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      Harris Is Good on Abortion Rights. Now She Needs to Take It to 11.

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      Among the many critical issues at stake in the 2024 election, one will be central for many Americans: Whom do you trust to make medical decisions — women and their doctors, or Donald Trump and JD Vance?Vice President Kamala Harris cast the issue of abortion in stark relief in her first debate with former President Trump last week, striking a chord with voters across political lines. Ms. Harris’s answers on abortion emerged as her strongest moments onstage in a strong night for her overall — and provided a glimpse of a winning strategy for this election.That involves the Harris-Walz ticket turning the volume up to 11 on abortion. Ms. Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and their campaign surrogates must keep emphasizing — on the stump, in ads and at every chance they get — how Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are impossible to trust on these issues.They must refuse to let Mr. Trump and other Republicans suggest that leaving decisions about abortion up to the states is a benign proposition and continue to point to the wide-ranging impact of abortion bans on pregnancy care, miscarriage treatment and training opportunities for an entire generation of doctors.Ms. Harris would do well, even, to devote an entire speech to the issue, laying out her plan to take action in support of abortion rights, with or without Congress.At the same time, she should keep deploying campaign surrogates such as Kaitlyn Joshua, a mother from Baton Rouge, La., who described being denied care at not one but two emergency rooms in the midst of a painful miscarriage because of her state’s abortion ban. Personal stories like these can break through and reach voters more effectively than any campaign talking point. According to PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, exposure to these stories is helping to shift public opinion in support of reproductive rights — an imperative in this election and beyond.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      See Where Abortion Is on the Ballot Across the U.S.

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      States voting on abortion One measure Two measures Voters in a record 10 states will decide whether to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions this fall. In Nebraska, voters face two measures: one favoring abortion rights and another that would ban abortion after the first trimester. Supporters of abortion rights hope to continue their […] More

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      in US Politics

      Florida officials investigate voters who signed abortion ballot initiative

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      Florida law enforcement officials are investigating voters who signed a petition to get a closely watched abortion rights measure on the ballot this fall, showing up at the homes of some residents unannounced in what activists say is an effort to intimidate voters.Organizers turned in more than 900,000 signatures in January to get a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. The deadline to challenge signatures has passed, but a state agency created by DeSantis to investigate voter fraud recently began investigating whether there was fraud in the gathering process.Isaac Menasche, a Fort Myers voter, said he signed a petition months ago when he was approached at a local farmer’s market. He wrote down his name, birthday, address, and scribbled a quick version of his signature. He didn’t think much of it until last week when a law enforcement officer showed up at his door and pulled out a copy of his signature on the petition, asking him to confirm that it was his – which it was.“The experience left me shaken. What troubled me was he had a folder on me containing my personal information – about 10 pages. I saw a copy of my driver’s license and copy of the petition I signed,” Menasche wrote in a Facebook post last week. “It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition. Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this. I wonder if the same could be said if the petition were for some innocuous issue.”The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has defended the investigation. “They’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” he said at a press conference on Monday, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “It may be that the signature is totally different, and that voter will say, ‘No, I actually did do that.’ Maybe they signed their name. That is absolutely possible. And if that’s what you say, I think that’s probably the end of it.”But the investigation also comes as DeSantis and Florida Republicans have made other aggressive efforts to thwart the amendment, which needs the support of 60% of voters to pass this fall. The Florida agency for health care administration, a state agency, posted a webpage last week attacking the amendment, which DeSantis has denied amounts to electioneering.The Florida supreme court also allowed a misleading financial impact statement to be printed alongside the amendment on the ballot.Local election officials in Florida are responsible for verifying signatures that are turned in. Groups that sponsor the petitions are responsible for paying for the robust process, which requires verifying the voter’s signature with the one on file for registration purposes as well as their name, address and date of birth, said Lori Edwards, the supervisor of elections in Polk county (Edwards said the state had not requested any information from her office on the abortion amendment).The office of election crimes and security, a multimillion-dollar effort and first-of-its kind agency created by DeSantis to investigate voter fraud, said earlier this year that it had been “inundated with an alarming amount of fraud related to constitutional initiative petitions”.A spokesperson for Mary Jane Arrington, the supervisor of elections in Osceola county in central Florida told the Associated Press that her office had never received a request to review signatures that had already been validated in the 16 years she had been in her role.Florida Democrats and voting groups have ripped DeSantis for the investigation, saying it is an obvious effort to intimidate voters.“This is all about theater, this is all about intimidation of the voters as people are about to go to the ballot box,” Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said at a press conference on Monday.The Florida department of state told the Florida department of law enforcement in a letter earlier this summer it had opened an investigation into more than 40 people paid to circulate the abortion-focused petitions. The letter also says the department had obtained “credible information” that several petition circulators in Palm Beach county had submitted fraudulent signatures.The local supervisor of elections had secured some signed complaints from voters saying they did not actually sign petitions, the letter says. “Some of the above-named circulators also signed petitions on behalf of individuals who were deceased at the time the petition was allegedly signed. The circulators appear to have forged the voters’ signatures and inserted the voters’ personal identifiable information into the petitions without consent,” the letter says.The department of state provided copies of petition forms alleged to contain fraud, with the signature and voter information redacted. The agency also released three complaints from voters saying they had not in fact signed the petition.“We have a duty to seek justice for Florida citizens who were victimized by fraud and safeguard the integrity of Florida’s elections. Our office will continue this investigation and make referrals to FDLE as appropriate,” Mark Ard, a spokesperson for the Florida department of state, said in a statement.The campaign behind the amendment, Floridians Protecting Freedom, hired a private company, PCI Consultants, to handle most of the signature gathering. Angelo Paparella, the company’s president, said in an interview that his company reviewed all the signatures it collected before submitting them to local election officials. When they found some that looked fraudulent – a tiny fraction of the more than 1m they collected – they submitted those separately and flagged that they were suspicious.“My staff is pretty good at ferreting this out,” said Paparella, who has been collecting signatures in Florida since 1998. “Sometimes people are idiots and they try to take a shortcut, you know, taking names out of a phone book. It’s a very stupid thing to do. It’s a crime.”Still, he said, the tiny amount of fraud does not come anywhere close to the overwhelming number of valid signatures that were submitted.“If they find someone who committed any kind of forgeries, then prosecute them,” he said. “It takes nothing away from the nearly million valid signatures that the counties found.”It is not clear how many voters have been targeted in the abortion petition investigation, but the Tampa Bay Times reported that at least six counties had been asked to provide information on signatures that had already been approved.One of those counties is Alachua county, where state officials requested to review 6,141 petitions. All of them had been submitted by six circulators that the state believed had submitted fraudulent petitions. In Osceola county, the state requested to review around 1,850 petitions from specific circulators, Arrington’s office said. In Hillsborough county, officials wanted to review nearly 7,000 petitions to the state for review, the supervisor of elections’ office said.The state requested to review 17,000 signatures in Palm Beach county, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In Orange county, home to Orlando, they requested to review 11,500 petitions.The investigation is the latest salvo of the office of election crimes and security, whose mission has been criticized since voter fraud is extremely rare. In 2022, the agency drew scrutiny for arresting people with felony convictions who had voted but appeared to be confused about their eligibility. It has also pursued fines against voter registration groups for relatively minor errors. Many voter registration groups have ceased activity in Florida since.“It’s been clear from day one that the purpose of the election police was to harass voters who don’t have the same viewpoints as the governor,” said Brad Ashwell, the director of the Florida chapter of All Voting is Local, a voting rights group.“By going after a petition for Amendment 4, which is already on the ballot, Governor DeSantis is undermining the will of voters and stomping over their democratic freedoms for his own political gain.” More

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      in US Politics

      Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sparred on Tuesday in a contentious presidential debate that repeatedly went off the rails, as Trump pursued bizarre and often falsehood-ridden tangents about crowd sizes, immigration policy and abortion access.The Philadelphia debate marked arguably the most significant opportunity for both Harris and Trump since Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July, and the event began cordially enough. Harris crossed over to Trump’s podium to shake his hand and introduce herself, an acknowledgement that the two presidential nominees had never met face to face before Tuesday night.But the cordiality did not last long. After delivering some boilerplate attack lines about the high inflation seen earlier in Biden’s presidency, Trump pivoted to mocking Harris as a “Marxist” and peddling baseless claims that Democrats want to “execute the baby” by allowing abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy.That false claim was corrected by both Harris and the ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, who joined her fellow moderator David Muir in fact-checking some of Trump’s statements throughout the evening. Harris then segued into a stinging rebuke of Trump’s record on abortion, criticizing him for nominating three of the supreme court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v Wade in 2022.“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said. “And I pledge to you, when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v Wade, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it in to law.”Despite broad public support for Roe v Wade, Trump boasted about his role in reversing it and applauded the supreme court’s “great courage” in issuing its ruling, while he dodged repeated questions about whether he would veto a national abortion ban as president.Trump seemed to trip over himself even when moderators offered questions on his strongest issues, such as immigration. When asked about Biden’s handling of the US-Mexico border, Harris pivoted to discussing Trump’s campaign rallies.“I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said. “You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”The tangent appeared to be a blatant attempt by Harris to bait Trump into squabbling over attendance at his rallies instead of discussing immigration policy – and it worked. Trump began attacking Harris with baseless accusations that her campaign was paying people to attend her rallies while celebrating his own events as “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”.Then, rather than highlighting his immigration proposals, Trump chose to spread debunked claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city have started capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets.“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”The outburst instantly became a source of mockery on social media, as Democrats celebrated Trump for “doubling down on the crazy uncle vibe”, in the words of the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.Even as moments of the debate bordered on absurdity, other exchanges regarding foreign policy and the January 6 insurrection felt heavy with meaning. Pressed on his false claims regarding widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Trump again refused to acknowledge his defeat, prompting a stark warning from Harris.“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so, let’s be clear about that. And, clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that,” Harris said. “But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.”On foreign policy, Harris fielded difficult questions on the war in Gaza, as she expressed her support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” while calling for “security, self determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve” for Palestinians.Asked about his own stance on the war, Trump reiterated his bombastic claims that his presence in the White House would have prevented the wars in both Gaza and Ukraine.“If I were president, it would have never started,” Trump said. “If I were president, Russia would have never, ever. I know Putin very well. He would have never –and there was no threat of it either, by the way, for four years – have gone into Ukraine.”And yet, when asked directly whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, Trump deflected.“I want the war to stop,” Trump said. “I think it’s the US’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, all right? Negotiate a deal because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.Read more about the 2024 US election:

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      in Elections

      Harris Blames Trump for State Abortion Bans in Contentious Debate

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      Vice President Kamala Harris laced into former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday over his role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, blaming him for subsequent state-level abortion bans that, she said, have had painful consequences for many American women and their families.In the first true clash of their debate in Philadelphia, Ms. Harris noted that it was Mr. Trump’s appointees for the Supreme Court who helped eliminate the federal right to an abortion, leading to what she referred to as “Trump abortion bans.”“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree, the government and Donald Trump, certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Ms. Harris said.Mr. Trump reiterated that he supports exceptions for cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk, though some state bans allow for virtually no exceptions.Asked whether he would veto a national abortion ban, Mr. Trump declined to answer. When a moderator noted that his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, had said he would veto it if it came to his desk, Mr. Trump replied, “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness.” At a different point, though, he said, “I’m not signing a ban and there’s no reason to sign a ban.”Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor who began her career specializing in prosecuting child sexual assault cases, described what she saw as the dangerous outcomes from some of the state bans in place now.“Understand what that means: a survivor of a crime of violation to their body does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next,” she said, a reality in some states that she called “immoral.”In some cases, she said, a young victim of incest could be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. In other cases, she said, women who wanted their pregnancies have struggled to receive care when facing serious health complications. More

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      Debate Trump-Harris: qué podemos esperar

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      Los candidatos se preparan para el debate del martes por la noche, el único que tienen programado. Analizamos los aspectos más importantes que podrían discutir.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El debate del martes por la noche será el más importante de la carrera política de la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, ofreciéndole su mayor audiencia hasta el momento, mientras el país intenta saber más detalles sobre qué tipo de presidenta podría ser.El expresidente Donald Trump llega al debate con la esperanza de superar un verano difícil. Harris ha acortado distancias en las encuestas desde que sustituyó al presidente Joe Biden como candidata del Partido Demócrata, y el martes puede ser una de las mejores oportunidades de Trump para revertir ese impulso antes de que los estadounidenses comiencen la votación anticipada.Los colaboradores y partidarios de Harris quieren que provoque al expresidente para que despotrique de manera incoherente. El equipo de Trump quiere que vuelva a centrar la conversación en tres áreas que consideran terreno ganado: la economía, la inmigración y el caos global.Sin más debates programados entre Harris y Trump, el enfrentamiento se perfila como uno de los 90 minutos más cruciales que la política estadounidense ha visto en generaciones.Estos son los factores a los que hay que prestar atención:¿Trump podrá contenerse?Los asesores del expresidente tienen tatuado en la memoria el primer debate de 2020, en el que un Trump sudoroso y confundido por la covid despotricó y desvarió, interrumpiendo a Joe Biden y perdiendo el interés de tantos votantes que sus encuestas descendieron notablemente tras el debate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Trump Can Afford to Disrespect His Anti-Abortion Voters

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      The Babylon Bee, which is like The Onion for conservative Christians, last month ran a despairing story about the presidential options anti-abortion voters have before them. “Pro-Lifers Excited to Choose Between Moderate Amount of Baby Murder and High Amount of Baby Murder,” said the headline. It was a dark joke, but it spoke to something real: a disquiet among some anti-abortion activists over Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the abortion bans enabled by his Supreme Court appointees. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told my Times colleague Astead W. Herndon that declining evangelical enthusiasm for Trump could be a “grave danger” to his campaign.As someone who wants Trump to lose, I hope he’s right, but I’m skeptical. “One of the things that Trump has done is reveal what you might call the G.O.P.’s dirty little secret, and that is that it’s never really been only about abortion,” said Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute. Conservative activists, he argued, have long seen themselves as part of a moral crusade against the killing of babies, but Republican voters, even white evangelical ones, tend to have more complicated views. In P.R.R.I. surveys, he said, white evangelicals are more likely to identify the economy, crime and immigration as critical issues than abortion. “The bond between Trump and rank-and-file Republicans and between Trump and white evangelical Protestants has really not been abortion,” said Jones.Clearly, a second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for reproductive rights. He obviously doesn’t care about abortion and is happy to take whatever position suits him at any given moment. But many of the people he will sweep into office with him are devoted to abortion bans. Part of the purpose of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was to make sure there was a deep bench of MAGA apparatchiks ready to staff a second Trump administration, freeing him from the legal and bureaucratic roadblocks that stymied his first administration. The same people Heritage selected to defend Trump at all costs have thought deeply about how to use the levers of the federal government to restrict abortion.Still, in his spasmodic abortion positioning, Trump has annihilated the expectation that Republicans show deference to the social conservatives who’ve been crusading against abortion for a generation. On his vanity social media site, Truth Social, he wrote that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He’s come out against six-week abortion bans. He removed a plank from the Republican Party platform calling for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. He’s promised that his administration would provide free in vitro fertilization, a procedure that the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in June.In doing all this without losing significant support among Christian conservatives, he’s demonstrated how little leverage the anti-abortion movement has over him.Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on this issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats unite to center reproductive rights as Republicans flail on abortion

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare to meet on the debate stage in Philadelphia, the battle over abortion rights has vaulted to the center of the 2024 presidential election campaign, the first since the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade.At the party’s convention last month, Democrats spotlighted the harrowing stories of women placed in medical peril as a result of post-Roe abortion bans in their states. Last week, the Harris campaign launched a 50-stop “reproductive freedom” bus tour across several battleground states, kicking off in Trump’s “back yard”, miles from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in south Florida.And this weekend, days before the first – and perhaps only – primetime presidential debate, where the issue is likely to be raised, the Harris campaign debuted three new TV ads reminding voters that Trump has repeatedly taking credit for his role in ending the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion. The message is blunt: because of Trump, one in three women of reproductive age now live in states where abortion is banned or significantly restricted. And it could get worse, they warn, if Trump is given a second term.“Donald Trump is a fundamental threat to reproductive freedom – and you don’t have to take our word for it – Trump said it himself,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement. “Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting to restore reproductive freedom in all 50 states because they trust women to make the right decisions for their families.”In the bitterly contested race for the White House, abortion remains a glaring vulnerability for the Republican nominee.“You know it’s an important issue because Trump is trying to change his position,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster.As a candidate, Trump has held conflicting positions on abortion, alternately boasting that he appointed three of the nine supreme court justices whose votes were decisive in overturning Roe, while complaining that Republican extremism on the issue has cost his party at the ballot box.​He recently appeared to endorse a ballot measure to expand abortion rights in his adopted home state of Florida, only to announce one day later – after sparking backlash among prominent conservative groups – that he would vote against it. He has also previously hinted at support for a 15-week federal ban only to insist that the issue should be left to the states. His campaign has said Trump would not sign a national abortion ban as president.While the economy remains the top election issue for voters this November, a New York Times/Siena College poll released in August showed that a growing share of battleground state voters, particularly women, say abortion will be central to their decision. Among women younger than 45, abortion has eclipsed the economy as their single most important issue.In the final months of the campaign, Democrats are aiming to harness the unabated anger over the loss of federal abortion protections, especially among women and young people, and unifying around a platform that seeks to protect what remains of abortion access and the availability of reproductive healthcare, including contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).In polling and focus groups, Lake said abortion rights remains an especially salient issue for women and the issue was helping to fuel a widening gender gap between Harris and Trump. Harris’s vocal support for abortion rights has not only energized young voters, a core Democratic constituency, but is also helping to persuade independent women and, as Lake put it, “older women who remember when abortion was illegal, and don’t think the idea of jailing doctors, investigating miscarriages, [and] eliminating birth control and IVF is a good idea”.View image in fullscreenIn recent weeks, Trump, who has long worried that Republican-led efforts to outlaw abortion and restrict access to reproductive care could imperil his White House bid, has sought recast his approach to the issue. During a town hall even in battleground Wisconsin, he endorsed a plan to make the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF – a type of fertility assistance that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and that some in the anti-abortion movement want to see limited.“We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said.Democrats assailed the proposal as insincere, pointing to the Republican’s record and the positions of his running mate, JD Vance.Trump has had “more positions on reproductive rights than he has had wives”, Ana Navarro, a TV personality and anti-Trump Republican, said last week, at the Florida launch of the Harris campaign’s bus tour.Democrats have leveraged the abortion issue to secure key victories in the 2022 midterms, when mobilization efforts around abortion rights drove strong turnout and enthusiasm, helping the party keep control of the Senate and limiting Republican gains in the House. In Michigan, Democrats secured a governing trifecta as voters in the state overwhelmingly turned out to back a ballot initiative enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution.“Bringing the message to the people, talking with women and healthcare providers and our families, that’s how we had such a historic outcome in our ’22 election here in Michigan,” the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a co-chair of Harris’s campaign, said in an MSNBC interview this week. “But it’s important, even for Michiganders and New Yorkers and Floridians, to know what’s at stake if we have a second Trump presidency.”Some Republicans have argued that the potency of abortion rights would wane in a noisy presidential election. But Lake believes the opposite could be true.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbortion rights are a priority for young voters who are more likely to turn out in a presidential election year. Constitutional amendments seeking to guarantee abortion rights are on the ballot in 10 states this fall, including battleground states like Arizona and Nevada as well as Florida, once a presidential bellwether that has trended Republican in recent cycles.“We are the belly of the beast here in the state of Florida,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party. “We are the state that has drastically moved on abortion from two years ago having full access to now being one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country.”Florida Democrats are hopeful the ballot initiative will help boost the former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s underdog campaign against the Republican incumbent senator Rick Scott. Elsewhere in the battle for control of the Senate, vulnerable Democratic incumbents Jon Tester of Montana and Jacky Rosen of Nevada will appear on the ballot alongside measures to protect abortion rights.Fried, who joined the Harris campaign kick-off in Palm Beach county last week, said the referendum had helped draw attention to the state – and was mobilizing voters of all political stripes.“If they can take away access to reproductive healthcare, what else is next?” she said. “What other types of rights have we moved the needle on that would be going backwards if Trump is re-elected?”The state’s referendum would overturn the state’s unpopular six-week ban, guaranteeing the right to abortion “before viability”, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. A poll released in mid-August found that 56% of Sunshine state voters support the proposed amendment, just shy of the 60% threshold needed to become law. Yet it drew more support than Trump, who led Harris 51% to 47% in the state, according to the survey.Abortion remains Harris’s strongest issue. She holds a 15-percentage-point advantage over Trump in a national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College. Yet there were also signs that Trump’s mixed signals have muddied the waters on the issue. According to the survey, released Sunday, nearly half of independent voters say they did not think the former president would sign into law a national abortion ban.Still, the Republican nominee must contend with his base, particularly evangelicals and other conservative Christians, who expect Trump to further restrict access to abortion as president.Kristan Hawkins, president of the prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, recently told the Guardian that young conservatives were “shocked and saddened to see someone who they thought was pro-life, or who had always reaffirmed pro-life values, walking back on that”.Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia offers one of the highest-profile opportunities for Harris to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on abortion. Reproductive rights supporters anticipate Harris will challenge the former president over his attempts to shift positions on the issue.“I hope that Vice-President Harris makes it crystal clear for the tens of millions of people who are watching that leaving it to the states is not a moderate position – that it is extreme,” said Rob Davidson, a Michigan-based emergency physician and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, a left-leaning coalition of physicians and medical professionals that recently endorsed Harris.Davidson said voters will also want to hear Harris articulate her vision for expanding access to reproductive healthcare.“We know what Trump did,” he said. “What are we going to do going forward?” More