By Tyler Pager, The Washington Post (c) 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris will hold a rally Friday in Texas, a state she does not believe she will win but one where her campaign plans for her to begin making a closing argument to voters centered on abortion rights.
Harris will travel to Texas, which her campaign calls the “ground zero of the nation’s extreme abortion bans,” to warn Americans about the threat she believes former president Donald Trump poses to women and those who support women’s reproductive rights, officials said.
At a rally in Houston, Harris will be joined by women who have been affected by Texas’s new law, which was adopted in 2021 and bans abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Texas became the first state to adopt such a policy – known as a “heartbeat bill” because abortions are banned as soon as a doctor can detect a heartbeat – and other states have since followed suit.
“We really wanted to go to a place that would properly capture the damage that’s been done to date and how it’s affecting people throughout the state, and to use that as an important tool to tell the story about what’s at stake as it relates to this election with abortion and women’s health care,” said David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris.
He said the campaign hopes the speech will reach voters in battleground states, including those that do not have abortion bans, to “talk very directly to them about what life would be like in their states if Donald Trump were to win another term.”
The decision to hold a major event in a politically unfriendly state can be a way for a candidate, or any political figure, to make a splash and send a message about their willingness to take on a fight. Next week, Trump plans to hold a rally in Madison Square Garden, a venue in the heart of famously liberal New York City. Trump also held a rally in the South Bronx.
In July 2023, Harris traveled to Florida to blast Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s approach to teaching Black history, delivering a fiery speech that helped her gain renewed attention after a period when her profile was relatively low.
Harris officials say they hope a speech outside the seven battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – will draw more media attention, as they conceded it has been difficult at times to break through the noise of a campaign that has focused almost exclusively on that handful of states.
“Obviously the most important decision a presidential campaign makes is where their principal is spending time,” Plouffe said. “So the fact that we’re going to Texas means we really believe that will help us in those seven battleground states.”
Reproductive rights have not always been front-and-center in the current presidential campaign. But since the Dobbs decision in June 2022 doing away with a constitutional right to abortion, Democrats have overperformed in multiple elections, and many in the party believe the issue is key to winning over crucial voters like suburban women.
As president, Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who were central to overturning Roe v. Wade, and he regularly takes credit for overturning the 50-year precedent.
But as polls have shown widespread discomfort with sweeping abortion restrictions, Trump has at times seemed to back away from the issue, making contradictory statements about whether he would support a federal ban on abortion. During his presidential debate with Harris, he refused to commit to vetoing such a law, but later he said he would do so.
Harris, a strong proponent of abortion rights, has called for Congress to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade and became the first president or vice president to visit an abortion clinic. She has also centered abortion rights in her campaign, running ads that feature women who have been denied abortion care and spotlighting them at the Democratic National Convention.
Harris aides said Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who is challenging Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), will join Harris at the rally. While in Texas, Harris also plans to sit for a podcast interview with Brené Brown, a University of Houston professor and best-selling author who describes herself as studying “courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.”
Harris began this second-to-last week of the campaign barnstorming the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney. She will return to Pennsylvania on Wednesday for a CNN town hall, hold a rally with former president Barack Obama in Georgia on Thursday and join former first lady Michelle Obama in Michigan on Saturday.