The Young Woman Making Kamala Harris’ Strongest Case on Abortion Rights

PHOENIX — The day after Labor Day, swing-state polls were showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris locked in a “ dogfight ” or a “ showdown ” or even a “ knife fight in a phone booth ,” depending on the news outlet. That morning, a young Harris surrogate named Hadley Duvall was in the battleground state of Arizona, having breakfast with some staffers, looking friendly and serene. She’d been deployed there — as she has to several swing states since delivering a stunning speech to the Democratic National Convention — to tell her story as a survivor of incest.

Three times that day, she would repeat matter-of-factly, in front of different sets of strangers far from her Kentucky home, a secret she’d kept for 10 years as a child. “From the age of five years old,” she would say, “I was sexually abused by my stepfather at the time. When I was 12, I was impregnated from him.” She would explain being told, with Roe v. Wade then still in effect, that she had options and would have had an abortion had she not miscarried. In three different rooms in three different towns, she would offer proof that debates over abortion restrictions, especially ones like Arizona’s that prohibit the procedure after 15 weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest, are not abstract or theoretical exercises.

Before all that, at breakfast in a Phoenix restaurant festooned with owl-related decor, Duvall, now 22, explained to me why she had launched herself into the middle of one of the most divisive issues at the center of an exceptionally divisive election. She wanted to show people, she said, “I could be your neighbor. … Nobody’s safe. And no matter what type of [laws] your state has, no matter what you think is good for your state, no matter how much you feel like this abortion topic doesn’t matter to you or doesn’t affect you, it does.”

Duvall has proven herself particularly effective among the small world of assault survivors who have spoken out against laws that restrict or ban abortion. She is credited with helping lift one Democrat , Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, to reelection in a red state with the viral television ad in which she first stepped into politics after Roe fell. Her story is as shocking as she herself is ordinary. She’s just a recent graduate of a Christian college with a boyfriend and a dog named Honey — “she’s a golden retriever-wiener dog-lab-aussiedoodle” she says proudly, showing a photo of a little mutt in a pumpkin Halloween costume on her phone. She’s got a pleasant Kentucky accent and sports a gold necklace with the letter “H” on it; she is warm and largely at ease discussing one of the most disturbing topics imaginable because, she says, “I’ve already been through the worst.” Thus the Harris campaign’s eagerness to send Duvall to swing states — including places like Arizona with upcoming referenda to protect abortion — hoping to turn out a base motivated by abortion and also try to persuade voters across party lines.

“What we’ve seen is that Hadley’s story, as well as abortion rights, resonates strongly with Democrats, Independents and Republicans across the board,” said Jen Cox, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign in Arizona. Given the state’s narrow margins — Biden won it by less than a percentage point in 2020 with roughly 11,000 votes, and Trump is leading there now by a percent or less in multiple polling averages — Cox said, “in Arizona, we have to do everything. We have to make sure that Democrats and younger voters and voters of color, especially Latino voters, are energized about the campaign, are turning out to vote. We also need to reach out to more moderate voters, Republicans and independents, especially folks in the suburbs.” (In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Harris alluded to Duvall when she assailed Donald Trump for saying people wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. “A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”)

Still, it’s a strange place for Duvall to be, repeating something she once thought she’d never be able to say out loud in a sentence, trying to get a president elected. “I used to always say, like, I don’t argue politics because I don’t know enough about it. I’ve always known my place,” she said at breakfast. But something snapped after Roe fell, and she published the social media post about her abuse that caught the attention of the Beshear campaign, which led to the ad, which led to the DNC speech, which led here.

“I know my place now, and that’s why I’m speaking up now,” she said. “It is my place.” It wasn’t just about politics, either — when she was younger, it would have meant a great deal to her to see someone like the adult version of herself, speaking out and telling her she wasn’t alone. “If not me,” Duvall said, “then who?”

She then walked to an adjacent venue to talk to some Republicans.

Specifically, these were “Republicans for Harris,” some of the aisle-crossing women (and they were all women at the podium) who could help put Harris in the White House. “We are coming together,” Duvall remarked, “not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans, because there is too much at stake. Trump brags about overturning Roe v. Wade . He says he’s proud to be responsible for each and every one of the cruel abortion bans, including the one in effect here in Arizona.”

Arizona’s current abortion ban is not among the country’s most restrictive — the 15-week limit is within the time frame that more than 90 percent of abortions take place, according to CDC data and it includes exemptions after that to protect the life and health of the mother. Cindy Dahlgren, the communications director for It Goes Too Far, which opposes Arizona’s upcoming abortion referendum, told me later that “my heart goes out to [Hadley], of course, and every rape victim,” but that current law allows for almost four months to decide whether to have an abortion. “Voters here in Arizona are not voting for either abortion or no abortion,” she said. “They’re voting for abortion at 15 weeks and beyond for qualified medical emergencies … [versus] unlimited and unregulated abortion.”

Yet this spring, the state Supreme Court sparked chaos when it upheld an 1864 law, passed before Arizona was a state and the age of consent was 10 years old, that banned abortion almost entirely. In the political uproar that followed, the state’s Republican-led legislature repealed that ban , with some arguing it would hurt the party in November.

“It is a hot-button issue that certainly paints a picture of Republicans being on the wrong side of it,” said Paul Bentz, an Arizona pollster who is a Republican himself. “It’s basically two-thirds would prefer legal, safe abortions; only about a third or less want criminalization.” And Bentz said the issue was a big factor in the Senate race two years ago, when Democrat Mark Kelly defeated Republican Blake Masters — who called abortion “demonic” and advocated federal limits — for the seat formerly held by Republican John McCain.

In a race that could swing by a few thousand votes, of course, any number of factors could be decisive — and Bentz pointed to election denialism as a particular turnoff for otherwise Republican-leaning voters. But the key swing demographic, Bentz said, is “a portion of crossover individuals, independents and Republicans, generally female, generally higher education attainment, generally higher wage, that are the ones that sort of pick and choose the outcomes of these races.”

Witness the “McCain Republicans,” a fair chunk of whom put a Democrat in the senator’s old seat, and just enough of whom, with Cindy McCain’s backing of Joe Biden in 2020, helped swing the presidential election to the Democrats that year. While the Republicans for Harris event was ongoing, in fact, the late senator’s younger son Jimmy set off a bit of a scramble among the comms staff by endorsing Kamala Harris himself . And Bettina Nava, who worked for McCain for nearly two decades, including as his state director and his presidential campaign manager for the southwest, was among those standing with Duvall at the podium to advocate for Harris.

I caught up with Nava afterward; she called Duvall a “hero.” “I just met her today,” she said. “I care even more than an election, win or lose, that this young woman gets to have a voice, and tell her story, and normalize the fact that what happened to her is not acceptable.”

The Republican Party in its current form, Nava said, was no longer her party. “I’m in no-man’s land, no-woman’s land,” she mused. Then something occurred to her. “Actually, I found a woman” in Kamala Harris, she said. “I’m in woman’s land. And you know what? It’s about time.”

Up in the college town of Flagstaff a few hours later, the heat dissipated with the higher elevation, and Duvall stopped at a community center to address a group largely comprising students, retirees and Democratic leaders. Greeting a young activist by the door, Duvall remarked warmly how much she liked Arizona, and the woman laughed. “You say that to all the swing states.”

Duvall is very much still a youth herself — she just got her degree in psychology with a concentration in drug and alcohol counseling and had been thinking about clinical social work. She had no background in public speaking prior to taking the DNC stage to address millions of people; she doesn’t even do karaoke. But earlier that morning, one former Arizona state representative had urged her to run for office.

And now for her third speech of the day, Duvall was more relaxed and informal, ad libbing off her prepared paper, throwing in improbable moments of levity despite the subject. She got to the part about this election being the “most impactful of our lives” and paused. “I know that the politicians say that every year, but I’m not a politician, so really listen when I say it,” she said to some knowing chuckles. She had a specific appeal to young people as well: “There is not a better time to get educated in politics, especially if you are young. … We’ve seen the power of youth and we need the older generation to help with that. We need the guidance. We need the wisdom. But we also, you know, just need to be taken seriously.”

Sarah Benatar, the Democratic Coconino County treasurer, is a youth in politics too, having been elected the youngest county treasurer in the state 10 years ago at the age of 27. She’s also among those advocates who now get up in front of audiences to tell intensely personal stories about why she feels abortion access is necessary — in her case, she and her young daughter both survived a dangerous pregnancy involving a blood clot in her placenta that necessitated an emergency C-section. She did not contemplate getting an abortion at the time, but given the risks, she is avoiding another pregnancy until Arizona law changes. She tells this story more often than she’d like, she told me later. She believes Duvall will shape the election in her state. “This is a state that does not vote party line,” she said. “We are a state that votes for values. … And so that’s where Hadley coming here is hugely impactful.”

It’s also a state with higher-than-average youth turnout, a figure that’s jumped substantially from a decade ago. A recent study from Arizona State University found that Gen Z voters are even more independent than their over-30 counterparts — nearly half were registered independent. And 70 percent of these voters said they were more likely to vote with an abortion referendum on the ballot.

At the community center in Flagstaff, an older voter told Duvall after the speeches that she’d worked to register college students, some of whom declined, telling her, “You know better than me” about politics. “Like, what do you say to that?” she asked in exasperation. Duvall advised: “Tell them you might know better than they know, but MAGA people do not. …That’s what I tell ’em.”