How Harris may win back a critical group of voters who abandoned Biden
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN
(CNN) — The quickest way for Kamala Harris to grow her support may be to consolidate the voters who agree with her on abortion.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has been a much more comfortable and cogent messenger on the issue than President Joe Biden, who wasn’t winning nearly as much support in 2024 as he did in 2020 – or major Democratic candidates did in 2022 – among voters who support legal abortion, according to previously unpublished results from multiple public polls.
Biden’s slippage with voters who support legal abortion partly reflected the same problems that hurt him with other segments of the electorate, such as concerns about his age. But his decline with those voters also underscored the risk to Democrats that abortion’s relevance has been reduced since 2022 by voter concerns about other problems, especially inflation, and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to downplay the issue.
With Harris at the top of the ticket, Democrats now see a chance to refocus voters on the issue and restore their margins among the abortion rights voters who had notably drifted away from Biden. “She is able to talk about it in a way that, quite frankly, that Biden was not,” said Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, expressing a widely held view in the party. “It’s not that the issue hasn’t been talked about at a national level, but it hasn’t been articulated in the way she does.”
Biden’s lackluster showing in polls this year among voters who support abortion rights, though rarely discussed, represented one of the most important changes in the political landscape from the past two national elections. In both the 2020 and 2022 campaigns, voters who backed legal abortion provided overwhelming support to Biden and other Democratic candidates.
In 2020, Biden won almost exactly three-fourths of voters who said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. In 2022, the exit polls found that Democratic House candidates again won almost exactly three-fourths of voters who said abortion should always or mostly remain legal.
Democrats maintained that elevated level of support even as the share of voters who said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances spiked from 51% in the 2020 exit poll to fully 60% in the 2022 election coming just a few months after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned the constitutional right to abortion with the Dobbs decision.
In an array of recent national public polls before he quit the race last week, Biden this time was not winning nearly as large a share of voters who support abortion rights.
A merge of the results from three national Marquette Law School polls this year found Biden carrying a little less than two-thirds of the voters who said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to results provided by Charles Franklin, the poll’s director.
In a CNN poll conducted by SSRS this April, Biden won exactly three-fifths of the voters who said they disapproved of the Dobbs decision, according to data provided by the CNN polling unit. Two other recent polls put Biden’s support among voters who support abortion rights even lower: surveys this spring by Quinnipiac University and Yahoo News/YouGov, which measured attitudes about abortion in different ways, each showed Biden winning only about half of voters who identified as supportive of abortion rights, according to results provided by the pollsters.
The Marquette, CNN and Quinnipiac polls each showed Trump winning about 85% of voters who opposed legal abortion, even more than his 76% support among them in 2020, according to the exit polls.
State level polls told the same story. In 2020, Biden won between 72% and 77% of voters who supported legal abortion in all or most circumstances in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia, according to the exit polls. In 2022, most Democratic gubernatorial candidates did even better: the exit polls found that Democrats Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried about three-fourths of the voters who supported legal abortion, while Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer won more than four-fifths of them in Pennsylvania and Michigan respectively (the 2020 exit poll did not ask about attitudes on abortion in Michigan.)
Across all of those battleground states, Biden this year was performing well below that level with voters who support legal abortion, polls have found. A large YouGov survey for a consortium of major US universities and the Times of London earlier this month found that Biden did not exceed 59% support among voters who say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances in any of the seven major battleground states, according to results provided by YouGov. Even among women who support legal abortion in all or most circumstances, Biden’s best showing in the poll was exactly 60% in Michigan. By contrast, in the 2020 exit poll, Biden carried at least 75% of women who supported abortion rights in each of the four states where the question was asked; in 2022, Whitmer won 82% and Shapiro 85% of women who supported legal abortion.
This declining support among voters who support abortion rights came after the Biden campaign and allied Democratic groups spent nearly $26 million in this campaign cycle on ads that addressed abortion, according to the ad tracking service AdImpact.
One reason for Biden’s decline with voters who support abortion rights, strategists in both parties agree, is that they were not immune to the same factors that had soured all voters on the president. Results from the Marquette Law School national polls provided by Franklin validate that observation: Even among voters who support legal abortion, the survey found that three-fourths believed Biden was too old to serve as president. Those abortion rights voters also split about evenly on whether Biden or Trump was better for the economy.
Another factor is that Biden was always an uneasy crusader for the abortion rights cause. Biden resolutely supported national legislation restoring the national right to abortion. But as an 81-year-old devout Catholic, who initially criticized the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, he was often hesitant even to mention the word “abortion.”
“A lot of voters thought that Biden was personally against abortion and in his public policy [position] was for it,” said Celinda Lake, a pollster for his 2020 campaign. “Ironically,” she added, many voters think Trump “is personally for it, and in public policy against it.”
Voters, Lake said, see none of that ambivalence in Harris. From the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, the vice president has taken the lead for the administration on defending abortion rights. She has parachuted into red states to denounce abortion bans and limits, rallied about the issue on college campuses and met repeatedly with women and medical providers affected by the new restrictions. This week, her campaign is holding a “Fight for Reproductive Freedom” series of events around the country tied to the Iowa law banning most abortions after six weeks that went into effect on Monday.
“It was always true that Kamala Harris was going to be a better messenger on abortion,” said Melissa Williams, who runs the independent expenditure program for Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights. “Part of that is relatability. Part of that is living her life. But part of that is her experience and the way she talks about it. She is out there visiting a Planned Parenthood, talking to providers and talking to patients. She is stridently offended by where Republicans are on this issue and that’s a compelling position.”
Harris not only brings more passion than Biden to her defense of abortion rights, but she connects it to two larger messages more effectively than he did. One is to place abortion at the center of a much broader effort by red states, the GOP-nominated Supreme Court justices and Trump to roll back an array of rights and liberties – voting rights, protections for LGBTQ people and potentially access to contraception and IVF. The fact that her first campaign video revolved around the idea of protecting “freedom” (complete with the sanctioned use of a Beyonce song of that title) underscored how central that argument will be to her campaign.
“A majority of women in America feel they are losing their rights – and men agree,” said Tresa Undem, a pollster for progressive causes. “I often hear women say, ‘what’s next, our right to vote?’ They are angry and scared. Harris is mirroring exactly how most women are feeling. This is why candidate gender matters. Harris – the most powerful woman lawmaker in the country – has had her rights taken away just like every other woman in the country. It’s not an abstraction.”
The other way Harris has enlarged the abortion debate is by arguing that it reflects a desire among conservatives to roll back the broader gains women have made in society over the past generation. In her comments about abortion, she is often most passionate when she bristles at the idea that “our daughters will have fewer rights than our grandmothers,” as she put it at the Essence Festival earlier this month.
That framing could help Harris hold older White female voters who may be receptive to Trump’s arguments on other issues that touch on race and identity, such as crime and immigration, said Greenberg. “The anger about abortion is very much concentrated with college women and older women over 50,” Greenberg said. After Dobbs, she said, “a lot of these [baby] boomer women who remember Roe v. Wade being decided and the women’s movement” were outraged — and remain so. “They may not be feminists,” Greenberg continued, “but they were part of the generation that got rights” and they have a growing concern that those rights are now slipping away.
Conversely, Harris’ comfort and fervor in discussing abortion could help mobilize more younger female voters, who were losing faith not only in Biden but in the prospect of restoring reproductive rights, said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
In focus groups of young women this year, Della Volpe said he found that many of them “across the country seemed resigned to the new reality, that it’s a state-by-state situation.” With Biden as the messenger, abortion “didn’t have that fire and that urgency that so many Democrats felt through public opinion and the ballot box in 2022 and 2023,” added Della Volpe, who is advising a super PAC attempting to mobilize younger voters for Democrats.
In all these ways, Harris may deliver the Democrats’ case on abortion rights more effectively than Biden and energize more of the voters who support abortion rights but were unenthusiastic about his candidacy. But Republicans express confidence that even if Harris does all that, she is unlikely to restore the crushing levels of support that Democrats reached in 2020 and 2022 among voters who back abortion rights.
That’s because Republicans believe both that the issue is less salient in this year’s presidential race and that Trump is less vulnerable on it than other GOP candidates were two years ago.
Jason Cabel Roe, a GOP consultant in Michigan who’s a former executive director of the state Republican Party, said that while abortion often overshadowed other national issues in gubernatorial and Senate races in 2022, this year all signs suggest the order will be reversed. The 2022 midterm, he said, “was the Dobbs election: It was super charged but it also sucked up all the oxygen” from other concerns, he said. “I think a lot of the issues that were underlying issues in 2022 will come back to the forefront in 2024” including inflation, immigration and crime. Not that many swing voters, Roe predicted, “are going to vote [primarily] based on abortion when all these other factors are part of the debate.”
Trump has also tried to limit his exposure on the issue. He’s repeatedly declared that he opposes a national ban on abortion (a position echoed by GOP legislative leaders), and now prefers to allow states to set their own differing rules. His team carefully suppressed discussion of abortion at the party’s recent national convention and in its platform (though the platform still contains language that suggests support for national restrictions by endorsing the idea of “fetal personhood” under the 14th Amendment.)
“Donald Trump has taken a relatively centrist, common sense position: He has basically said — let the states decide,” said Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign. “It’s up to the states, you don’t like what your states are doing, vote them out. It’s democracy.”
Trump’s deference to states, McLaughlin continued, has made some voters who support abortion rights “less fearful” of what a second term for him would mean on the issue and encouraged them to back him because of other issues. “Many of them aren’t single issue abortion voters; they are worried about the economy and inflation, they are worried about immigration,” McLaughlin said.
Williams, the Emily’s List political operative, agreed that convincing voters to see a risk that Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress might seek a nationwide abortion ban “is work we have to do. … We have to tell people where Trump is. We have to define him and set the stakes.”
But, Williams added, Trump repeatedly bragging that he was responsible for overturning Roe through his Supreme Court nominations makes that easier, as do the starkly anti-abortion comments and policy positions of his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, as well as the abortion restrictions proliferating across red states. “In all of these states where Republicans have control, they have rolled back rights, so it is very much a watch what they do, not what they say,” Williams said.
Any look at Trump’s position today among voters who support abortion rights, Williams said, doesn’t reflect the impact of the large amount of paid advertising that is coming on the issue from outside groups like hers. “My guess is that’s a communications problem, not a problem problem,” she said.
In fact, while polling has consistently found that fewer than half of Americans blame Trump for the court’s decision overturning Roe, Democrats and advocacy groups say their own surveys show that most voters believe Republicans will still seek a national abortion ban if they win unified control of the White House and Congress, despite the GOP’s promises to the contrary. A KFF poll late this spring supported those findings: in that survey, nearly three-fourths of women nationwide said they believed a reelected Trump would sign a nationwide abortion ban into law.
Biden could not convert those concerns into enough support in his bid for reelection, given all the other headwinds he faced, and the erosion of his ability to drive a message on abortion or anything else. Harris still must confront many of the same obstacles as Biden, particularly the discontent among many voters about the rising cost of living since the administration began.
But she has already shown she can deliver the Democratic case on abortion, and rights more broadly, far more pointedly than the president. Raising the relevance of abortion rights for more voters may not be sufficient to erase all Trump’s advantages in the race — but, for Harris, it looks like the necessary first step on any path toward overtaking him.
The-CNN-Wire
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