President Joe Biden’s reelection team is tying together former President Donald Trump’s impact on access to abortion with his 34 felony convictions, putting out messaging that brands him guilty on a figurative 35th count of taking away reproductive rights.
The two men are set to face each other Thursday night on the debate stage for the first time in nearly four years — and the first time since the loss of a federal right to abortion.
The issue of abortion took a back seat in the 2020 election, including in that year’s presidential debates. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, Biden’s team has heavily emphasized abortion , buoyed by a winning streak at the ballot box on the issue. Since Trump effectively clinched the Republican nomination, Biden and his campaign have sought to blame him for the loss of abortion rights, dubbing state bans “Trump’s abortion bans.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, a former attorney general of California, has been the leading face and voice of the Biden administration’s messaging on abortion rights. Speaking at an event in Maryland on Monday, the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, she laid out the prosecutor’s case for Trump’s culpability.
“And Trump has not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions. Instead, he ‘proudly’ takes credit for overturning Roe,” she said. “My fellow Americans, in a court of law, that would be called an admission — and some would say a confession — all pointing to the ultimate issue. In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty.”
The Biden campaign also released a new ad featuring Kaitlyn Joshua, a Louisiana woman who says she was turned away from two emergency rooms while having a miscarriage at 11 weeks of pregnancy in the state, which has a strict abortion ban.
“That was a direct result of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” Joshua says in the ad. “He’s now a convicted felon. Trump thinks he should not be held accountable for his own criminal actions. But he will let women and doctors be punished.”
Without Democrats having control of Congress, the Biden administration has had limited tools to respond to the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. If Biden is reelected and Democrats win both chambers of Congress, Biden has pledged to restore the protections of Roe in federal law.
Trump has simultaneously claimed credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe while distancing himself from the most anti-abortion factions of his party. While Trump has thrown cold water on the idea of signing a national abortion ban if one is passed by Congress, his administration could act to limit access to abortion and even contraception.
“What I think you’re going to see in the debate is a really clear, stark difference,” Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion advocacy group Reproductive Freedom For All, told reporters Friday. “The differences are going to be laid out clearly, the choices are going to be laid out clearly, and I think you’re going to see President Biden really make it plain what the risk is with Donald Trump.”
Leading up to the Dobbs anniversary, Biden administration officials and surrogates, including lawmakers and celebrities, traveled to battleground states across the country. First Lady Jill Biden went to Pittsburgh, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff to Michigan, Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Wisconsin, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Nevada, “Wonder Woman” star Lynda Carter to the Philadelphia area, and “Scandal” actor Tony Goldwyn to New Hampshire, all to rally on abortion rights. Warren was joined by Amanda Zurawski , an Austin, Texas, woman who spoke publicly about losing a pregnancy in a state with a strict abortion ban.
Yasmin Radjy, executive director of Swing Left, a progressive organization focused on harnessing grassroots energy to elect Democrats, said she’s already seeing high levels of enthusiasm from volunteers and donors, fueled in part by restrictions on abortion.
Many voters, however, aren’t yet fully tuned in to the presidential election a little over four months out. A debate relatively early in the cycle, she said, will be “essential” for Biden to both continue to fire up his base and sell his agenda to voters, including contrasting with Trump.
“We really see this debate as not just that energizing moment for an already energized volunteer and donor base, but as a critical tone-setting moment for what is going to be the beginning of a tuning-in process for voters across the country,” she said.
Both candidates are preemptively messaging on abortion ahead of the debate. On Wednesday, Trump’s rapid response team sent out an email blast accusing Biden of lying about Trump’s stances on abortion.
How Trump speaks about abortion has varied based on his audience. Speaking at a gathering of conservative Christians on Saturday , Trump took credit for sending abortion “back to the states” and falsely asserted that legal scholars on both sides of the aisle wanted to see Roe overturned. But he also expressed support for exceptions to abortion bans, saying, “you have to go with your heart” but “you have to also remember you have to get elected.”
Trump and other Republicans have also tried to paint Biden and Democrats as extreme on abortion. Jen Klein, head of the White House’s Gender Policy Council, rebutted those arguments in a call with reporters Monday.
“The president and the vice president do not support abortion up until the time of birth, nor do they support abortion after birth — in fact, that’s not abortion,” Klein said. “The president, the vice president, this entire administration has been quite clear and unequivocal that we support restoring the protections of Roe in federal law, and we’re not proposing something new.”
The Biden campaign is also spending heavily on advertising highlighting Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a Manhattan jury in May. Trump is set to be sentenced in July, just a few days before the Republican party’s official nominating convention. Trump, for his part, is emphasizing immigration ahead of the debate.
Thursday’s debate, hosted by CNN in Atlanta, will take place under different terms than the last time Trump and Biden faced off nearly four years ago. The debate will have no live audience. The moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, will be able to cut off Trump and Biden’s microphones to limit them from going over time or interrupting each other. Trump was widely criticized for the amount he interrupted in the first of their two debates in 2020.
In recent general election polls conducted by ABC News/Ipsos and PBS Newshour/Marist College , voters have said they trust Trump more than Biden to handle inflation and the economy — top voting issues — but trust Biden more than Trump on abortion.
Women voters are more likely than men to name abortion rights as a top voting issue, polls show . Trump’s criminal conviction also gives both candidates an opening among women independent voters, a critical voting demographic, according to recent polling from The 19th and SurveyMonkey.
In a recent KFF poll of women voters, large majorities described themselves as frustrated and anxious about the upcoming election. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say they were hopeful about and enthusiastic about the election. Independent women were least likely to say they were hopeful and most likely to describe themselves as uninterested.
Forty percent of women voters named inflation and rising costs as their top voting issue, while 22 percent said threats to democracy, 13 percent named immigration and 10 percent said abortion. Democratic women were more likely than Republicans and independents to name abortion as their top issue.
Radjy, pointing to Biden’s amped-up State of the Union address as an example, said Biden can have a successful debate by both bringing energy to the stage and touting his policy record and accomplishments in “clear and uncomplicated terms” so that voters can “connect the dots.”
“We hope he brings the energy that he brought us at the State of the Union, but also that he really takes credit for the work that he has done,” she said.
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