By james art Posted on Wednesday, October 23, 2024 | 10 in the evening
WINSTON-SALEM, NC — TikTok videos are stalking 26-year-old Christy Kishbaugh.
One seared into her memory shows a young mother talking about how several Idaho emergency rooms turned her away because of the state’s abortion ban, leaving her bleeding for weeks after a miscarriage.
Kishbaugh sends similar videos to friends, saying “Can you believe this?”
She can’t.
In a muffled voice near a popular park, the married suburbanite worries about her own future under new state laws that prevent thousands of women across the country from getting 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 overturned Roe v. Wade, tensions over abortion have 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, according to data from AP VoteCast, a broad poll of the electorate. But in a battleground state like North Carolina, where Donald Trump won 60 percent of the white female vote in 2020, their allegiance could be strained by the state’s new 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 percent of North Carolina voters in 2020, nearly all of whom supported Trump and his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed the right to the woman to abortion for almost 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 made the effects of the laws a focus of his 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 the age of 30 say abortion is their top concern, according to a survey released Oct. 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 final weeks of the campaign, North Carolina saw a series of dueling visits by 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 cast at polling stations across the state, Harris running mate Tim Walz urged the crowd at Winston-Salem High School’s 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.
It’s on one of those college campuses where Jenny Gonzalez, 21, said the abortion issue motivated her to register to vote in her first election. She will vote for Harris.
“It should be accessible to all women, regardless of the situation, because everyone goes through different things and you don’t know why they decide to have an abortion,” said Gonzalez, who studies pharmacy technology at Forsyth Technical Community College.
About 120 miles southeast of Winston-Salem, Christine Duchesneau, 48, sat on a bench in downtown Fayetteville as she explained why abortion is also a major issue for her.
“For me, it’s just body autonomy,” said Duchesneau, a mother of three. “I hate to use generalizations, but, you know, as older white men, deciding what’s good, what’s best for me and my family or my life is crazy. You’re not my doctor, you know?
Duchenneau said she wasn’t thrilled about voting for President Joe Biden, but after he dropped out, she became “super excited” to support Harris.
Abortion restrictions have left tattoo artist Liz “Ugly” Haycraft, 44, a former Republican who once opposed abortion, feeling on edge. Haycraft doesn’t plan to have children, but she worries about women who have faced barriers to getting medical care.
“There’s no reason women should give up their lives or their bodies,” said Haycraft, who plans to vote for Harris.
Standing outside a Planned Parenthood clinic armed with bags of snacks and anti-abortion pamphlets for those entering the facility, Laura Brown, 45, tried to convince the women to talk to her instead. The retired Air Force sergeant and mother of two believes Democrats are using horror stories about abortion to scare young women.
“I believe they’re being told there’s only one option and that they’re too young to have children,” said Brown, who works at a nearby anti-abortion center that counsels pregnant women. “And I would say that’s wrong.”
Brown declined to say how she would vote in the election.
It’s still all about the economy, Republicans say
Republicans, for the most part, play down the issue. The Trump campaign is running ads in the state instead of attacking Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgery. And locally, GOP loyalists are raising questions about how well the Biden administration has responded to the devastation of Hurricane Helen.
Abortion may resonate most with younger women, but they are also a historically unreliable voting bloc, said Linda L. Petru, a longtime Forsyth County Republican and district chair.
“There may be more women — younger women — coming out and voting for Harris because of this,” Petru acknowledged, but added, “the percentage of young people who vote is relatively small.”
Older women — even Democrats — see abortion as more of a peripheral issue than their younger counterparts.
For Donna Klein, an 80-year-old retiree, women’s rights are “important,” but the environment is her top concern, a concern interrupted only by the hurricane devastation for the longtime Democrat.
“It’s very important to try to understand what’s going on, what we can do about it,” Klein said. “As an old man, as I think about my grandchildren. What land will they inherit?’
Petru said Republicans are counting on widespread dissatisfaction with the economy to keep voters firmly in Trump’s camp.
Inflation has 20-year-old Wake Forest student Leila Herrera considering voting for Trump in her first presidential election. The biology student, who is not part of the party, says the increased prices have been hard on her middle-class family based in suburban Charlotte.
“Donald Trump when he was in office had better prices, especially for gas. Food is a really big thing, it’s all really taken off,” she said.
But on abortion, Herrera is conflicted. She doesn’t like the new laws that prevent women who have been raped from terminating their pregnancies. But she thinks about her mother, born and adopted a year before the U.S. Supreme Court initially upheld national abortion rights in 1973.
“I feel really lucky because if she was born a year later, I wouldn’t be here,” Herrera said. “It really weighs on me.”
Some Republican women are also struggling with their position.
Weeks after the election, Robin Spade, a Canadian immigrant who dislikes the influx of immigrants crossing the US border illegally, still isn’t sure how she’ll vote. Harris won’t get her vote, she says. But after voting for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, she described his latest remarks as “very crazy”.
And the 68-year-old suburban grandmother has another problem she’s trying to come to terms with before heading to the voting booth.
“I have five granddaughters and I don’t like the government telling them what to do with their bodies,” Spade added.
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Superville reported from Fayetteville, North Carolina. AP national writer Alan G. Breed in Fayetteville and Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Winston-Salem and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.