Joe Biden’s campaign plans to hammer Donald Trump for his role in erasing abortion rights largely by enlisting ordinary American women who have suffered from restrictions on the procedure, elevating their voices in place of the president’s own.
This approach was immediately on display this week in a Biden campaign video featuring the story of a Texas woman released after Trump announced he would defer to state-level abortion laws, some of which impose draconian limits on women and physicians. Biden himself made no appearance in the ad, except to deliver a standard campaign finance disclosure line.
The strategy represents a kind of concession that Biden, with a complicated history on the issue and a reluctance to even say the word abortion, may not be the most resonant messenger on the issue for many voters, and that spotlighting regular people has the potential to reach those who may not start out sympathetic to the president’s campaign.
“It’s less important for Biden to be the messenger on this, and more important for our folks who can talk personally about the impact this has already had in their lives,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of the Democratic political group Run for Something. “This is not abstract for them. That is more compelling than anything Biden can say or do.”
The focus on first-person storytelling is inspired in part by recent down-ballot successes in states like Ohio and in Kentucky, where Gov. Andy Beshear last fall won a difficult reelection campaign in a conservative state by tying his Republican challenger to conservative policies on reproductive health.
Biden advisers took particular note of an ad Beshear ran in the closing stages of his campaign featuring the testimonial of a woman, Hadley Duvall, who had been raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was a child, and who would have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term under policies favored by Kentucky Republicans, including Beshear’s opponent.
Eric Hyers, a…
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