Why Kamala Harris Is Going to Charlotte On Saturday – Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to appear in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday to stump for President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ pro-abortion agenda. Harris will deliver a speech on the anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that overturned the long-standing Roe v. Wade abortion ruling.
The event will be an opportunity for Harris to emerge from the woodwork, show her face, and promote President Joe Biden ahead of a Democratic presidential primary that now has a Kennedy in the race.
While the president and vice president expect to sail through that primary and win the nomination – and they probably will – speeches like these are essential for the Biden-Harris ticket to remain popular, in the minds of the American people, and connected to issues that people care about.
According to a White House official, the vice president will speak on so-called “abortion rights” during her visit and will “push for national legislation to protect reproductive rights.”
The vice president, the official said, will also “draw contrast between the Republicans’ extreme approach to reproductive health and that of the Biden-Harris Administration.”
Dems Hope to Win On Abortion…Again
Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that pro-life Republicans, who oppose abortion under any circumstances, are out of step with the rest of the American public. Despite doing more for the pro-life cause than arguably any other president before him, former President Donald Trump won in 2016 by promising to send the issue back to the states – and while he claimed to be pro-life, he never really got into the dirt and fought as hard as traditional pro-life Republican presidents might have done. Trump was, after all, a New York Democrat running on a pro-business and anti-mass-immigration agenda.
For the Republicans to win in 2024, they’ll either need to hope that the Roe v. Wade talk has died down, or shift their position to meet the American people in the middle.
The strategy here is clear. The Biden White House knows that the overturning of Roe v. Wade hurt the Republicans in the 2022 midterms – allowing them only a small victory in the House and keeping the Senate under Democratic control. Just one year ago, in June 2022, Pew Research Center released a study that shows how 61% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while just 37% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Those numbers have barely changed since 1995, and they’re not likely to change much any time soon.
This could, therefore, be the issue that the Democrats hope will win them the presidency again in 2024 – and it may just be the issue Kamala Harris needs to make herself at least somewhat likeable. But if Harris succeeds in returning the abortion issue to the center of public discourse, and if she and President Biden win again in 2024, it will probably be a result of GOP failures rather than any deep love that Americans hold for either of them.
Jack Buckby is 19FortyFive’s Breaking News Editor. He is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
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