How Joe Biden plans to win swing states — make abortion the issue

The US president hopes that opposition to the overturning of Roe v Wade will be decisive in his battle against Donald Trump.

Abortion rights activists protest the overturning of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court in June 2022. Picture: AFP

President Joe Biden was to deliver a landmark speech on abortion in Florida overnight on Tuesday, placing the battle over women’s rights at the centre of his election showdown with Donald Trump.

Days before Florida introduces one of the most draconian abortion bans in America next week, Mr Biden will use the speech to blame his Republican rival for the “chaos” unleashed since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade two years ago.

The ruling struck down the constitutional right to abortion after almost half a century, returning power over the procedure to individual states.

Democrats believe a groundswell of public anger at the fall of Roe v Wade will be decisive at November’s election, as it was in the midterms in 2022 and state elections last year.

Ahead of the speech in Tampa, aides said Mr Biden would lay out “the stakes of this election for ­reproductive freedom across the entire country”.

The President will warn that Republicans would seek to introduce a nationwide abortion ban if Mr Trump reclaims the White House.

Mr Biden’s campaign hopes that the speech will resonate in the battleground states expected to decide the 2024 election. They include Arizona, where the state Supreme Court has cleared the way to enforce a law dating back to the Civil War that criminalises abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

“From Arizona to Florida, more and more Americans are seeing up close the devastating impact of Trump overturning Roe v Wade,” said Morgan Mohr, the Biden campaign’s senior ­adviser for reproductive rights. “While Donald Trump continues to brag about unleashing these extreme and dangerous bans, President Joe Biden is running to restore reproductive freedom.”

Jow Biden’s team hope that the issue of reproductive rights will give him the edge in key battleground states. Picture: AFP

Mr Trump, who appointed three of the conservative ­Supreme Court judges who voted to overturn Roe v Wade, has been put on the defensive by the political backlash and by the looming ban in Florida, which brings the abortion issue to his own front door.

Florida’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court upheld a six-week abortion ban earlier this month, which comes into force on May 1. The ruling effectively cuts off access to abortion throughout the southeast of the country. But the court also gave Florida voters a chance to repeal the ban and protect abortion rights up to 24 weeks of pregnancy in a ballot initiative in November.

Mr Trump denounced the six-week ban as “a terrible mistake” when it was signed earlier this year by his Republican rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. As a resident of the state, however, the former president now faces questions on whether he will vote to support or overturn the ban in November.

After weeks of pressure to declare his position on abortion, the former president ducked the issue in a video statement this month, insisting the decision should be left to the states. Mr Trump’s evasion angered many conservatives, who voiced disappointment that he did not go further and back a nationwide ban.

His attempt to sidestep the abortion question and defer to the states met confusion within days of his statement, when Arizona reinstated its 1864 ban. Fearing the ruling was politically toxic in a battleground state Mr Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, Mr Trump has urged Arizona ­Republicans to change the law, arguing the ban goes “too far”.

The Biden campaign has ­already launched a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz focused on abortion and targeting the swing states. Alongside video of Mr Trump boasting about overturning Roe v Wade, the ads have featured accounts from women who fled their home states to seek a termination or were forced to give birth after a miscarriage, ­endangering their own lives and fertility.

Some Democrats have cautioned that abortion alone is not a silver bullet for the party as Mr Biden, 81, struggles to overcome voters’ concerns about his age, his handling of the economy and an immigration crisis on America’s southern border.

Opinion polls show that abortion ranks below the economy and immigration on lists of voter priorities. But Democrats believe the polls do not reflect the deep public anger that has only grown as the reality of life after Roe v Wade has set in.

Mr Biden’s campaign is convinced the issue will continue to galvanise voters, including the ­independents and moderate ­Republicans who turned away from Mr Trump in 2020. The backlash to the Supreme Court ruling helped Democrats fend off an anticipated Republican wave at the 2022 midterms and prompted a surge of new voter registrations across the country, particularly among young women.

Even in Republican strongholds such as Kansas and Kentucky, voters have over­whelmingly voted to uphold women’s rights when the issue is placed on the ballot. “Since the overturning of Roe, whenever reproductive rights have been on the ballot, they have won, and this November will be no different,” Ms Mohr said.

The Times