AP Photo/Adam Bettcher
Vice President Kamala Harris visits the Planned Parenthood St. Paul Health Center in Minnesota on March 14, 2024.
Just as Joe Biden made history on September 26, 2023, by becoming the first President of the United States to join the picket line of a striking union, Kamala Harris also made history on March 14, 2024, as the first Vice President of the United States to visit an abortion clinic.
While Biden’s decision to join a United Auto Workers picket line in Michigan amplified the argument that his administration is uniquely pro-labor, Harris’s stop at a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota, confirmed an equally potent argument that the Biden-Harris Administration is committed to restoring a person’s right to choose their reproductive health care.
Harris is the face of that commitment: an ardent and unapologetic supporter of abortion rights who sees the issue as central to the way society understands the rights of women—and also as a key to the politics of 2024.
“It’s a human issue, and it’s a lived experience for many women,” Harris tells The Progressive during a recent conversation. “Women will communicate about the issue in different ways. They may not always show up at town hall meetings and say to candidates, ‘I demand you talk about it,’ but when they go to the voting booth, it is something that they are familiar with.”
Unlike some other prominent Democrats who have been slow to embrace the fight for abortion rights as a central struggle in our politics, Harris comes at the issue from a place of deep experience. Raised in a progressive family, she has followed politics since her youth in the activist hotbeds of Madison, Wisconsin, and Oakland, California, and later as a highly engaged student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Hastings College of Law (since renamed as the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco). One of her first heroes was former U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York, who, as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, distinguished herself from fellow contenders as an ardent advocate for women’s rights—including support for the Equal Rights Amendment, pay equity, and the right to choose.
In a statement on abortion in 1969, Chisholm noted that “the question is not can we justify abortions but can we justify compulsory pregnancy?” She spoke those words before the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which legalized abortion in all fifty states. Now, because of the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe, the question arises anew.
“The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is nonnegotiable,” Harris says.
As concerns about President Biden’s ability to continue his campaign arose following an abysmal summer debate with Donald Trump, veteran political writer Jim VandeHei observed that replacing Biden with Harris would signal a fall Democratic campaign with a “bigger abortion emphasis” that could rally new voters.
Harris’s unequivocal approach to the question—no matter her place on the ticket—is a big deal for Democrats in an election that could be decided by relatively small margins in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These are all states that switched from backing the Republican ticket of Trump and anti-abortion zealot Mike Pence in 2016 to the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020. All of them elected pro-choice Democratic governors in 2022.
Harris, an experienced politician who has won elections for San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. Senator, and Vice President, points to what happened in 2022 as a harbinger for this year.
In the midterm elections that year, Republicans had predicted a “red wave” would sweep the country. But Harris and other savvy Democrats counted on the fact that public anger over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade would shift the political dynamic. Harris turned up the volume on reproductive rights, calling the Court’s ruling “immoral” and “unconscionable.” On the campaign trail, she declared that we “must agree that the women of America have the ability to exercise their own judgment in making decisions about their own body, and the government should not be making that decision.”
When the votes were counted in that election, Democrats fared far better than expected in both federal races and those for state houses, where decisions about reproductive rights had been shifted by the Supreme Court ruling.
Politico captured the sentiment with the headline “A predicted ‘red wave’ crashed into wall of abortion rights support on Tuesday.” The article noted that a “surge in turnout among people motivated by the erosion of abortion rights carried Democrats to victory in races for governor, Senate, attorney general, and state legislatures—defying predictions that the issue had faded for voters in the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.”
“There are certain experiences for women that are just universal, whatever party they’re registered with.”—Kamala Harris
Harris got credit for the work she did to both frame the issues and then to generate voter turnout based on that framing. Planned Parenthood President and Chief Executive Officer Alexis McGill Johnson praised the Vice President for working in “a really smart way, leveraging the muscle behind her name, her office, and the White House, and pairing that with local elected officials who people know and are familiar with.” Harris, added McGill Johnson, “brilliantly reinforces the fact that we need an all-of-government approach in response to this fundamental right being taken away—and this message should continue well after the election.”
Yet, as the 2024 election approaches, predictions have surfaced again claiming that the abortion issue will fade in the minds of progressive voters. The polling group Morning Consult declared that a “candidate’s abortion stance may matter less in 2024 than it did in 2022.” In particular, some pundits have suggested that turnout among young voters—who polls indicate are particularly inclined to back pro-choice candidates—could be diminished by an “enthusiasm gap” that even strong messaging on reproductive rights issues might not be sufficient to overcome.
Harris rejects the nay-saying. When she spoke to The Progressive in March, she noted that we had seen concerns about reproductive rights boost Democratic prospects in the midterms in 2022 and then again in 2023. During off-year elections last year, messaging focused on reproductive rights played a critical role in flipping control of the Wisconsin state supreme court to a progressive majority, shifting control of the Virginia legislature to Democrats, and re-electing pro-choice Democratic Governor Andy Beshear in Kentucky.
Harris’s belief that the abortion issue will continue to play a decisive role for Democrats in 2024 is rooted in an understanding of why the issue resonates with women.
“Here’s one of the other things that I know well because of my career as a prosecutor focused on crimes against women and children and the work that I’ve done over many, many years in that space,” she says. “There are certain experiences for women that are just universal, whatever party they’re registered with.”
It goes beyond politics, she says. “There is not a twenty-year-old woman in America who has not been afraid she’ll get raped by a stranger. There is not a woman of reproductive age who is having sex with a man who is not afraid of an unwanted pregnancy. These are just universal truths, hard though they may be to hear . . . . So when you have [the] government telling a woman what she can and cannot do with her body, that is fundamentally offensive.”