Harris rallies crowds on abortion message, while Trump treads lightly

Former president Donald Trump predicted Thursday that abortion is “going to be a very small issue” this election, portraying it as a settled matter.

“I think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches,” he said during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “I don’t think it’s a big factor anymore.”

But over a thousand miles away, Democrats were betting on the opposite.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, standing beside Vice President Kamala Harris as part of the newly minted Democratic presidential ticket, forecasted that Republicans would do more to restrict abortion nationwide than they were letting on.

“They will ban abortion across this country no matter what Congress says,” Walz warned while speaking at the United Auto Workers Local 900 union hall in Wayne, Mich.

“That’s my choice,” a woman in the crowd shouted.

“Damn right it is,” Walz responded.

In a string of events in battleground states across the country this week, Harris and Walz riled up Democratic supporters with similar one-liners, calling the patchwork of abortion restrictions in various states “Trump’s abortion bans” and promising that “we’ll fight for a woman’s right to choose.” The mention of reproductive health care in any fashion stood in stark contrast to the message from the Republican ticket. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), held campaign events alongside those by Harris and Walz in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and made little mention of abortion or reproductive health care.

The disparate approach to the issue on the campaign trail highlights the complicated politics of the moment. Republican voters are largely supportive of some abortion restrictions, though there are disagreements on the details, and Trump has taken credit for the Supreme Court overturning federal protections for abortion, saying it was a popular decision. But most Americans say the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was bad for the country. Abortion rights advocates have won battles against antiabortion candidates and ballot referendums since the decision, and Democrats won midterm victories in campaigns that focused heavily on reproductive rights.

Democrats believe they can once again harness that energy to help them keep the White House. But the Trump campaign is betting on a message that voters in individual states now get to decide how to address the issue.

“Has Trump found a way to defuse the issue by saying everybody wanted us to give this back to the states for 50 years, which might not be factual?” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, said in an interview. “He’s trying.”

Harris has placed blame for the harshest bans on abortions on Trump since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. But the Democratic message around abortion has also expanded to broadly include all reproductive health care, motivated in part by an Alabama Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that sparked outrage and debate over the use of in vitro fertilization. On the campaign trail this week, Walz brought up his own family’s experience using IVF to conceive his children, saying the issue is personal for him.

Walz on Friday described going through “years” of fertility treatments with his wife, and the devastation of learning the treatments had failed. His eldest daughter was conceived via IVF, and the process inspired her name, Hope, he has said.

“So when Vice President Kamala Harris and I talk about freedom, we’re very clear: We mean the freedom to make your own health-care decisions,” Walz told cheering Arizona voters.

At the same time, Trump and Vance have spent little time discussing reproductive health care with voters. Vance did not bring it up in the past two weeks of speeches in five battleground states. And Trump at a news conference Thursday said he believes the issue of abortion bans is resolved because it is being decided on by states - but he also suggested he was open to revoking access to a key abortion pill.

“I’ve done what every Democrat and every Republican wanted to have done,” Trump said. “And we brought that issue back to the states.”

Later in the news conference, Trump was asked if he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to “revoke access” to mifepristone, a medication used for abortions, and he did not reject the idea. (His campaign later said he didn’t hear the question and maintained the issue is settled because the Supreme Court declined to limit mifepristone access, even though that decision has no bearing on whether a future administration could restrict the drug.)

Although Republicans have traditionally advocated for a federal abortion ban, the party has retreated from that position under Trump, striking the language from its party platform at the Republican National Convention last month. Trump has said the issue should be determined by states and has added that he would not sign a federal bill banning or restricting abortion.

About 1 in 8 voters rank abortion as the most important issue for their vote in 2024, according to a KFF poll conducted in February. Those voters were mostly women, young and Black, cohorts that could be critical in this election.

Asked about the messaging and concerns of voters who rank abortion as a major issue, the Trump campaign pointed to the other issues they are focused on, mainly the economy and immigration.

“Kamala Harris is the most unpopular Vice President in history and doesn’t have any policy plans to fix the top issues voters care about, such as ending inflation and securing the border,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “President Trump has been very clear - he supports the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.”

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said abortion is likely to drive turnout, especially women and young voters. She pointed to the string of ballot referendums, elections and special elections in which voters have sided with fewer restrictions on abortions or stopped harsher bans from passing.

“This is a loser for Republicans,” Kamarck said.