On a recent sunny morning, Riley Heesch stood outside a coffee shop and signed her name to a petition aimed at putting the abortion issue on Arizona's November ballot.
She was glad to do it.
“I'm very passionate about abortion access,” Heesch said. “It's something that's being threatened, especially in Arizona, and it shouldn't be that way. It should be available to everyone and anyone who needs it.”
But his passion fizzled out when it came to the presidential race.
The 22-year-old child care worker, who just graduated from Arizona State University in Tempe, has paid little attention to the contest. And while she definitely won't be endorsing Donald Trump, she's not entirely sure she'll support Joe Biden, like she did in 2020.
She couldn't say why. “Maybe he's not the best candidate?” -Heesch ventured, before lukewarmly promising a possible vote for the president.
“I will do it if I have to,” he said. “Believe.”
As Biden fights for a second term, he's counting on reluctant voters like Heesch to eventually come forward, and on ballot measures like Arizona's abortion rights initiative to help swing them in his direction.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and with it a 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion, the issue has played in favor of the Democrats.
It helped the party avoid a widely expected defeat in the 2022 midterm elections and also forced Republicans, including Trump, to contort themselves as they try to satisfy social conservatives without alienating the majority of Americans who believe abortion should be legal. In most cases.
Voters in seven states, including GOP strongholds like Kansas, Kentucky and Montana, have defended abortion rights at the polls or rejected efforts to restrict access.
However, the issue still has to be tested in a presidential election year, when turnout will be significantly higher and a host of issues (the economy, border security, the war in Gaza) will compete for voters' attention. .
That does not diminish the importance of the abortion issue. “It's just a matter of priorities, given all the others that matter,” said Republican pollster David Winston.
Nearly a dozen states could have abortion rights initiatives on their ballot in November. (Efforts to present anti-abortion measures to voters in Iowa and Pennsylvania failed.)
Democratic strategists see the issue as vital not only to maintaining control of the White House, but also to boosting their candidates for Congress and statehouses across the country, in part by engaging voters – particularly Democrats and independents. – who might otherwise not participate in the elections.
“I hear all the arguments about the border, immigration and the economy,” said Mini Tammaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, a national organization that advocates for abortion rights. “But we can motivate voters on this issue and we can motivate young voters who, frankly, are a little disaffected right now and don't feel like they're being heard.”
Most of the abortion measures that have reached the polls, or could reach the polls, are in states like Maryland, New York and South Dakota, which are not seriously contested in the presidential race.
In Florida, voters will decide whether to repeal the six-week abortion ban and codify the right to abortion in the state constitution. But Florida is no longer the political battleground it was, having moved decisively toward the Republicans in recent years. In November it is only marginally competitive.
That leaves two important swing states, Arizona and Nevada, where Democrats hope abortion rights and measures enshrining them in law will help Biden come out on top.
Both were decided narrowly in 2020, but Arizona was the closer of the two; Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes, a 0.3% margin.
The state has since become a focal point of the abortion debate, after its Supreme Court upheld an 1864 law that imposed a near-total ban. (Bowling to pressure, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a measure setting a 15-week limit, with few exceptions. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs quickly signed it into law.)
The court's decision “shook the body politic,” said Stan Barnes, a Republican strategist in Phoenix, and gave Democrats a big boost down the ballot, though he expects the sentiment to dissipate by the fall.
Chuck Coughlin, an independent pollster in Phoenix, isn't so sure.
The abortion issue “certainly helps Democrats” as “something motivating to get people out and hang out.” [Trump’s] neck,” said Coughlin, who used to work for Republicans but left the party after Trump’s election.
“Taking away a right that people thought they had is a huge tsunami in American political life,” Coughlin said. “And then the electoral response is: 'Get your government out of my body!'”
On the northern edge of Phoenix, where patches of desert can still be seen amid relentless urban sprawl, Ruth Lambert was collecting signatures to put the issue of abortion before voters.
By 8:30 in the morning it was approaching 80 degrees and Lambert was sitting in the corner of a shopping center, sheltered under the partial shade of a palo verde tree.
The 73-year-old retiree moved to Arizona in 2004, just as her daughter was about to give birth. That granddaughter is now 20 years old, Lambert said, and she “can't understand” the rollback of abortion rights across the country.
“It's almost like a foreign concept,” said Lambert, who has been volunteering for the initiative's campaign since September.
He's surprised by how easy it has been to rally support (organizers hope to turn in the largest number of signatures in state history) and surprised by how many Republicans and self-described conservatives have put their names on the petitions.
“I don't really like to talk about parties. It's good policy,” Lambert said of the Arizona Abortion Rights initiative, as the measure is formally known. “It's not necessarily political.”
Proponents of an abortion rights initiative hope to turn in the largest number of signatures collected in Arizona history. The question is whether the measure can survive an expected legal challenge.
(Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)
But of course, it very much is. The ballot measure generates strong resistance from those who oppose abortion and others who feel it goes too far.
The bill would amend the state constitution to guarantee a “fundamental right” to abortion up to fetal viability (or approximately the 24th week of pregnancy) and beyond if a health care professional deems it necessary to “protect life or physical health or “mentality of the fetus.” pregnant person.”
Opponents say that would amount to abortion on demand, and that's why Coughlin, among others, intends to vote against the initiative if it reaches the polls.
That is not at all safe.
After Arizona voters approved a measure raising the minimum wage in 2016, Republican lawmakers pushed legislation that made it much more difficult to qualify ballot initiatives, imposing a series of finicky rules.
If, for example, the signature of one petition extends to the next, both may be disqualified. If someone who is registered to vote as “Jonathan” signs her name “John,” that may also be rejected.
Etc.
Organizers say they have already collected far more than the roughly 400,000 signatures needed to hold the vote, with more than a month left before the July 3 deadline. The deadline to start printing ballots is the end of August.
That opens “a seven-week challenge in which every imaginable line on the petition sheets will be challenged,” said Stacy Pearson, a Democratic strategist who has run several initiative campaigns. The final arbiter will be the same conservative Supreme Court that upheld the Civil War-era abortion law.
Polls suggest that if the initiative reaches the polls, it will likely pass. And it would likely help Biden and at least partially boost the rest of the Democratic field.
While abortion may not be a priority for most voters, the issue could involve those like Heesch, the 22-year-old child care worker who would otherwise be of little use to the president.
“In many ways, Democrats are going to fight against the couch,” that is, the indifference of stay-at-home voters that the party is counting on, said pollster Natalie Jackson.
“In a close election, you would rather be on the side of the vast majority of the population,” said Jackson, a Democrat who has extensively researched attitudes on abortion. While for most he will not be “the main driver,” Biden would definitely prefer to have “the problem behind him.”
It could make a difference.
