By james art WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — TikTok videos are haunting 26-year-old Christy Kishbaugh.
One etched in her memory shows a young mother talking about how several Idaho emergency rooms turned her away due to the state’s abortion ban, leaving her to bleed for weeks after a miscarriage.
Kishbaugh sends similar videos to friends, saying “Can you believe this?”
She can’t.
In muffled voices near a popular park, the married suburbanite worried about her own future under the new patchwork of state laws that have prevented thousands of women across the country from obtaining abortions.
“I’m thinking ahead in case something goes wrong,” Kishbaugh almost whispered, iced coffee in hand. “The idea that me, my friends, my loved ones, that they could potentially die or never have children or lose a child because they don’t have access to the health care they need, that really haunts me.”
Two years after the US Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wadetensions over abortion only intensified, turning the presidential election into a referendum on the basic rights of tens of millions of women.
Republicans have long relied on deep support from white women in states like Georgia, Florida and Texas, who support them at higher rates than white women nationwide, data from AP VoteCasta large-scale survey of the electorate, show. But in a battleground state like North Carolina, where Donald Trump won 60% of the white female vote in 2020, their allegiance could be strained by the new state 12-week abortion ban.
If Trump’s support among white women in North Carolina falls closer to the group’s average of 52 percent in 2020, he could struggle to regain the state’s 16 electoral votes. Vice President Kamala Harris could narrowly win if only a minority of white women decide to support her over Trump, who carried North Carolina by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020, the narrowest margin of Trump’s victory.
Abortion was a top issue for just 3% of North Carolina voters in 2020, with almost all of them supporting it Trump and his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the high court decision that guaranteed women’s abortion rights for nearly half a century.
The court has now left abortion rights up to the states, and the issue is far from settled, with legislatures enacting a number of restrictions. Harris has affected the laws a focus of her campaign. And another group of North Carolina voters — 10 percent of them in 2022 — listed abortion as their top priority, according to AP VoteCast data. Nearly 8 in 10 North Carolina voters in 2022 who prioritized abortion supported a statewide Democratic candidate.
This presidential race will reveal how much access to abortion really matters to them, and whether it’s enough to overcome their concerns about Harris on the economy, immigration and other issues.
Did the Republicans set off a hand grenade against abortion?
By targeting women under 35, North Carolina Democrats are telling voters that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and want control over women, said Morgan Jackson, a campaign adviser to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein.
“The Republicans have set off a hand grenade in their own hands,” Jackson said. “They thought you were with them all the way. It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
Nationally, 4 in 10 women under 30 say abortion is the biggest problem, according to the survey published October 11 by KFF, a health policy research organization.
However, North Carolina is one of the few Southern states that has not enacted a strict ban that makes abortion nearly impossible. That moderate approach will make it less of a pressing issue for voters in the state, said Republican Sen. Vicki Sawyer.
Sawyer considers what she hears from her own young adult daughters. Abortions come up, she said, but not as much as concerns about housing costs or everyday items.
“Right in the wheelhouse of something that could affect them,” Sawyer said. But “they know their rights are protected” because the state’s ban on 12-week abortions also allows for some exceptions in the second trimester.
But Democrats are telling voters that bigger threats to abortion rights remain with Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, who once vowed to ban “abortion in North Carolina for any reason.” During Sunday’s NFL games, commercial breaks included an ad of a woman sitting on an operating room table explaining how she nearly passed out in a Texas emergency room because doctors were afraid to treat her with dilation and curettage surgery — a commonly used procedure during abortions – after she has given birth.
With enthusiasm already high among black women, Harris’ campaign will focus on using the abortion issue to win over white and Hispanic suburban women, Jackson said. No Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008.
In the closing weeks of the campaign, North Carolina had a series of dueling visits from the presidential candidates and their surrogates. Trump surveyed storm damage in western North Carolina on Monday after Harris stopped at a predominantly black church and drew a crowd of 7,000 at East Carolina University earlier this month.
Last Thursday, as a record 353,166 votes were voted on at polling stations across the state, Harris running mate Tim Walz urged the crowd at the Winston-Salem High School gymnasium to consider that access to abortion could be further restricted under a second Trump presidency. Voters, he argued, should not believe the former president’s announcement that he would refuse to sign a national abortion ban.
“The people in our lives — our wives, our daughters, our mothers, our friends, for God’s sake, our neighbors — their lives are literally on the line for how we vote,” Waltz said.
The Harris campaign has 29 field offices and more than 340 staffers across the state and has made reaching out to black and younger voters a priority, the campaign said. Trump’s team sent an emailed request for details about his campaign presence to Sawyer, who represents a conservative part of the Charlotte suburbs.
Harris’ campaign may find the votes it needs in the hills of fast-growing Forsyth County, full of women, college students and young working professionals. Downtown Winston-Salem, dotted with modern apartments converted from old cigarette factories and artsy cafes, added the most people, a shift that helped Democrats take power in the once blue-collar city after years of Republican control. The city’s economy is driven in part by more than a half-dozen colleges, including Wake Forest University.