Democrats and reproductive rights activists had their second piece of good news this week, when campaigners in Arizona announced that they had met the signature barrier to place an abortion rights amendment on the ballot this year.
NBC News first reported the announcement on Tuesday; activists with the umbrella organization Arizona for Abortion Access (which includes some local groups as well as offshoots of the ACLU and Planned Parenthood) told the network that they had surpassed the signature requirement for ballot access and would continue to increase their total before the deadline.
Assuming the group still has enough signatures after some are inevitably invalidated by state law and procedure, the campaign will succeed in putting a question on the state’s 2024 ballot asking voters whether the Arizona constitution should include an amendment “establish[ing] a fundamental right to abortion.” If passed, the amendment would forbid any laws or regulations that forbid abortion procedures before a fetus is medically capable of surviving on its own; it would also safeguard patients’ rights to have abortions at any time if the continuation of their pregnancies jeopardizes their lives.
Right now, Arizona prohibits abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The constitutional amendment would nullify the law, which was approved in 2022 and signed by Republican governor Doug Ducey; fetal viability is generally regarded as occurring around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Cheryl Bruce, a spokesperson for the ballot measure campaign, told NBC News that reproductive freedom was “an issue that people are eager to see on the ballot” following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning abortion protections in Roe v. Wade and the Arizona legislature’s subsequent passage of a ban.
President Joe Biden is certainly among those who are keen to put abortion language on the ballot in such a critical swing state. The Biden re-election campaign has stated unequivocally that grassroots state-level efforts to incorporate reproductive liberties into state constitutions present chances for Democrats up and down the ballot as the incumbent president pursues a second term and goes off against Donald Trump once more.
On a campaign call with top Democrats in Florida’s state house on Monday, it became clear that reproductive rights will also be on the ballot in that state in November. Activists are putting a constitutional amendment before voters. Meanwhile, the state’s Supreme Court has allowed a six-week ban to go into effect, resulting in one of the nation’s harshest abortion laws.
“This November, Florida will draw a line in the sand and say enough: we will reject these extremists,” Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell told reporters during the call Monday.
His campaign is leaning into this message with passion, despite the fact that the Irish Catholic president himself avoids using the phrase “abortion” in speeches and comments. His vice president, Kamala Harris, became the first sitting vice president to attend and speak from an abortion clinic when she went to a Planned Parenthood facility in Wisconsin last month.
Unlike Florida, Arizona is a state that Mr. Biden won back from Republicans in 2020. While the Sunshine State has definitely trended red in previous election cycles, Democrats in the southwest have had the opposite fortunes, repeating their 2020 success in last year’s midterm elections by defeating Kari Lake, a Trump loyalist and election skeptic, in the gubernatorial race.
Some polling in Arizona shows that Mr. Biden is now trailing his former and potential opponent, but the race is still fiercely contested. In a RABA Research survey conducted in late March, Mr. Trump led by only three percentage points.
In the last two election cycles, races with reproductive liberties “on the ballot” have been electoral lifelines for Democrats across the country. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn longstanding federal abortion rights protections in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case fueled grassroots opposition to conservative abortion bans, contributing to victories such as Katie Hobbs’ in Arizona, Tudor Dixon’s in Michigan, and John Fetterman’s in Pennsylvania.
Democrats are now hoping that the same energy will keep Mr. Biden afloat in the states he won in 2020 but now face losing to Mr. Trump due to lingering concerns about oppressive inflation on products such as groceries and gas, as well as open debates about the president’s mental acuity and fitness. Mr. Biden looks to be trailing his opponent in a number of important battleground areas, but his friends remain optimistic that the president’s numbers will rise and Mr. Trump’s will fall when voters pay more attention to the race later this year.
Mr. Biden continues to outraise his Republican competitor, recently announcing a $26 million one-night gain following an event in New York with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
