WSJ What’s News - Chasing the Vote: Arizona’s Abortion Battle

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

After a court revived a Civil War-era abortion ban in Arizona, lawmakers quickly moved to repeal it. But the saga has already revealed fractures among Republicans who have struggled to coalesce around how far to push abortion restrictions, while Democrats have had success using the issue to motivate their base and get independent voters to come to their side. WSJ political reporter Jimmy Vielkind travels to the battleground state to find out how voters are weighing the issue of abortion as they prepare to head to the polls. Relevant Links:  Why Arizona Will Be Ground Zero for the 2024 Abortion Fight  Arizona Is the Next Abortion Battleground  Arizona Legislature Votes to Repeal State’s Ban on Virtually All Abortions  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ecolab Water for Climate. Less water, more growth. Results will vary. Learn more at Ecolab.com slash EWC. Ecolab Water for Climate. Transforming the way the world thinks about water. Alright, let's get started again. Thank you very much. That's Linda Chiles. We're sitting in her living room in Phoenix, Arizona, while she makes calls to voters on her cell phone as her cat, Miss Kitty, prowls nearby. It's mid-July, before President Biden ended his re-election campaign. Hi there, Nick. Nick, this is Linda Chiles, and I'm a volunteer with Maricopa County Democratic Party.

I'm not trying to sell you anything. It's just that we're reaching out to see if you would be interested in signing up for the early voting list and get your ballot. Okay, I guess not. That happens. Hang up. This is what politics looks like in the Arizona summer, spending as much time as you can in the A.C.

It's going okay. Hey, hey there. Oh, Rebecca, did I, did I call you and leave a message about the early voting? Linda grew up in a family that supported Republicans and voted that way for much of her life. The 80-year-old said she missed lots of the activism that swept up others in her generation, like marches for women's rights and against the Vietnam War. She's retired now, and I met her because she spent her days this spring and summer working on the Arizona for Abortion Access, or AAA, campaign. Before she switched to making phone calls, she was stopping people at a popular trail head to gather signatures to put an abortion

rights referendum on the Arizona ballot this November. The response? The reception is always very, very positive. That is a draw that I think without question that will be reaching out where people might not have voted already. That's why it's so incredibly important for us to talk to folks between now and November. This is an election unlike any that Americans have seen in generations, with voters having to quickly absorb some major twists.

There was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, who's on an historic quest to regain the White House after losing it, and the sudden rise of Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket, after Joe Biden became the first president since 1968 not to seek reelection. Beyond their political promises, both Harris and Trump have records in Washington that voters will have to sort through before November. What Linda has found is that where the candidates stand on abortion matters a lot to the people she talks to.

It's largely because Arizona has become ground zero for the political fight around abortion access after the fall of Roe v. Wade. I would say abortion is up there and the woman's right to choose is a top factor among other things. I don't think it's anyone's, the government's business or anyone's really what another woman does with her body. I do believe in certain abortions so you either go one way or another way probably end up going with no abortions. People here are counting on the abortion issue to drive people to the polls. I'm Jimmy Vielkind and this is Chasing the Vote, a new multi-part series from the Wall Street Journal. Earlier this year I brought you Chasing the Base, looking at big political themes as Donald

Trump won the GOP nomination. For this new series, each episode will examine a key issue in a swing state that may determine the course of the general election. Abortion has been a big issue in American politics for decades, but it's become even more salient since 2022, when the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. Democrats have had success using the issue to motivate their base and to get independent voters to come to their side. Trump and other top Republicans have backed away from the fight after they came up short in the 2022 midterm elections and a number of other high-profile races. I went to Arizona in June and July and followed up with the people I met after Biden dropped out of the race. I wanted to find out whether abortion would be enough to help energize Democrats

and push the party to victory in a state that Biden won in 2020 by only around 10,000 votes. Or whether the Republicans' tactical retreat would be enough to make voters focus on other issues, like border security and the economy. Arizona is the biggest battleground where abortion is expected to be on the ballot. That's my colleague Eliza Collins, a national politics reporter at The Journal. And it's a really tight state and it's a coin flip who will win these really important seats. The White House could be decided in Arizona.

The majority in the Senate could be decided in Arizona. There are two competitive House seats that could decide the majority of the House. Eliza grew up in Arizona and moved back there in 2022, after the road decision was overturned. The state's abortion laws have gone back and forth since then, prompting a lot of public outcry in the closely divided state. In March of 2022, Arizona officials enacted a law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy instead of the roughly 24 weeks allowed under Roe. While more than 90% of abortions take place in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, some serious

problems of fetal development can't be confirmed by medical tests until around 20 weeks. And there was another law banning abortion in Arizona dating back to 1864, when Arizona was a U.S. territory that was still on the books. After Dobbs, judges in Arizona ruled that law stood, but then state lawmakers earlier this year voted to repeal it, leaving the 15-week ban, which also allows for an abortion in a medical emergency. Eliza says her reporting shows that Harris is a stronger messenger on the issue than Biden. He was rarely out front on the issue. But that's a very

different situation than Harris, who before she was the Democratic nominee was out talking about the issue. She's been in Arizona holding events supporting access to abortion. the issue. She's been in Arizona holding events supporting access to abortion. So Arizona, this November, up and down the ballot, reproductive freedom is at stake. And you have the power to protect it with your vote. It is your power. I wanted to look beyond the rallies, so I drove to a quiet part of Northern Phoenix. There's little to indicate that Camelback Family Planning

is an abortion clinic from the outside. It's just another office and another strip mall, only there's sometimes someone holding an anti-abortion sign outside. It's the busiest clinic in the state, according to the owner, Dr. Gabrielle Goodrich. We had no restrictions before then, before 2010. I mean, very few. One, I think it was

a very loose parental consent. Goodrich described what has to happen before a woman can get an abortion in Arizona, including an initial doctor's visit at least 24 hours before a procedure can happen, and an ultrasound. She said these restrictions are a relatively recent phenomenon here. And then the radical kind of got more radical, and they started introducing legislative laws here that chipped away at people's rights to control their bodies. So what can happen, and what has happened in many states around the country is where you have a total ban

and the actual harm that's done. So it's not fiction anymore. A CBS News poll from May found that 65% of likely Arizona voters supported a constitutional right to an abortion. But a survey released in June by the independent research firm Noble Predictive Insights found

mixed results. When Arizona voters were asked specifically about a right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability, or about 24 weeks, 41% said they supported it, 41% said they opposed it, with another 18% undecided. That's not surprising to Kathy Herrod. She spent a quarter century lobbying for abortion restrictions while working for the Center for Arizona Policy, an evangelical Christian group. Our state has always been pro-life, has advocated pro-life policies, has seen the value and

the dignity of the sanctity of human life, supported the life of the unborn child from the moment of conception. Look at the language of the amendment. It says that it's a fundamental right to an abortion. Those words matter. Herod says passage of the amendment would throw out a lot of the abortion restrictions currently on the books, not just the 15-week ban, but many of the prerequisites that Dr. Goodrich was concerned about. Herod calls them common-sense safety precautions. She works closely with Cindy Dahlgren, who's helping to lead a campaign against the amendment. Last I checked with our campaign manager, it was over 3,000, 3,500, something like that,

volunteers. They go out every day, various amounts, mostly on the weekends, but every day out they were doing a decline to sign campaign. It didn't seem to be enough. The AAA campaign supporting the amendment submitted more than 823,000 signatures, more than double the number required to get on the ballot. Dahlgren said her fight would continue. They call the effort, It Goes Too Far.

More on how it's going after the break. Introducing TD Insurance for Business with customized coverage options for your business. Because at TD Insurance, we understand that your business is unique, so your business insurance should be too. Whether you're a shop owner, a pet groomer, a contractor, or a consultant, you can get customized coverage for your business. Contact a licensed TD Insurance advisor to learn more. I'm from the It Goes Too Far campaign. Have you heard of the abortion movement that they're promoting to ballot in November?

That's Nancy Bardo, who's one of those campaigners. I met her on a Tuesday morning outside a library in the Biltmore area of Phoenix. Well, that's why we're here, because a lot of people are going to be faced with voting on it in November, and we wanted people to be fully aware of what it will do if a Constitutional right to an abortion is enshrined in a Constitution. Bartow's a former state senator. Her pitch doesn't make an explicit anti-abortion argument, but says the amendment could open the door to late-term abortions

and could undo requirements like parental consent for minors. My colleague Eliza Collins says that both sides of the abortion debate expect the referendum to boost turnout. — Democrats are hoping that that will help turn out people and get people to vote for Democrats. Republicans are hoping that it will get out anti-abortion advocates to show up and vote. And then voters who like the measure will be able to separate their votes. So vote for the measure and still vote for Republican. But there's some evidence that literally putting abortion on the ballot will tilt things more

toward the Democrats. Remember that polls show voters in Arizona generally support abortion rights. While Vice President Harris and other Democrats have put the issue at the center of their speeches and campaign ads, Republicans, by and large, have tried to duck the argument. I got a clear sense of that when I drove south of Phoenix to the city of Chandler, where a Republican women's group was holding a candidate forum. Kelly Cooper is running for Congress. He's a restaurant owner who's challenging an incumbent Democrat. If you look at party lines, that will or could potentially encourage Democrat voters to come out and vote for that issue because a lot of them, not Democrats necessarily, but a lot of folks in that arena, that's

their single issue. I think what I would like voters to understand is I have nothing to do with federalizing any of those things. I think that the voters in Arizona should decide. And that's what the referendum is all about. Trump also says he doesn't support federal action on abortion, and it should be left to the states. At his behest, this summer the Republican Party changed some language in its official

platform, dropping its long-standing call for a national ban. Trump also said, while talking to reporters at an airport in April, that Arizona went too far with the 1864 full ban. So for 52 years people have wanted to end Roe v. Wade to get it back to the states. We did that. It was an incredible thing, an incredible achievement. We did that and now the states have it and the states are putting out what they want. State Senator T.J.

Shope said he'd also rather not talk about abortion, even though it came to dominate his life this spring. The 39-year-old grocery store owner was one of the few Republicans who crossed party lines and voted with Democrats to repeal the 1864 abortion law. Pro and anti-abortion activists demonstrated at the Capitol, prompting Shope to be escorted by police from the parking lot to his Capitol office, where we met.

It's as simple as this. I was faced with something that it appeared that 85 percent of all of our polling shows that that we saw at the time of Arizona's didn't like and my job ultimately as a legislator is to try to represent my district and my state as well as I can. Republicans say voters are more concerned about immigration and the economy. So they're focusing their rhetoric there and hoping, like Eliza told me, that voters will split their feelings about candidates from their beliefs on abortion. To hear how voters were thinking, I went to the mall.

That's after the break. Hey Prime members, did you know you could be listening to this show ad-free on Amazon Music? Prime members get access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts. To listen to your favorite podcasts without ads, simply download the Amazon Music app or visit Amazon.com slash WSJ. That's Amazon.com slash WSJ. Fashion Square is a huge mall in Scottsdale, a city about 30 minutes northeast of downtown Phoenix. It has three levels of stores, everything from Gucci to Cinnabon.

I found Josh and Efrem Lonsaco in the food court. The brothers are devout Christians who oppose abortion and both said they would vote against the ballot measure. Efrem voted for Trump in 2020 and will probably do so again. Josh, who's younger, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and said he's wary of Trump because of the former president's actions on January 6, 2021. He said in July that he was ready to vote for Biden again, and now is researching Harris. What I did last time and what I might go for again is vote for Biden and then vote for

like Republican senators if I can or like House of Representatives, just to keep things nice and divided. Voters at Fashion Square were mixed in their opinions, and Republicans said they weren't thinking much about abortion. Mike Farrell said he supports abortion in some instances, but other issues weigh more heavily. I'm not totally Republican in that respect. There are some things I like on the Democratic side, but there's just too many things on

the Republican side that or more with me. The Arizonans I met who supported abortion rights were more likely to have supported Democrats, and they said having the referendum on the ballot would get them to the polls. Abortion rights advocates are leaning into this. Thank you. Have a great day, guys. Thank you. Appreciate it.

I met Robin Williams at a table for the AAA campaign outside of Brick Road, an LGBTQ-owned coffee shop in Tempe. The cafe has become a hub of the effort, collecting petitions to get the referendum on the ballot and regularly hosting canvassers of various stripes. I did this in the 70s when we were trying to get Roe vs. Wade, and I'm going to do it again because women should have rights over their bodies, And, you know, we're not second class citizens. One of the people Robin met was Garrett Bailey. He's 32, and when we spoke in July, he said he was dreading the election.

He's more excited now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, but even before that, he said abortion was the thing that was going to get him off the couch and out to vote. He's planning to start a family and wants to make sure his wife will have access to full reproductive health care. Women's rights, I guess that is a huge one for sure. My wife and I are thinking about getting pregnant soon and I think if that's not a safe option, that's not really something that we're going to jump into.

Ultimately, Arizona shows why the Democrats' strongest argument, that they're the bulwark against abortion restrictions, is a potent motivator for their base, but also how the argument has its limits among swing voters. Some people I talked to who were independents said it would be a nudge for them to vote for Harris, but others said they'd split their tickets. At the same time, social conservatives are also jazzed up. My biggest takeaway from Arizona about how abortion will factor into the presidential election is that it provides as powerful a reason to vote as the candidates do.

Here's how Christina Curso, an anti-abortion activist from the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert, puts it. It will get voters out on both sides. People constantly talk about bringing Democrats out, but this is really woken up the pro-life Christians at home quietly praying on their couch, giving them the out to vote. Chasing the Vote is part of the Wall Street Journal's What's News. This episode was produced by Ariana Asparu and Jess Jupiter. Sound designed by Michael Laval. News.