Rachel Walker was still wearing a scrubs when she arrived at a community center in Tucson, Arizona, on Friday afternoon to hear Kamala Harris give a speech defending abortion rights.
The US vice president was in Arizona three days after the state Supreme Court upheld a 160-year-old law banning almost all abortions, with no exceptions for victims of rape and incest. The decision disrupted the status quo in a swing state that could decide November’s presidential election.
Democrats are now trying to capitalize on public outrage, accusing Donald Trump of appointing the U.S. Supreme Court justices who restricted abortion rights by overturning Roe vs. Wade ago two years. Trump and his Republican allies, like U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, are struggling to contain the backlash.
That makes Arizona another state where the big November vote could be as much about abortion rights as it is about the next occupant of the White House.
For Walker, a 41-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist from Tucson, the cause is personal.
“Women’s lives are literally in danger,” she said. She and other doctors will likely change how they treat patients, including those suffering miscarriages, if the ban takes effect as planned in June.
The so-called territorial law — enacted before Arizona became a state in 1912 — provides a penalty of up to five years in prison for medical providers who terminate a pregnancy.
“It’s like we keep taking one step forward and then taking two steps back,” Walker said.
Democrats are counting on the fact that many voters across the country feel the same way.
“Republicans can’t run away from this problem fast enough,” said Mike Noble, founder of the Phoenix-based nonpartisan research institute Noble Predictive Insights. “Every time Democrats have the opportunity to discuss abortion, they win.
“Will this have an impact in Arizona? 100 per cent.”
Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist in the state, agrees. “It’s the cycle of abortion. It’s still immigration. It’s still inflation. It’s still housing. But [the abortion issue] it will definitely have an impact.
In Tucson on Friday, Harris criticized Trump for his role in restricting women’s reproductive rights.
“The overturning of Roe was a seismic event. And this ban in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet,” she told several hundred supporters, most of them women. “We all need to understand who is to blame. This is former President Donald Trump.”
Democrats have made the same point in response to a wave of abortion restrictions in the United States since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, including three Trump appointees, struck down Roe ., the 1973 decision enshrining the constitutional right to abortion.
The Biden campaign last week announced a “seven-figure” investment in an ad campaign in Arizona to attack Trump on the issue, including television spots and billboards in English and Spanish. “Abortion is banned in Arizona thanks to Donald Trump,” they read.
“The issue of abortion has energized this election,” Ruben Gallego, the Democratic congressman running against Lake in the Senate, told the Financial Times. “Trump did this and Kari Lake was a cheerleader. . . We will continue to talk about it until the end.
A day before the Arizona court’s ruling, Trump said he was “proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe. But he also said abortion laws should be decided by states, rather than the national ban championed by some abortion advocates.
It’s an attempt by the former president to moderate his stance on a polarizing issue that has weighed on Republicans in several elections since 2022 — and threatens his chances in this year’s White House race.
Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections and lost several high-profile elections in the 2023 off-year elections, including the Kentucky gubernatorial race, where Trump won in 2016 and 2020.
To end the backlash in Arizona, Trump attempted to distance himself from the state court’s decision.
“The Arizona Supreme Court went too far in its abortion ruling,” he wrote on social media Friday. The governor and state lawmakers should “show heart, common sense and act immediately to remedy what happened.”
Lake, who in 2022 called the territorial statute “great law,” also changed his position, saying Thursday that the court’s decision was “out of step with the situation of the people of this state.”
“I’ll tell you, I’m pro-life, I’m not going to apologize for that. I want to save as many babies as possible,” Lake told an audience at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “But I can’t impose my personal beliefs on everyone.”
“Have you noticed how quickly they’re going backwards now?” said Nina Trasoff, a 77-year-old voter who attended Harris’ speech Friday.
“Seeing this many years later made time go back that much. . . This is unconscionable and unacceptable, and we must fight like hell to change this. People need to understand that there are consequences throughout the vote,” she said.
Arizonans could have their say on abortion in November, if activists succeed in putting a referendum on the ballot on whether to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. ‘State.
Polls suggest such a ballot measure would pass without issue, as have other referendums across the country since Roe was overturned. A New York Times/Siena College poll last fall found that 59 percent of Arizona voters said abortion should be “always” or “mostly” legal, compared with 34 percent who said the procedure should be illegal in most or all cases.
And there are signs that voters — particularly independents who make up a larger share of the Arizona electorate than either major party — may be turning away from Republican candidates over abortion . Many analysts also expect this issue to encourage young, Democratic-leaning voters to turn out in November.
This could be crucial to the Democrats’ chances. The latest polling average from RealClearPolitics puts Trump ahead of Biden in Arizona by 4.5 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the state by about 10,000 votes, or just 0.3 points.
Those polls, however, were taken before the state Supreme Court’s decision, and many Democrats are cautiously optimistic that Biden will be able to gain ground.
“We have a lot of independents and people who want to be able to make decisions for themselves in Arizona,” said Trish Muir, a Democratic voter and local union leader in Tucson. “Having this kind of draconian measure imposed on us stifles that. I think we’ll see a lot of Arizonans say no.
