Democrats lean on abortion issue in Arizona and other swing states. Will this strategy work?

PHOENIX — Streaming service ads are a different experience in swing states like Arizona with less than a month to go until Election Day. Voters are being bombarded with ads, billboards and yard signs.
Three political ads played back-to-back within the first 10 minutes of me turning on a show on Hulu. The first two were focused on the issue of abortion. One featured a doctor attacking Republican senatorial candidate Kari Lake on this issue, while another took aim at Arizona’s long-serving Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert over the issue.
The third 30-second long clip painted Schweikert’s Democratic opponent, Dr. Amit Shah, a former state representative, as a “radical” on immigration and crime.
This is already turning out to be a unique election for Arizona, Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates told me in Phoenix on Monday.
“We’re going to have on average 79 contests on everyone’s ballot, some ballots with up to 87 contests,” he said, noting that out of these, 18 will be propositions.
“It’ll be the first time since 2006 … the ballot will be made up of two pieces of paper,” Gates said. “So that’s a logistical challenge. It’s an educational challenge.”
Voters in Arizona will continue to be targeted by political ads that highlight the most contentious issues on the lengthy ballot: border security and abortion.
One proposition regarding the border would criminalize migrants entering Arizona illegally, not through the port of entry, and empower local law enforcement to uphold federal immigration law. According to an AZ Family September poll, nearly three-fifths of voters surveyed support both the measures.
Another proposition, Arizona Abortion Access Act, would make abortion legal for up to 22 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the mother. The current law bans abortions past 15 weeks, with the mother’s health being the only exception.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Arizona resurrected a Civil War-era abortion ban that the state legislature repealed with the helping hand of Republicans. The law was officially taken off the books in September. Now, Arizona voters will have a chance to expand abortion access.
While Democratic candidates are making this issue central to their messaging — especially after Vice President Kamala Harris, who has championed abortion rights, became the 2024 nominee — Republicans are dodging this issue and simply reiterating former President Donald Trump’s talking point of not installing any federal ban.
Last week, Lake in a social media post said her opponent, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego claimed she wanted to ban abortion, but that isn’t true. “What we need to do is really start supporting women and giving them true choices. We need to prioritize. We talk about being pro-family, and it’s about time we put the money where our mouth is,” Lake said in an interview with NBC News.
“This is where I can actually help in the Senate, by pushing some really great legislation that would actually provide baby bonuses for families, extend and beef up child tax credits to provide more tax incentives, and tax cuts for moms and dads and babies,” Lake said.
Gallego argues that Arizona needs to expand the protections around abortion so that the repealed law cannot be overturned in the state House and Senate.
“It could just get overturned later by another state House or state Senate,” Gallego told NBC. “The only protection we really, really have is to codify this and put this on the ballot and enshrine Roe and protect abortion rights.”
Voters will consider ballots related to abortion in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, New York and South Dakota.
In 2022 and 2023, the rhetoric about abortion rights amplified voter turnout in red states like Kansas and Ohio, which is wgt Democrats have continued to use the issue to their advantage, but, as the New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant wrote, it is not necessary that those favoring abortion provision on the ballot are aligned with Harris and that ultimately, “Legal abortion is more popular than Democrats are.”
A recent Fox News poll found that 50% of GOP voters in Arizona plan to vote in favor of the abortion rights bill on the ballot, highlighting a larger favorability for a specific issue, rather than the party since its unlikely half of the Republican voters in the state will vote for Harris.
Benjamin Case, who leads the ballot initiative research at Arizona State University’s Center for Work Democracy, told the news outlet that “people will vote differently when they’re allowed to vote on a policy versus when they have to vote for a politician as a proxy for all their views on different policies.”
“The conventional wisdom was that abortion was this polarizing issue that splits the country down the middle,” said Case, but “one of the things that allowed that misperception to survive was the fact that voters weren’t really asked very often directly.”