KAYLA: Hi, this is Kayla (ph) calling from Chicago. Four years ago today, one day before my master's degree graduation from Northwestern University and two days before my wedding, I wrote and planned to record an NPR time stamp. But I forgot, and I've regretted it ever since. The time now is...
SUSAN DAVIS, HOST:
...1:12 p.m. on Thursday, June 20.
KAYLA: Things may have changed by the time you hear this. My education and marital status will be the same, but I will have finally crossed an NPR time stamp off my bucket list. Enjoy the show.
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DAVIS: I like to think we rank number one on that list.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Yeah, right.
DAVIS: Time stamp, marriage, education.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: We are a top priority over here.
DAVIS: Hey, there, it's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.
KURTZLEBEN: I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign.
LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
DAVIS: And today, abortion politics and how they're shaping the 2024 election. It's been nearly two years since the Supreme Court's landmark decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and hand back to individual states the power to decide abortion access laws. Mara, if Republicans want this election to be a referendum on the economy and immigration, it seems pretty clear that Democrats would much rather this election be about abortion access.
LIASSON: Absolutely. Now, this election is going to be about a couple of things. It is going to be about the economy, probably number one. And then it's going to be about issues like immigration, which works for Republicans, and abortion, which works for Democrats. And that's why Democrats are going to be talking about it a lot between now and Election Day.
DAVIS: Danielle, we have new polling data out. What does it tell us about where the electorate is right now on this issue?
KURTZLEBEN: Sure. So when it comes to abortion, the NPR/PBS News/Marist poll shows that a majority of voters, 54%, think Biden would better handle abortion than Trump. Trump got 42%. And across a lot of polls, abortion is one of the few issues where Biden really does better than Trump and quite markedly better...
LIASSON: Yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: ...Than Trump and regularly better than him on these polls. So that also reflects a just broader trend that we have seen in recent polls, especially post-Dobbs, but even a bit pre-, which is Americans lean towards abortion being legal in all or most cases. Looking at Pew data, for example, from this year, from April, nearly two-thirds, 63%, of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases; 36 believe illegal. But poll numbers mask so much subtlety.
DAVIS: Danielle, I'm glad you brought up that point about polling being tricky because, in our own polling, it shows about 8% of voters say that abortion has been their No. 1 issue, and that's been static for most of 2024, which, on one hand, would seem to suggest that abortion is really not a top issue for a lot of voters. But we know the evidence suggests otherwise. In elections, in referendums and ballot choices since the 2022 Dobbs decision, abortion does seem to be a much bigger voter motivator than polls might suggest.
KURTZLEBEN: Yes. And I think there are two ways to look at how abortion factors into voters' decisions. One is to look at that result you just mentioned - 8% list abortion as their top issue - and just look at that in a very plain, unnuanced way, that even if you have voters who lean towards abortion being legal in all or most cases but who don't have abortion top of mind, they might well vote for Donald Trump. And that is quite true of one voter that I talked to this spring at a Donald Trump rally in Michigan. This is a young man named Jay Andrew Beckwith (ph). He's 30. And I asked him about reproductive rights.
JAY ANDREW BECKWITH: I'm pro-choice, personally. A lot of people, a lot of guys are not. I think it's important to protect women's rights and reproductive rights. However, I also don't think it's the No. 1, 2 or 3 issue.
KURTZLEBEN: So this guy flat out saying, look, I care, but also there are other things I care more about, therefore, I'm going to vote for Trump. But there's another way of looking at this, in that I don't think you have a lot of voters who wander into the voting booth or who pull their ballot from their mailbox and think, gosh, what is my No. 1 issue, and therefore, who am I voting for? I think a lot about something that a Democratic strategist told me in 2022, the midterms then right after Dobbs. And that strategist told me that Democrats took abortion and made it about more than abortion. They made it about Republicans' extremism. So if you use abortion as, for example, an object lesson in, hey, here's why you should or shouldn't vote for X party, then abortion becomes about a lot more.
LIASSON: Yeah. And, you know, the other thing abortion becomes a lot about is freedom. And the Democrats, for a change, actually have a freedom message, the freedom to choose, which is something you're going to hear a lot from Democrats, much bigger than abortion. Donald Trump and Republicans want to restrict your rights across the board.
DAVIS: Mara, it's an interesting issue because, on the policy of it, Democrats feel that they're in a really strong position. But it's also notable that this is not an issue that falls into President Joe Biden's comfort zone on politics. He doesn't personally seem to seek out many opportunities to talk about this, to campaign on it, even though on the policy, he very much supports what Democrats are trying to do here.
LIASSON: That's right. It's always better to have a woman delivering the message on abortion anyway. And Vice President Harris has done that, and there have been a lot of other female surrogates for him. So I don't think it's that much of a disadvantage that he doesn't talk about it all the time personally. But the message that you're going to hear a lot of is that the freedom to choose is not about abortion. It's not about not having a child or not bringing a pregnancy to term. It's about keeping your fertility. And as soon as IVF entered the abortion debate, IVF is all about having more kids, not fewer kids.
DAVIS: I think you - I'm glad you brought that up because I do think, especially since the Dobbs decision, this isn't just about abortion access anymore. This debate has become a broader debate about reproductive rights, access to birth control, access to IVF.
LIASSON: Right.
DAVIS: And generally speaking, those issues do still tend to bend towards the Democratic position.
LIASSON: And don't forget the Republicans in the Senate just blocked a measure that would have protected access to IVF.
KURTZLEBEN: And to add to all of that, I think part of what you're seeing here is what - is the difference between fighting the status quo or being more fine with the status quo, right? For a very long time, Republicans, and especially the white evangelicals in their base, they spent decades saying, well, whatever we want on abortion, it sure ain't what we got. We don't like Roe, we want to get rid of it, then we'll go from there. And now there is serious debate among Republicans, among people on the right about, OK, do we like IVF, yes or no? Do we believe in fetal personhood, yes or no? Those kinds of debates within a movement very much also had happened among people who support abortion rights. But right now, people on the left, people in the Democratic Party, people who support abortion rights - those differences between them have kind of vanished. It's mainly just like, hey, what we got right now, we don't like it. We want Roe back.
DAVIS: All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about this when we get back.
And we're back. And, Danielle, I'm curious about how much former President Trump is campaigning on the issue of abortion. As someone who has traveled to his rallies and has been talking to his supporters, how central to his core message is the issue of abortion?
KURTZLEBEN: Not terribly. And when it does come up, his tune on it almost never changes. He generally says when he brings it up that, hey, the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and now it went back to the states. Aren't you glad about that? Everybody likes that, he says, which, I mean, fact check...
DAVIS: That's a little debatable, but yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: And, of course, his crowds love it. But he doesn't always bring it up. I was just going through his speech in Racine, Wis., this week. It didn't come up in that speech. So it's certainly not one of his central things, which are, you know, other culture war issues like transgender athletes in sports and also, of course, immigration.
DAVIS: Mara, I try never to use the words unprecedented or extraordinary anymore because I feel like those words have no meaning in modern politics. But I do still think it is worth pausing to make the point that it is pretty remarkable and unprecedented and amazing in modern politics that the Republican candidate for president is also campaigning and saying he will not sign a federal abortion ban. That is not a position that a Republican presidential candidate could have had since Roe.
LIASSON: No, but he can say that because Republicans, at least for now, have won the war. Now, they might lose the battle. I mean, they're dealing with all the negative consequences of winning. Like I said, they worked for 50 years to overturn Roe, and they finally did. But the thing that Trump does that's so interesting to me is he is running an almost completely base-oriented campaign. He hasn't tempered his rhetoric at all about January 6. He's talked as harshly about immigrants as he ever had. Abortion is the only issue where he has, quote, "moved to the middle." And his move to the middle is, of course, to repeat over and over again, it's up to the states. They will ask him questions like, is it OK for states to track women's pregnancies? And he'll say, well, it doesn't matter what I think. The states can do whatever they want. I don't know how far that gets him.
DAVIS: Danielle, I always think it's important to remember that this isn't just about the presidential. You and I today were just listening in on a call with Democratic campaign chairs, and it's very clear that Democrats think that the abortion issue is critical to both their chances of holding onto control of the Senate and possibly taking control of the House.
KURTZLEBEN: Yes, totally. And there is something really interesting that was said on this call by Democratic Senator Tina Smith from Minnesota. She was saying that because of a law that we have talked about on this podcast before - it's called the Comstock Act. It is currently on the books, and were it interpreted in a particular, quite conservative way, it is possible, say some legal experts, that it could end the mailing of abortion pills, which account for more than half of abortions, or even that it could quite overwhelmingly curtail abortion nationwide. And so she said, listen, even if you've passed a law, a ballot measure in your state protecting abortion, that might not be enough.
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TINA SMITH: If you live in a state where right now you feel that your rights are protected because of action that your governor and state legislature have taken, forget about it because Donald Trump, as president, has beliefs wrongly that he has the power to roll that all away.
KURTZLEBEN: Now, she's getting at Donald Trump there, of course. But also, this has big repercussions in all those other state races - right? - like, for example, Arizona, where there may be such a thing on the ballot; Florida, where it is on the ballot for this fall. But besides that, they're also very much making the case that, hey, Biden says he wants to codify Roe. Well, you'd better elect us if you really want that to happen. But I know, Sue, that you can tell us that that's not...
DAVIS: Easier said than done.
KURTZLEBEN: ...Necessarily going to happen.
DAVIS: Yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
DAVIS: Yeah.
LIASSON: Well, the two states to really watch are the two battleground states, Arizona, for sure, and Nevada, because that is what Democrats hope will boost abortion rights turnout. I mean, we don't think it'll make a difference - much of a difference in Montana and Ohio, which is where the two embattled Democratic Senate incumbents are running for reelection.
DAVIS: I mean, that's an important point, too. I mean, abortion matters. It matters a lot in politics until it doesn't. I think that it's important to remember that Republican governors like Mike DeWine in Ohio and Brian Kemp in Georgia handily won reelection despite signing restrictive abortion laws. When you're talking about Texas and Florida, Ted Cruz is up for reelection, Rick Scott, both Republican senators. They're heavily favored to win, despite their own states having restrictive abortion laws. I mean, it's an issue that bends towards Democrats, but it's important to remember that it doesn't mean electoral defeat for a Republican candidate. They can outrun popular opinion on this issue.
LIASSON: That's right. But there's also a flip side to that in very, very red states like Kansas, where a statewide referendum enshrining abortion rights in the Constitution passed overwhelmingly. Kansas isn't any less red, but you have to assume that a lot of anti-abortion rights voters voted for that referendum. In other words, they were not willing to make Kansas a constitutionally anti-abortion state because they care about freedom or some other reason. But it's a complicated issue.
KURTZLEBEN: Well, and that also gets back to the priorities question - right? - is that if abortion is not your top priority, maybe it won't sway you against Trump, but you very well might be a person who would vote for Trump but also would vote for a ballot measure for abortion rights...
LIASSON: Right.
KURTZLEBEN: ...In your state.
LIASSON: Right.
KURTZLEBEN: There are a lot of...
LIASSON: ...Crosscurrents, yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: ...Complex voters out there. Yeah.
DAVIS: All right, that is it for us today. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow with the weekly roundup. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.
KURTZLEBEN: I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign.
LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
DAVIS: And thanks for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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