WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will head to Republican-leaning Texas just 10 days before Election Day in an effort to refocus her campaign against former President Donald Trump on reproductive care, which Democrats are making this year a make-or-break issue see breaking .
Her campaign says Harris will visit Houston on Friday for an event with women affected by the state’s restrictive abortion laws, which took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. She will go there after spending time in Georgia. , another state with a restrictive law.
Harris has argued that Trump — who nominated three conservative justices to the Supreme Court and later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — would enact similar legislation across the country.
Campaign officials called Harris’ plan to visit Texas a nontraditional way to capture the attention of voters in battleground states flooded with campaign ads and mundane campaign events.
“Texas is the stage for this event,” said senior campaign advisor David Plouffe. “But for us, the most important audience is the people on the battlefield.”
During the campaign, Harris told the story of Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who gave birth prematurely, developed sepsis and nearly died after doctors said they could not intervene to perform an abortion because Zurawski was not in enough medical danger to warrant her to save. allow the procedure.
Harris also highlighted the story of Amber Thurman, a Georgia mother who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill.
The Supreme Court in recent weeks upheld a court order saying that for now, Texas hospitals cannot be federally required to provide terminations of pregnancies when they violate the state’s abortion ban.
Plouffe said the vice president is making the trip “to really tell a story about Donald Trump’s role in eliminating Roe v. Wade, what that means for people in a state like Texas, and what’s at stake — if you live in a state that doesn’t currently have an abortion ban — that could come your way if Donald Trump wins.”
In 2016, Democrats, confident of their chances against Trump in his first bid for the White House, sent their candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to Texas, Iowa and Ohio in the hope of upping the ante’s score. Electoral College, while missing signs. of problems in Democratic-leaning states that flipped and sent Trump to the Oval Office.
“We don’t do that,” Plouffe said, dismissing the idea that the campaign was trying to compete in Texas. “We are moving away from the battlefields because we think this will help us on the battlefields.”
He said it’s “strategically important” to go somewhere like Texas, “where you have the most horrific and tragic stories of what’s happening, and then tie that directly to the threat that voters in these states without current bans would should feel. Donald Trump’s potential for the next term.”
Harris will be joined by Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, who is attempting to unseat Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Trump has also tried events outside the battlefields to energize his supporters. He has a rally planned this weekend at Madison Square Garden in New York and last week he had one at the Coachella music festival site in California.
Texas encapsulates the post-Roe landscape. The strict abortion ban prohibits doctors from performing abortions as soon as heart activity is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks or earlier. As a result, women, including those who did not intend to terminate a pregnancy, are receiving increasingly poor medical care, in part because doctors cannot intervene unless she is dealing with a life-threatening condition, or to prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily functions.” . ” The state has also become a battleground for lawsuits; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the state’s ban just two weeks ago.
Complaints about pregnant women in medical need being turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and elsewhere have increased as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate strict state laws against abortion. Several Texas women have filed complaints against hospitals for failing to terminate their failed and dangerous pregnancies because of the state’s ban. In some cases, women lost reproductive organs.
Trump has continually shifted his positions and given vague and contradictory answers to questions on an issue that has become a major vulnerability for Republicans in this year’s election. Trump recently said he would vote against a constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot aimed at overturning the state’s six-week abortion ban.
About 6 in 10 Americans believe their state should generally allow someone to get a legal abortion if he or she does not want to be pregnant for any reason, according to a July poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Voters in seven states, including some conservative ones, have either protected abortion rights or rejected efforts to restrict them in statewide voting over the past two years.
In his first year as president, Trump said he was “pro-life with exceptions” but also said “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who seek abortions — a position he quickly reversed.
During the 2018 annual March for Life, Trump expressed support for a federal ban on abortion during or after twenty weeks of pregnancy. More recently, Trump suggested in March that he might support a national ban on abortions for about 15 weeks before announcing he would instead leave the matter to the states.
