The clues in Kamala Harris’s championing of reproductive rights

“We…will stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans because we trust women to make decisions about their own bodies and not have their government tell them what to do,” Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, told a roaring crowd near Milwaukee on July 23rd. “When Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States I will sign it.”

Abortion is the subject on which Ms Harris sounds both most fluent and most different from Joe Biden. Mr Biden is so queasy about the topic that he can barely say the word: he failed to do so in his last state-of-the-union address, despite it being scripted. Ms Harris, by contrast, this year became the first vice-president to visit an abortion clinic. Her record of protecting women’s rights could be an asset in mobilising voters. Although for most Americans abortion is not their deciding issue, it has become a priority for Democratic voters. In an election that could hinge on turnout, such mobilisation could be critical.

According to a YouGov survey this week, Ms Harris outperforms Mr Trump by 12 percentage points on who would be better at handling the abortion issue. When the same question was asked about Mr Biden earlier this month, he outperformed Mr Trump by only five points. Among young Democratic women, 69% trust Ms Harris to speak about the issue, compared with 49% for Mr Biden, according to KFF, a non-profit organisation focused on health.

Whereas she can lack authenticity on other issues, on abortion Ms Harris has it in spades. She sees abortion as both basic health care and a basic right. And she has used it to speak about other freedoms that she claims Mr Trump would threaten or roll back. She is at her most effective when she talks with the conviction of a prosecutor who knows right from wrong about how Mr Trump “stole” a fundamental right from Americans. This fits well with a broader justice-warrior message.

This combative stance counts on the Republicans continuing to look like the bad guys on abortion, a reputation Mr Trump is trying to magic away. At the Republican convention the issue of abortion was notable for its absence. Mr Trump mentioned it not once and his running-mate, J.D. Vance, deleted the section of his website calling for a national ban (the site has since shut down).

Still, abortion clearly remains a winning issue for Democrats. But Ms Harris must be careful of the trap Republicans are laying for her: to present themselves as moderate while painting Ms Harris as an “abortion positivity” radical. Anti-abortion activists are already calling her the “abortion tsar”. ■

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