WASHINGTON (AP) — Planned Parenthood will spend $40 million ahead of the November election to bolster President Joe Biden and leading Democrats in Congress, believing voters angry at Republican-led efforts to restrict access to further restrict abortion could be the difference in key races across the country.
The political and advocacy arms of the nation’s largest reproductive health care provider and abortion rights organization shared the announcement with The Associated Press before its wider release Monday.
The group will initially focus on eight states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Biden wants to defend 2020 victories, and North Carolina, which the Democratic president’s campaign hopes to turn around after the Republican elections. Donald Trump won it four years ago, and Montana, New Hampshire and New York, which are home to races that could help determine control of the Senate and House of Representatives.
The campaign will look to reach voters with volunteer and paid recruitment programs, phone banking and digital, TV and postal advertising.
“Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be the way we energize voters,” said Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes. “It will allow us to win.”
The spending plan is not an election cycle record for the group. It spent $45 million before Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and $50 million before the 2022 midterm elections.
That’s when Planned Parenthood advocates focused on pouring money into contests involving abortion access, months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that established a constitutional right to created abortion, a decision handed down two years ago. Monday ago.
“We continue to see the devastation that comes when anti-abortion politicians gain power,” Lawson said of the years since. “It just got worse.”
Abortion remains one of the country’s most important political issues, but the dynamics surrounding it have changed dramatically since the Supreme Court’s ruling. After the ruling, most Republican-controlled states imposed new abortion restrictions, including some bans at any stage of pregnancy.
Meanwhile, voters in seven states — California, Michigan and Vermont, as well as the usually reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and Ohio — sided with abortion rights advocates on ballot measures.
In November, voters in several other states, including battleground Arizona and Nevada, will hold abortion referendums on the ballot, as will Florida, a former presidential bellwether that has turned increasingly Republican in recent cycles but where Biden’s campaign hopes to boost turnout for the abortion vote. initiative can bring things closer.
SBA Pro-Life America, one of the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion rights groups, announced in February that it plans to direct $92 million to voters in eight battleground states: Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan , Ohio, Montana and Georgia.
In addition to the national effort, local Planned Parenthood advocates and political organizations in California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio are planning campaigns ahead of November.
Planned Parenthood efforts will also focus on some lower voting rates, such as helping Democrats seek a supermajority in the Nevada statehouse, or thwarting two state Supreme Court justices who are up for re-election in Arizona after they have voted to allow state officials to enforce an 1864 law banning nearly all abortions, which the state legislature has since abolished.
“We can’t just vote for ballot initiatives,” said Lindsey Harmon, executive director of Nevada Advocates for Planned Parenthood Affiliates PAC. “We must also support the infrastructure that enables access to abortion.”
