Campaigning for Harris, Women Share Their Abortion Stories With Neighbors

The Harris campaign is trying to transform women in battleground states into an organizing force who can drive their friends and family to the polls.

One by one, the women shared their stories.

A middle-aged woman recounted how her developmentally disabled sister had been sexually assaulted at work, saying that carrying a child would “destroy her.” An operating room nurse wondered how she would care for her pregnant patients now that certain procedures were illegal. And an older woman recalled how she had taken a college friend for a “dehumanizing” back-alley abortion.

As they spoke, some began to wipe away tears. But the women, gathered on folding chairs in a Harris campaign office tucked away in a suburban Wisconsin strip mall, were determined. The group of about two dozen mostly female volunteers had assembled for a specific purpose: to learn how to take their experiences door to door.

“How are we actually going to use the stories that we just told?” asked Sammy Rasin, an organizer for the Harris campaign, standing in front of a wall of windows covered in Democratic campaign signs. “We elect Vice President Harris and Gov. Tim Walz.”

It was the kind of political conversation that happened only at the margins of the last presidential race, when Democrats last fought to keep former President Donald J. Trump from winning another term and abortion rights were barely mentioned. But now, two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Harris campaign see women and their experiences as one of their most potent political weapons in a razor-tight contest.

For months, Democrats have been training dozens of volunteers across battleground states to personally testify to the effects of Republican-led abortion restrictions enacted across the country since the overturning of Roe V. Wade two years ago. Some have taken on high-profile roles, appearing in television ads and prompting gasps across the convention floor during prime-time speaking spots at the Democratic National Convention. Many others have shared their stories in lower-profile ways, with social media posts and at local events.

And then there are the women in this room in Wisconsin. They haven’t made headlines with their activism for abortion rights, but they all claim a deep connection to the issue. The Harris campaign is trying to transform them into a hyperlocal organizing force who can drive their friends, family and neighbors to the polls.

The strategy is an attempt to cut through the noise of a divisive election by casting the abortion debate in relatable and wrenching terms. An important part of their effort, Harris aides say, involves intimate appeals to make the issue feel personal to voters.

The tactic is crucial for Ms. Harris, who has embraced abortion rights more vocally than any presidential candidate in history. She has seized on the issue as a central rallying call for her candidacy, hoping to drive more support from women to compensate for what polls show is a nagging gap with younger, Black and Latino men.

“People can see themselves in most of these stories, whether it’s because they’ve had a similar experience during a pregnancy or they went through pregnancy and they were afraid of these things,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster for Ms. Harris’s campaign. “There’s a lot of relatability that comes from it and takes it out of a political conversation.”

A version of this strategy has been embraced across the Democratic Party. Candidates in competitive congressional and Senate races have aired ads featuring women who had to leave their state for an abortion or faced life-threatening complications during pregnancies. During Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota invoked the stories of women living with the consequences of abortion restrictions enacted by Republicans since Roe was overturned — and the story of one woman, Amber Thurman of Georgia, who died. Mr. Walz warned that far more women would face similarly devastating situations should Mr. Trump win the White House.

Democratic strategists believe firsthand appeals from everyday women — not activists — could help Ms. Harris win a larger number of white women without a college degree, a demographic that has favored Mr. Trump by a double-digit margin in the past two elections and tends to be less engaged in politics.

The stories of women facing difficult circumstances are “very emotionally compelling,” said Nicole McCleskey, a G.O.P. pollster, who has conducted focus groups measuring views on abortion. But they may not be political decisive, she argues.

Voters in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, where abortion rights are now protected, may feel free to prioritize economic issues. And in Arizona, she says, a ballot referendum codifying a constitutional right to abortion in the state means voters can support abortion rights while backing Mr. Trump.

"Voters have a different perspective on this than they did in 2022,” she said. “They’ve had two years to wrestle with it and are putting it more in perspective to other issues.”

Still, there’s some model for the Democratic tactics working even among traditionally conservative voters.

In 2023, Gov. Andy Beshear, Democrat of Kentucky, was running for re-election in the deep-red state and released an ad featuring Hadley Duvall, who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather as a 12-year-old girl. The ad attacked his opponent for supporting the state’s newly enacted abortion ban without exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Ms. Duvall, now a young woman, expressed horror that today she would have been forced to carry her rapist’s child.

When the campaign tested the impact of the ad, it found that Mr. Beshear gained the most ground not among women, but with traditionally conservative voters, including men without a four-year degree, older voters and those living in more rural areas of the state.

“All these demographic groups that skew against Democrats, that was where folks moved the most,” said Eric Hyers, Mr. Beshear’s campaign manager. “That kind of ad is just going to have more of an impact than a faceless narrator making a standard pro-choice argument to you.”

The Harris campaign wants to take those stories to the front porches of battleground voters.

In Wisconsin, campaign volunteers learned from the example of Kate Cox, who became a high-profile abortion rights activist after she sued Texas for the right to terminate her nonviable pregnancy. Since then, she has become a prominent surrogate for the Harris effort, campaigning across the country, helping to train other volunteers and even announcing that she was pregnant again during the delegate roll call at the party’s national convention.

Ms. Cox said she had become friends — sharing meals and texting — with some of the other women who have become prominent speakers on the issue, including Amanda Zurawski, who also sued Texas over its abortion laws and told her story from the convention stage, too.

Recounting her diagnosis of a fatal genetic condition and leaving the state for abortion care never gets easier, Ms. Cox said in an interview. But she told the Wisconsin volunteers that she had found a purpose in her pain: electing Ms. Harris.

“I went from feeling alone to feeling part of a movement, a movement across our country that is turning our pain into action and we are being heard,” she said.

After Ms. Cox spoke, Ms. Rasin, the campaign organizer, walked the volunteers through the campaign’s messaging on abortion rights and the contrast with Mr. Trump that they were making on the campaign trail.

Then, it was time for the main work of the training. Participants spent a few minutes writing down their own stories, creating a kind of testimony about their experiences with pregnancy, birth and abortion rights.

After that, speaking in pairs, the women shared stories of missed periods and miscarriages, back-alley abortions and sexual assaults.

Ms. Rasin called the participants back to attention to direct them to download the campaign’s organizing app, where they could find ways to canvass voters.

Sandy Geier, a 61-year-old retired copywriter, described sitting in an exam room more than three decades ago and receiving the news that she had an ectopic pregnancy.

“My right to an abortion was something that I never thought about back then because I wasn’t wishing for an abortion — I was wishing for a child,” she said. “I’m here today because of a right that I took for granted.”

As the volunteers scrolled through the program on their phones, Carly Eaton, a mother of two young daughters, began to cry. She recalled the pain she felt going into the emergency room alone to comply with Covid restrictions when she experienced her own miscarriage in 2020.

Ms. Eaton, 38, planned to spend the remaining few weeks before Election Day campaigning for Ms. Harris, following a version of the script that she learned in the training.

“Having gone through a miscarriage, and understanding how that feels, makes it feel really personal,” said Ms. Eaton, who lives in Waunakee, a suburb of Madison. “This is about me and what I can do and what my daughters can do.”