris said during the Michigan event. ProPublica reported that a state review committee that included doctors issued a nonpublic report that determined Thurman’s death was preventable.

Thurman, a mother who planned to go to nursing school, found out she was pregnant with twins and wanted to terminate the pregnancy, according to ProPublica. She ended up taking abortion pills after driving to North Carolina, which had not yet enacted its current abortion restrictions. Thurman acquired a rare complication that required a procedure in a hospital. Doctors waited to operate because the procedure, known as a D&C (dilation and curettage), is now a felony in Georgia unless the life of the mother is at risk.

Speaking to Winfrey on Thursday, Harris argued that even abortion restrictions that allow exceptions for the life of the mother are not nearly sufficient because they force doctors to determine if a woman is “on death’s door” before treating her.

Doctors struggle

CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed Dr. Nisha Verma, an obstetrician and gynecologist practicing in Georgia, about the effect the bans have had on care for pregnant women.

“We are grappling with these really difficult situations where we’re trying to figure out when in this continuum of care we can intervene,” Verma said. “There is not a line in the sand where someone goes from being completely fine to acutely dying.”

“It’s really unclear based on that law, based on that exception for medical emergencies, when we can intervene in each particular situation,” she said.

Verma described treating a patient who had gone through in vitro fertilization and was using her final embryo and really wanted to be pregnant but found out at about 18 weeks that the baby would not survive.

While the patient was dealing with that tragic situation, Verma said doctors were trying to figure how sick she would have to get before they could provide care.

“That exacerbated her suffering in this already terrible situation,” Verma said.

An edge for Harris on a key issue for voters

In a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters that found the national race to be tied, abortion rights are an issue where Harris had an advantage – 54% of likely voters trust her to do a better job on abortion rights compared with 41% who trust Trump. On several other key issues in the poll, like the economy, Trump holds an advantage.

Harris’ strength on abortion rights is built on key groups that she hopes will show up in droves for her on Election Day. Among young people, ages 18-29, nearly three-quarters said they trust Harris on the issue. Among Black voters, 83% trust Harris, and among Hispanic voters, it was 63%.

Compared with White likely voters, Black and Hispanic voters were more likely in the poll to say they think Trump will try to pass a national abortion ban. Trump has said he would not.

A majority of voters, 61% in a KFF poll released this month, said they would prefer a federal law restoring abortion rights nationwide, although such a law seems unlikely to pass through the US Senate, where it would likely require a supermajority of 60 votes to enact such a change.

A consequential issue this year

The vast majority of voters, 89%, think this election will have an impact on abortion rights, and 61% said it will have a “major” impact, per KFF.

Predictably, voters say they are more likely to say they trust the Democratic nominee to handle abortion rights than the Republican, but it is an edge that has grown since Harris stepped in for Biden, according to the KFF survey.

Will men consider abortion rights when they vote?

Abortion rights may not be a motivating issue for men. But CNN’s Arit John, Eva McKend and David Wright have reported that by framing abortion rights as a matter of personal freedom and featuring real-life testimonials of women affected by abortion bans alongside their spouses, the Harris campaign has tried to make it more relevant to male voters during a Reproductive Freedom Bus Tour this week in the key state of Pennsylvania.

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