Biden launches ad blitz after Arizona abortion ruling
Perhaps you’ve noticed. The Democratic president Donald “Now 88 Counts” Trump once called “Sleepy Joe” is hammering MAGA Republicans over their post-Roe revocation of women’s reproductive freedoms in state after state.
Biden “plans to pummel Trump on abortion” (Politico):
Joe Biden’s campaign plans to hammer Donald Trump for his role in erasing abortion rights largely by enlisting ordinary American women who have suffered from restrictions on the procedure, elevating their voices in place of the president’s own.
This approach was immediately on display this week in a Biden campaign video featuring the story of a Texas woman released after Trump announced he would defer to state-level abortion laws, some of which impose draconian limits on women and physicians. Biden himself made no appearance in the ad, except to deliver a standard campaign finance disclosure line.
As the reporters frame it, Biden is taking a back seat here because of his “complicated history” on abortion. This, rather than Politico conceding that women are their own best advocates for reproductive freedom. The power of women’s first-person accounts was clear in recent elections in Ohio and in Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky.
Biden advisers took particular note of an ad Beshear ran in the closing stages of his campaign featuring the testimonial of a woman, Hadley Duvall, who had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was a child, and who would have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term under policies favored by Kentucky Republicans, including Beshear’s opponent.
Eric Hyers, a Democratic strategist who managed the Beshear campaign, said Duvall’s message had echoed across Kentucky, including in constituencies that do not ordinarily lean to the left.
“The voters who moved the most when hearing messages like Hadley’s were the opposite of the voters you might think,” Hyers said. “It was rural voters, male voters, older voters, Republican voters, non-college educated voters.”
Messaging expert Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”) has long insisted that the central issue in the national abortion debate is not choice or justice but freedom. It’s about whether, when (and with whom) to have a child. Republicans “believe every rapist has the right to choose who has their child. We believe that’s a family choice.” Duvall made that message as clear as a punch in the gut.
Working the eye
The national alarm over the Arizona Supreme Court’s reanimating the Arizona Territory’s 1864 abortion ban, Republicans and Trump himself are staggering and attempting to walk back their extremist positions. The Biden campaign means to keep them backed into a corner fending off blows (MSNBC):
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign launched a paid media blitz about reproductive rights in Arizona on Thursday, two days after the state’s Supreme Court upheld a near-total abortion ban dating to 1864.
The seven-figure ad buy focuses on former President Donald Trump’s latest abortion stance, in which he again took credit for overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling because of the justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and said states should decide abortion policy.
The move is part of a larger, more aggressive strategy to seize on Trump’s record on abortion, with the Biden team quickly mobilizing to respond on an issue it sees as the most motivating one for voters in November.
The Biden campaign released these ads before Tuesday’s ruling in Arizona.
This is exactly what Democrats need to be doing now: showing voters some fight. Trump won the fealty of his MAGA base by appealing to white Christian conservatives’ persecution complex and convincing them he was their champion. Now it’s Democrats’ turn. Post-Roe assaults on women’s reproductive freedoms means, as Hyers noted, that the audience for Democrats willing to fight back for them is far larger than Trump’s.
The famously teetotaling Trump and his MAGA allies are on their way to punch-drunk with the abortion backlash Democrats mean to exploit.
“This week, women across the state of Arizona are watching in horror as an abortion ban from 1864 with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of a woman will soon become the law of the land for Arizonans,” campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement Thursday. “This nightmare is only possible because of Donald Trump.”
Team Biden means to make Trump own it with their media buys and social media blitz.
As the late W.C. Fields might say, never give a sucker an even break.
UPDATE: Here’s another this morning.
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