With an eye toward taking on Trump in a general election, the president is leaning into reproductive rights as a talking point.
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With an eye toward taking on Donald Trump in a general election, President Joe Biden has started hammering home the message that he will protect reproductive freedoms in a second term.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Frame and Blame
During the season premiere of The Bachelor last night, viewers saw a somber ad: A Texas mom who works as an ob-gyn looks straight into the camera and describes how she struggled to access abortion care after learning that her fetus had no chance of survival. “In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy. And that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” she says. “We need leaders that will protect our rights and not take them away. And that’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harrris.”
The new ad from the Biden campaign signals a push to demonstrate the candidate’s dedication to protecting abortion rights—and to communicate the idea that the loss of such freedoms in some parts of the country is Trump’s fault. From now until November, Biden’s campaign will likely return to the message that Trump nominated the hard-right Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe. The new campaign ad about a Texas mother, for example, “ties the situation to Trump, even though he wasn’t directly responsible for Texas’s law. ‘Frame and blame’ is the move,” my colleague Elaine Godfrey, who covers politics, told me. “Abortion and January 6 (as well as other examples of MAGA extremism) are going to be Biden’s biggest campaign talking points for 2024.”
The Biden campaign is leaning on the argument, which the president has embraced for some time, that hard-line abortion policies infringe on Americans’ freedoms. Abortion “works as a campaign message—especially if they frame it as an issue of choice, of rights, of freedom, and literally say those words,” Elaine noted. The idea is not that some Americans must abandon their personal beliefs on abortion, Vice President Harris stated on The View last week, but that “the government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies.”
Trump’s abortion record may prove polarizing in a general election; support for abortion access is broadly high among voters, with nearly 70 percent of people saying that abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, according to 2022 Gallup polling—though two-thirds of Republicans said they thought the Dobbs decision was a good thing. Now that a Trump nomination is looking nearly inevitable, Biden seems to be leaning into a general-election strategy that centers abortion. It’s also a focus that proved energizing for Democrats in the 2022 midterms, Elaine said.
Though Biden has spoken more about abortion issues of late, his age, gender, and, most of all, personal history (a religious Catholic, he was no advocate for abortion earlier in his career, though he’d become openly supportive of Roe by 2007) make him a bit of an awkward champion for the cause. So far, Harris is the one taking center stage on this issue; she set out as his surrogate on a national “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour in Wisconsin yesterday, on the 51st anniversary of Roe.
As with other campaign issues, Biden is presenting himself as better than the alternative when it comes to reproductive freedom. Elaine wrote in the most recent issue of The Atlantic that reproductive rights could be significantly imperiled during a second Trump presidency; although it’s not a given that Trump will capitulate to the requests of anti-abortion activists, it’s a real risk. And Biden’s White House has warned that Republicans in Congress are trying to ban abortion nationwide. Now emphasizing a right that a few years ago many Americans took for granted has become an opportunity for Biden to set himself apart from Trump.
Related:
Today’s News
- Turkey’s Parliament approved Sweden’s bid to join NATO, in a move that leaves Hungary as the last holdout.
- Yesterday in Yemen, the United States and Britain expanded their strikes, hitting eight Houthi-controlled sites, according to the two countries.
- Polls close tonight in the New Hampshire primary, where Trump and Nikki Haley are the Republican front-runners (with Trump holding a significant lead); Biden will not appear on the ballot after a dispute between the state and the Democratic National Committee.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
The Fantasy of Heritage Tourism
By Gisela Salim-Peyer
The first generation of immigrants wants to survive, the second wants to assimilate, and the third wants to remember, the sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen wrote in 1938. The fourth, fifth, and sixth? Apparently they now want to go on a luxury vacation to visit the Welsh coal mines their ancestors crossed an ocean to escape.
Read the full article.
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P.S.
As the election ramps up, I’ve been thinking about where activists and campaigns will draw the lines on digital trolling. I read earlier this week about a liberal group that purchased website domains, including GenZforTrump.org, and redirected them to a website attacking the GOP. URL trolling is fairly tame—even the Biden campaign bought and redirected a Trump-related URL leading up to the previous election—and has been par for the course in national elections since at least 2015. But I’m curious when making fun online becomes genuine manipulation, and how far campaigns and advocates will go.
— Lora
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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