Democrats bet on abortion rights to fire up voters

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Democrats are betting that Republicans’ hardline stances on abortion will work in their favour and help tip the scales towards Kamala Harris and her party in down-ballot races. [free to read].

When the US Supreme Court struck down the national right to obtain an abortion by overturning Roe vs Wade in 2022, a profound anger set in among pro-choice voters — and especially young women. And running on abortion rights supercharged Democratic victories in the 2022 midterms.

This November, almost a dozen states, including the battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada, will have abortion measures on the ballot. This comes after voters in reliably Republican states such as Ohio and Kansas opted to codify abortion rights over the past two years.

Meanwhile, Republican officials have pushed for increasingly strict restrictions on the procedure at the state level. More than 20 states have laws limiting abortion earlier in pregnancy than the foetal viability standard set by Roe, including 13 states where the procedure is now banned in almost all circumstances — including for victims of rape and incest. Some lawmakers and judges have taken this further by calling for limiting access to contraception and fertility treatments.

Opinion polls have consistently shown that most Americans identify as pro-choice. And though Harris and Donald Trump are deadlocked in battleground polling, women across the country back the vice-president by a 14-point margin.

Jessica Mackler — president of Emily’s List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights — told the FT’s Lauren Fedor that the issue was already shaping voter choices:

The question is not: will abortion drive votes in this election? It is: how far, how wide and how deep does that impact go?

In every district that we are in, in every state that we are in, this is the issue that is driving the Democratic coalition in a really remarkable way . . . Where abortion is on the ballot in any form, it is a driver of wins for Democrats.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• The US Department of Justice warned Elon Musk’s America Pac that its $1mn giveaway might be illegal.

• During a CNN town hall, Harris said she considered Trump a fascist, and pointed to his own former chief of staff, John Kelly, who also said the former president met the definition. (CNN)

• After Trump’s campaign accused the UK Labour party of interference in the US election, party officials said it paid for one of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s top aides to attend the Democratic National Convention, but denied that he advised Harris’s campaign.

• The dollar has hit its highest level since August, as investors bet on the growing likelihood of a Trump election victory.

• In a political gamble, the vice-president will campaign tomorrow in Texas, a Republican stronghold, as she makes reproductive rights a central pillar of her final pitch.

Behind the scenes

2024 has proven to be the TikTok election, as the platform emerged as the main online battleground between Harris and Trump.

To broaden Harris’s reach when she took over the top of the Democratic ticket, her campaign hired what it described as a pack of “feral 25-year-olds” to make viral videos and courted content creators by inviting them to White House events and the DNC.

Harris’s TikTok strategy is “aspirational for any brand, let alone a politician” Lara Cohen, head of creators at LinkTree, which has worked on get-out-the-vote initiatives, told the FT’s Hannah Murphy.

Harris’s campaign account, KamalaHQ, has attracted 1.5bn views compared with her rival’s 1bn. And she’s posted far more — 851 videos versus the former president’s 41.

Yet as she’s lost momentum in recent weeks, she’s lost ground in the TikTok battle, too. Data shared with the FT by social media intelligence platform CredoIQ found that conservative content has been more likely to go viral on the platform than progressive posts since the vice-presidential debate.

CredoIQ founder Ben Darr told Hannah that there had been an uptick in pro-Trump creators criticising the Biden administration’s hurricane relief efforts in the wake of two devastating storms, Helene and Milton, which could be contributing to the shift.

But as Jerrica Rowlett, assistant professor of communication at Bryant University in Rhode Island, said:

We’ll have to see if they can maintain the hype until November . . . it’s the internet age. Attention spans are short.

Datapoint

Trump now has the edge over Harris on the US economy, according to a new Financial Times poll, suggesting the vice-president has failed to win over voters on their top issue as they begin to cast their ballots.

The former president has significantly improved his standing, and more voters trust him to handle the economy compared with Harris [free to read]. A total of 44 per cent of registered voters backed Trump on this question compared with 43 per cent for Harris, according to the latest FT-Michigan Ross poll. 

It’s the first time our poll has found Trump to have an advantage over his rival on the economy. Last month, 44 per cent of voters said they trusted Harris versus 42 per cent for Trump.

The final FT-Michigan Ross poll before election day also found that a higher percentage of voters said they’d be better off under Trump’s economic policies: 45 per cent of voters think this, up from 37 per cent in September. Meanwhile, 37 per cent said that they’d be better off under Harris. 

Despite the erosion of economic trust in Harris, the poll suggested some of her message was resonating: 49 per cent of voters said she better represented middle-class interests compared with 37 per cent for Trump. Voters also overwhelmingly said he better represented the interests of wealthy people and large corporations.

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