The New Yorker:

Democrats used to talk about abortion in abstract terms. Now Harris campaign volunteers are getting specific and changing the debate.

By Peter Slevin

The crowd that greeted Kamala Harris in a high-school gym outside Milwaukee last month was delighted to the point of delirium. People roared when she said that, as a former prosecutor, she knows “Donald Trump’s type.” They cheered again when she spoke up for affordable child care and an assault-weapons ban. But when she said, “We trust women to make decisions about their own body,” the response was so loud that it nearly drowned out the end of the sentence. She shouted above the din, “And not have their government tell them what to do.”

Before Harris spoke, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, noted that she has been talking up abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, two years ago. In January, on the fifty-first anniversary of the Roe decision, she had opened a national reproductive-rights tour just fifteen miles away, in traditionally Republican territory, where Democrats are counting on opposition to Dobbs to help them in November. Rebecca Hammer, a financial planner from Oconomowoc, emerged into the sunlight after the rally, thrilled to see Harris as the party’s new standard-bearer. She was aware that President Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, is a reluctant Roe supporter, who said as recently as last year, “I’m not big on abortion.” Harris is a different story. “It is personal to her,” Hammer said. “She can feel it in her bones.”

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