These women are all in for abortion rights — and for Trump

When her mail-in ballot arrived earlier this month, Emily Jones couldn’t wait to vote to enshrine abortion rights in Arizona’s state constitution - and to fight back against the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

To the 27-year-old mother from Arizona’s San Tan Valley, the issue was personal: An abortion probably saved her life after she was diagnosed a few years ago with an ectopic pregnancy, she said. The 2022 abortion ruling terrified her, she said, taking women “10 steps back.”

An independent with a history of voting for mostly Republican candidates, Jones said she knew Vice President Kamala Harris has been trying to use the abortion issue to win over women like her in the presidential election. But while she’d seen dozens of Harris’s abortion-related ads, they hadn’t swayed her.

So on the same ballot where she voted to protect abortion rights, she also voted for Donald Trump.

With Beyoncé-studded rallies and harrowing ads about post-Roe pregnancy complications, Harris has intensified her efforts to tie her candidacy to the fight for abortion access - hoping to tap into the momentum that drove voters across the country, even in conservative Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky to back abortion rights when the issue appeared on their ballot in the years since Roe was overturned. On Saturday, Michelle Obama appealed to women who might be considering casting a different vote from their husbands and boyfriends.

“Your vote is a private matter,” she said. “Regardless of the political views of your partner.”

But though polls continue to show sizable support in both parties when people are asked whether they support an abortion rights referendum, the question of whether Harris can persuade independents and moderate Republicans who support abortion rights to vote for her is less clear - and could be critical to the outcome of the election.

While an Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted in October found that 68 percent of voters in Arizona and 80 percent of voters in Nevada say they planned to support their state’s abortion referendum, the same poll showed Harris narrowly behind Trump in Arizona and tied in Nevada. Harris’s support among likely voters in the poll was 46 percent in Arizona to Trump’s 49 percent, and they both had 48 percent support in Nevada.

Meanwhile, Trump - who has claimed credit for Roe’s reversal - has been working to assuage the concerns of independent and Republican voters who support abortion rights. In recent weeks, the former president has promised to veto a national abortion ban, after repeatedly refusing to make such a pledge. While he has maintained that each state should choose its own abortion laws, he said in a recent town hall geared toward women voters that many of the current bans are “too tough.”

Republican and independent voters who plan to split their ticket on abortion - voting for an abortion referendum and for Trump - said they were willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt on the issue, with some feeling reassured by his recent promises not to crack down further on abortion. Despite Trump’s decision to appoint the three conservative Supreme Court justices who helped revoke the constitutional right to abortion, a few voters said they believe Trump is secretly “pro-choice.”

“It bothers me a little bit,” Jones said when asked about Trump taking credit for the fall of Roe. But in her view, she said, Trump just wants to stop abortions from occurring in the third trimester of pregnancy - a position he has emphasized frequently in debates and on the campaign trail.

“I don’t think he did it to hurt the women,” Jones added. “I think deep down he has good intentions.”

Roe only protected the right to abortion through the point when a fetus could become viable, or about 24 weeks, before the third trimester begins. Abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy are extremely rare, and they typically only occur when there is a severe fetal anomaly or when a mother’s health is at risk.

[Harris says Trump’s comments on women ‘are offensive to everybody’]

The Harris campaign believes she can make significant inroads with independent and Republican-leaning women by emphasizing the dangers a second Trump term could pose for abortion rights, said Molly Murphy, a pollster with the campaign. In the last few weeks, Harris has appeared at a number of events designed to target that group, Murphy said, including several town halls with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who, when speaking to Harris, denounced the “fundamentally dangerous things that have happened” in post-Roe America.

Still, Murphy said, the campaign is “clear-eyed” about the difficulty of winning over Republican women. While they’re certainly hoping to peel off some former Trump voters with the abortion issue, she said, they are more squarely focused on women voters she described as “in the middle,” who don’t like either candidate. The difficulty with women who have voted for Trump in the past, she said, is that they’re more inclined to trust what he says - to believe, for example, that he would veto a national abortion ban.

“When he gives his assurances, he then has credibility because they’re conservative and Republican-leaning,” Murphy said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t win them over.”

Across the seven battleground states, 45 percent of Trump supporters say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a recent Post-Schar School poll. Polls show majorities of Democrats and independents and at least 4 in 10 Republicans back the abortion rights referendums.

For many of the Trump voters who also support abortion rights, abortion is simply not one of their top issues, said Tresa Undem, an independent pollster who studies opinions on abortion. While they would like to see abortion rights protected - and will vote to expand protections if given the chance to vote on the issue directly - they are more invested in the economy or immigration, she said.

Others who care deeply about abortion rights don’t believe Trump will impose further restrictions on abortion. In a New York Times/Siena poll conducted in September, 22 percent of Trump supporters said they thought Trump would try to pass a national abortion ban, compared with 79 percent of Harris supporters.

“I think it’s breaking through,” Undem said, referring to Trump’s attempts to reassure voters who support abortion rights. “I think there are people who think, ‘Oh, he’s done what he wanted to do on abortion.’ I don’t think Democrats buy that for one second, but I think Republicans do.”

[Trump takes vague, shifting stances. Many supporters fill in the blanks.]

Raymond Fillion, a 60-year-old Republican from Tucson, will be voting for Arizona’s abortion rights referendum, which protects abortion until the point of viability. But he said the issue ranks “super far down the list” for him when deciding whom to vote for in the presidential race, mostly because he believes the important decisions now lie squarely in the states.

“There’s nothing more the executive branch can do,” said Fillion, a military veteran who works in bomb disposal. “He’s already said he won’t sign a national ban.”

Trump could upend abortion access without a national ban through executive action, by cracking down on abortion pills - a plan outlined in Project 2025, a controversial 900-page plan for the next Republican administration that Trump has disavowed, though it was written by his allies.

For one 63-year-old Republican woman in Phoenix, the question of how abortion should affect her vote for president recently led to a heated two-hour discussion with her daughter.

Janice Albert and her daughter Michelle both feel strongly about abortion rights. Michelle Albert, a left-leaning independent who is voting for Harris, couldn’t understand how her mother could back the man who has taken credit for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

“I just can’t believe you would even consider it,” Michelle, 33, recalled telling Janice on a phone call. “That really breaks my heart.”

Janice told her daughter that Trump said he wouldn’t impose national restrictions, both women recalled.

“I don’t trust that,” said Michelle.

In an interview with The Post, Janice Albert said Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have assuaged her concerns about the abortion issue. She appreciated how Vance - who had previously said he wants abortion to be illegal nationwide - talked about the issue during the vice-presidential debate, emphasizing the importance of “earning the American people’s trust back on this issue.” Vance spoke about an anonymous friend in an abusive relationship who told him how grateful she was that she had been able to have an abortion, seeming to imply that he supported her decision to terminate her pregnancy.

“I thought it was great that he admitted that he has changed his view, and I respect that,” Janice said. “That gives me hope.”

She said she is doing what she can to protect abortion access by voting for Arizona’s abortion rights referendum.

Abortion referendums can drive turnout for Democratic candidates, said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who runs regular focus groups with voters. But, she added, they can also provide a convenient “off-ramp” for Republican and Republican-leaning voters like Janice Albert who care about abortion rights.

“It’s a way to get to vote narrowly on one issue, and gives you the ability to say, ‘I took that issue that matters to me off the table, now I can vote for … Trump,’” Longwell said.

On the abortion issue, Longwell said, Trump benefits from one of his greatest “superpowers”: that people perceive him as a social moderate - even if his statements and actions are not moderate at all. In the focus groups she has run ahead of the presidential election, she said, people often say that they think Trump is not “pro-life,” sometimes joking that he’s “probably paid for an abortion.” (Asked in 2016 whether he’d ever been involved with anyone who’d had an abortion, Trump said, “Such an interesting question” and moved on.)

The general sense that Trump is actually not opposed to abortion may work to his benefit with independent and Republican-leaning women, Longwell said.

In Arizona’s San Tan Valley, Jones and her husband have decided that they don’t want to have any more children. Her previous pregnancies, she said, presented too much of a risk to her health.

“I don’t think my body could physically do it again,” she said.

If she does get pregnant, she said, she wants the option to have an abortion.

Jones has decided to believe that, if elected, Trump will keep that option open for her.

“I don’t think he’ll actually outright ban it,” she said. “I think he’s learned.”

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Emily Guskin and Dan Keating contributed to this report.