Claudia Kline, an organizer for Our Voice, Our Vote Arizona, speaks to canvassers before they set out to knock on doors in 106-degree weather in Phoenix on Sept. 26. The organization is part of a coalition that vowed to knock on 3 million doors by November. (Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez / Arizona Mirror)

Editor’s note: This five-day series explores the priorities of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they consider the upcoming presidential election. With the outcome expected to be close, these “swing states” may decide the future of the country.

As former President Donald Trump worked to scuttle a bipartisan border deal in Congress because it threatened to derail his campaign’s focus on immigration, Republicans in Arizona unveiled a plan to empower local officials to jail and deport migrants, decrying the federal government’s lack of solutions.

“Arizona is in a crisis,” state Senate President Warren Petersen said in late January. “This is directly due to the negligent inaction of the Biden administration.”

What followed were months of GOP lawmakers in Arizona making use of Trump’s border security rhetoric, employing xenophobic language to cast immigrants and asylum-seekers as criminals. But there was strident opposition to the plan, too, from many Latino and immigrant Arizonans who traveled to the state Capitol to protest the legislation.

Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris offer starkly different plans for the future of the 11 million people who live in the United States without legal status. Harris, in a bid to stave off accusations that she’s soft on the border, has sought to establish a firm security stance. To that end, she has vowed to bring back and sign the torpedoed bipartisan border deal.

On the campaign trail, Trump has taken a far more hawkish approach, promising mass deportations. He has offered few details, other than that he would be willing to involve the U.S. National Guard. President Joe Biden, Trump and other recent presidents have deployed the National Guard or military troops to support Border Patrol actions, but not in direct law enforcement roles.

Immigration has consistently ranked high among voter concerns nationwide, following heightened political rhetoric and a record-breaking number of unlawful border crossings in late 2023. Those numbers have since plummeted to a three-year low, but the U.S. border with Mexico remains a key talking point for Republican politicians.

But immigration is a far more complex topic than border security alone, and strategists may be miscalculating by failing to consider some key voters and their nuanced perspectives, recent polling shows.

Growing populations of new and first-generation citizens in the swing states — with the power to sway elections — are transforming demographics and voter concerns.

In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the legislation that would have allowed local law enforcement to usurp federal authority on immigration, but Republicans repackaged it as a ballot initiative called the “Secure the Border Act.” In a state that Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes four years ago, and where political strategists anticipate high voter turnout, the ballot measure serves as a test of whether the GOP’s immigration position will drive people to the polls in a swing state.

While many Republicans hope the immigration issue boosts their chances in down-ballot races, progressive organizations are working to mobilize voters in opposition through canvassing and voter registration drives.

Living United for Change in Arizona was established in the aftermath of the state’s controversial “show me your papers” law — SB 1070 — passed 14 years ago by Republican lawmakers. LUCHA Chief of Staff Abril Gallardo derided this year’s Secure the Border Act as the latest iteration of that law.

“Arizonans are sick of Republicans trying to bring back the SB 1070 era of separating families, mass deportations and children in detention centers,” she said. “We’re here to say, ‘Not on our watch.’”

The ballot measure has been widely criticized as greenlighting discrimination. Among other provisions, it would make it a state crime for migrants to cross the southern border anywhere except a legal port of entry and punish first-time offenders with six months in jail. Local police officers would be authorized to carry out arrests based on suspicion of illegal entry, and Arizona judges would be empowered to issue orders of deportation, undermining court rulings that have concluded that enforcing immigration law is the sole purview of the federal government.

Gallardo said that LUCHA is focused on engaging with voters to ensure the proposal fails. The organization is part of a coalition of advocacy groups committed to knocking on more than 3 million doors before November.

“They can try to ignore us, but come Election Day and beyond, they will hear us, they will see us, and they will feel the strength of our movement,” she said.

An August UnidosUS and BSP Research survey asked Latino voters in Arizona about their top priorities on several issues related to immigration policy. The results show strong support for protecting longtime residents from deportation and offering them a path to citizenship — along with cracking down on human smugglers and drug traffickers. Policies centered on building a wall or mass deportation ranked near the bottom. In recent years, Latino voters in the state have helped reject virulently anti-immigrant candidates.

Latino voting strength

In 2020, Latinos made up about 20% of the state’s electorate, and they largely favored Biden over Trump. Then, two years later, a record-breaking number of Latinos voted in an election that saw Democrats win statewide offices. Today, 1 in 4 Arizona voters is Latino, and a new poll from Univision estimates that more than 600,000 will cast their ballots in the state’s November election.

The Grand Canyon State is far from the only swing state with both impactful Latino and new-citizen voting blocs.

Still, campaigns might be ignoring these voters. The UnidosUS poll showed 51% of Latino voters in Georgia hadn’t been contacted by either party or any campaign, even though 56% say they’re sure they’ll vote.

“This is, I think, a wake-up call for both parties to reach out into the Latino community,” said BSP senior analyst Stephen Nu?o-Perez in a Georgia Recorder story. “There’s still not a lot of education out there on why Latinos should be voting for one party or the other.”

The numbers hovered right around there in other swing states. In Pennsylvania, that was true for 50% of the people polled. In North Carolina, it was 49%. In Nevada, 53%. In each case, a higher percentage said they plan to vote.

Influence grows in dairy country

The number of Latino voters in Wisconsin is a fraction of the electorate that lives in states closer to the U.S.-Mexico border but no less impactful. There are roughly 180,000 eligible Latino voters who call the Badger State home. Biden carried Wisconsin in 2020 by a margin of just 21,000 votes, less than 1 percentage point.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz is the executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a civil and workers rights organization that advocates on behalf of immigrants. She said that over time, the Latino vote has become increasingly sought after by politicians looking to gain office.

“If you don’t get it, you don’t win it,” she said.

Neumann-Ortiz said that the rise of the Latino electorate has translated into political power. The group has been a longtime backer of driver’s licenses for Wisconsinites without full citizenship status, and occupational licenses for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a federal policy that grants temporary work permits and protection from deportation to people who arrived in the country as minors.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia allow people without citizenship status to obtain driver’s licenses. And just 12 give DACA recipients the opportunity to obtain medical or legal licenses.

Legislation in Wisconsin to open up access to either license was blocked by the GOP legislative majority, though the movement behind the proposals drew support from top officials, including Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who backed driver’s licenses for all as a policy priority last year. Influential lobbying organizations, such as the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation and the Dairy Business Association, both of which lean conservative, also threw their weight behind the push for universal driver’s licenses.

Neumann-Ortiz attributes that support to the fact that immigrants make up a large part of the state’s dairy and agricultural industries. And in rural areas where dairy operations and farms are located, public transportation is sparse. United Migrant Opportunity Services, a Milwaukee-based farmworker advocacy organization, estimates that as much as 40% of the state’s dairy workers are immigrants. Other estimates indicate they contribute 80% of the labor on dairy farms.

Despite being over 1,000 miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border, immigration and border security are key issues for Wisconsinites, and their positions appear mixed. In a September survey from Marquette University’s Law School, 49% said they agreed with deporting all immigrants who have lived in the country for years, have jobs and no criminal record, while 51% opposed it.

Newly minted citizens stand to break new electoral ground

Laila Martin Garcia moved to the United States with her husband and infant son eight years ago. November will be the first time she casts her ballot for a U.S. presidential candidate since she became a naturalized citizen two years ago in Pennsylvania, and she’s elated.

“The main reason for me to become a citizen was to vote,” she said. “You know, this is home. This is where my husband is, where my son is being raised, and I wanted to make sure that I was using my voice in any way possible.”

She’s part of another segment of the electorate that will have a chance to respond in the voting booth to the election-year emphasis on immigration: newly naturalized voters. In fiscal year 2023, just over 878,000 immigrants became naturalized U.S. citizens, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. That number represents a slight decline from the previous fiscal year, when a little more than 969,000 people achieved naturalization –— the highest number of new citizens in a decade.

Newly naturalized voters can close the gaps in swing state races, according to Nancy Flores, who serves as the deputy director of the National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition of immigrant and refugee rights organizations.

Every presidential election year, the coalition partners with local organizations to assist eligible immigrants as they embark on the naturalization process and help newly naturalized citizens register to vote. New citizens, Flores said, are a great investment, because once they’ve made a commitment to vote, they will likely continue to do so. And naturalized voters appear to cast their ballots at higher rates than U.S.-born citizens. In the 2020 election, about 66% of the general electorate turned out to vote, compared with nearly 87% of naturalized voters surveyed by the organization.

This year appears on track to repeat that trend: As many as 97.3% of naturalized voters residing in states polled by the National Partnership for New Americans — including in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania — reported that they plan to vote this fall.

“For a lot of folks, reaching the point of citizenship is really a lifetime achievement,” Flores said. “And we see that folks really don’t take that lightly.”

And while Flores noted that naturalized citizens don’t fit one single voter profile, most of them do share an immigrant background and so are sympathetic on the issue.

“New American voters are not a monolith,” she said. “Folks that are naturalized are doctors, professors. We have folks that are naturalized that are picking the fruit that we eat. It really runs the gamut, but the common thread is the immigrant experience.”

A poll conducted by the organization found that naturalized voters share many of the same concerns as other U.S. voters, including worries about inflation and the economy. But, Flores added, candidates who are looking to attract naturalized voters are likely to be most successful with the demographic group when they present a positive view of immigration.

“Looking at immigration as an asset to our country, looking at how it can benefit the economy, looking at how we can provide pathways [to citizenship] that are humane — those things resonated with voters,” she said.

Similarly, Martin Garcia’s experiences as an immigrant have colored her views as a voter. Immigration reform, she said, is at the top of her priorities. Originally from Barcelona, Spain, Martin Garcia arrived in the U.S. in the middle of Trump’s first campaign, and she said she saw firsthand what his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies wrought.

In her work as an advocate, she frequently helped families torn apart by deportations, and in her personal life, while trying to share her language and culture with her son, she dealt with nativist hostility. During one incident at the grocery store, while she was helping her toddler identify items in Spanish, a stranger accosted her.

“I remember he came up to me and said, ‘We’re in America, speak American,’” she recalled. “Now that I think of that moment, I have so many things to say to that person. But at that moment, I was so scared. I just took my child, left my cart there with half of my groceries, and left the shop.”

Today, she recalls that incident, and the rallies and protests during Trump’s presidency, as catalysts for her civic engagement. Martin Garcia said she views the 2024 election as an opportunity to look out for the immigrant community’s needs.

“We deserve to thrive, and we will be thinking about that,” she said. “We have to make sure that our communities have the right to thrive in this election.”

What’s on the table at the federal level??

The failed $118 billion bipartisan border plan set aside $20 billion to pay for more border barriers, expanded detention facilities, more officers for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, and legal counsel for unaccompanied children. The bill also included more than $80 billion destined for aid and humanitarian assistance overseas.

The deal would also have overhauled the asylum system and eliminated the so-called “catch-and-release” system. It would have narrowed the criteria under which people can apply for asylum, fast-tracked the processing of existing claims and given migrants work authorizations while their claims reached resolution. The president would have been granted the power to shut down asylum claims processing altogether, once a certain number of claims had come through, resulting in more migrants being automatically deported during periods when there are a lot of border crossings.

For Vice President Kamala Harris to be able to sign the deal if she’s elected president, it would have to clear both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, which appears unlikely unless Democrats win a majority in both chambers in November.

Former President Donald Trump has said that if he’s voted back into the White House for a second term, he will oversee mass deportations in the style of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Operation W*tback.” The 1954 policy only succeeded in removing about 300,000 people, despite government claims that more than 1 million people were deported. Discriminatory tactics led to an unknown number of U.S. citizens being deported, too.

While it might at first sound feasible and draw support from some voters, adding context quickly turns them away, said Douglas Rivlin, a spokesperson for America’s Voice, a national immigration reform advocacy organization.

“You start talking about the number of jobs we’re going to lose, and the spike to inflation, and the hit to the U.S. economy contracting that way, and a lot of people turn against mass deportation,” he said.

A May 2024 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that immigrants made up 18.6% of the U.S. labor force — about 1 in 5 workers.

Rivlin warned that mass deportation would necessarily result in the breaking up of families, and leave millions of U.S. citizen children in the lurch. As many as 4.4 million children who are citizens in the U.S. live with at least one parent who does not have full citizenship status.

“You can’t deport 11 million people and not rip apart families, especially because 4 or 5 million children live in those families,” he said. “Are you going to deport them, too? Or are they going into foster care?”

One of the most notorious policies enacted during Trump’s presidency was his “zero tolerance” immigration initiative, which separated thousands of migrant children and babies from their parents at the country’s southern border. The policy ended after broad public backlash and federal lawsuits. More than 1,000 children remained separated from their families as of this spring, according to the most recent data available from the Department of Homeland Security’s task force on reunification.

The majority of American voters, Rivlin said, don’t want overly punitive immigration policies. Most favor opening up legal pathways to citizenship for the millions of people who’ve made their home in the U.S. A June Pew Research survey estimated that 59% of American voters believe that undocumented immigrants living in the country should be allowed to remain legally. And while there’s been an uptick in voters who oppose offering citizenship to people without legal status, they remain in the minority, with 37% supporting a national deportation effort.

Reproductive rights advocates gather on the steps of the Arizona Supreme Court to speak out against a near-total abortion ban from 1864 being considered by the judges on Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023. The ban includes no exceptions for rape or incest and allows only abortions performed to save the patient’s life. Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez | Arizona Mirror

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled to make abortion largely illegal in the Grand Canyon State, reinstating a 160-year-old law that forbids all procedures except those to save a woman’s life.

Justice John R. Lopez IV, writing for the court in a 4-2 split decision, said that a 2022 law allowing abortions up to 15 weeks of gestation depended on the existence of a federal constitutional right to abortion. And since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated that right in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling two years ago, that law can’t overrule one first passed in 1864, when Arizona was a territory.

“Absent the federal constitutional abortion right, and because (the 15-week abortion law)? does not independently authorize abortion, there is no provision in federal or state law prohibiting (the 1864 law’s) operation. Accordingly, (the 1864 law) is now enforceable,” Lopez wrote.

And that means abortions are illegal in every case except to save a woman’s life.

“In light of this Opinion, physicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal…,” Lopez wrote.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes called the ruling “unconscionable” and “and affront to freedom.”

“Make no mistake, by effectively striking down a law passed this century and replacing it with one from 160 years ago, the Court has risked the health and lives of Arizonans,” Mayes said in a written statement. “Today’s decision to reimpose a law from a time when Arizona wasn’t a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn’t even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state.”

The ban will go into effect in 59 days.

Anti-abortion groups celebrated the ruling. Cathi Herrod, president of Center for Arizona Policy, which backed the 15-week law while it was moving through the legislature and is behind many of Arizona’s abortion regulations, said that the high court ruled with an eye toward a neutral interpretation of the law, and not to advance partisan priorities.

“Today’s decision preserves a system designed to be blind to all but the law, and in doing so, it upholds the right of life for all Arizonans.”

Arizona governor responds

In a post on social media site X, formerly Twitter, Gov. Katie Hobbs sounded the alarm over the decision and vowed to continue working to protect access to abortion.

“It is a dark day in Arizona,” she wrote. “We are just fourteen days away from one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country. But my message to Arizona women is this: I won’t rest, and I won’t stop fighting until we have secured the right to abortion.”

During a news conference held shortly after the ruling was released, the Democrat called on the Republican-led legislature to repeal the 1864 law, saying it was the right thing to do. Two attempts this year to do just that stagnated in the legislature, where the GOP-majority has the power to decide which bills get heard.

But it seems unlikely that Republicans will respond to the renewed request. House Speaker Ben Toma and Senate President Warren Petersen filed an amicus brief in the case advocating for the reinstatement of the Civil War-era law, saying that lawmakers never intended to supersede the ban when they passed the 15-week law.

If Republican lawmakers won’t act, Hobbs said, then Arizona voters can in November, when an abortion access amendment is expected to make it onto the ballot.

“To the people across Arizona who are concerned about the future of abortion rights in our state, who are worried about their bodily autonomy, who don’t want to see the freedom of their wives, sisters and daughters restricted, you can make your concerns known at the ballot box,” she said.

Reproductive rights advocates are concerned that a return to a near-total ban will result in uneven health care access for women, as those who can afford to leave the state to seek abortions elsewhere will do so and women who can’t shoulder the cost will be forced to continue carrying unwanted or dangerous pregnancies. Morgan Finkelstein, who in 2020 was forced to travel to California because of Arizona’s limited abortion providers to receive a selective reduction when one of her twins developed a critical heart defect, said that the experience was “traumatic” and should not have to be endured by anyone.

Hobbs told reporters that, while she expects abortion advocacy groups to help women access the health care they need, she is open to discussing ways to support that effort with other governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom.

Hobbs highlighted her executive order that concentrates prosecutorial authority for abortion law violations in Mayes’ office as the most effective strategy to prevent the criminalization of doctors by “overzealous” prosecutors. And while some county attorneys have signaled an interest in challenging that executive order in court, Hobbs said she is confident in the order’s legal basis.

“Bring it on,” she said. “I would not have issued the executive order if I didn’t think it was legally sound.”

Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, medical director of Camelback Family Planning, one of a handful of private abortion clinics in the Valley, told the Arizona Mirror that she’s committed to keeping her doors open for the entire 59 days that the ruling is paused.

“It is business as usual, and health care as usual, and we will try to see as many people as we can,” she said.

But Goodrick, who has practiced in Arizona for more than 20 years, said she’s confident the November election will bring change, as voters flock to the polls in response to the “extremist” ruling.

The background

The dilemma arose in the summer of 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and sent the power to regulate the procedure back to the states. Then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich went to court to reinstate the 1864 abortion ban, and convinced a trial court judge that the Civil War-era law should be enforced instead of the 15-week ban passed just months earlier.

The consequences for reproductive health care in Arizona were instantaneous: An uncertain legal landscape led the majority of the state’s nine abortion clinics to provide intermittent services for months. The 1864 law carries with it a 2- to 5-year mandatory prison sentence for doctors who perform abortions for any reason other than saving a patient’s life, and the 2022 law punishes doctors with a class 6 felony and a revoked license.

Women were cut off from potentially life-saving care as the abortion rate saw record lows that year. Whereas abortions in Arizona have consistently exceeded 13,000 since 2011, in 2022 that number plummeted to just 11,407 procedures.

With two conflicting statutes on the books, uncertain doctors shutting their doors rather than risk prison time, and state officials vying over which ban to implement, Arizona courts were tasked with figuring out how to make the laws coexist.

Proponents of the near-total ban argued that the 2022 law included a provision that stated it wasn’t meant to repeal any laws that came before it, signifying that the 1864 law should reign supreme. But reproductive rights advocates pushed back, pointing out that if the 1864 law wasn’t overruled by the 15-week law based on that interpretation, then neither were the numerous abortion law restrictions enacted in Arizona in the 50 years since Roe v. Wade was decided. And keeping in place laws that mandate an ultrasound, a 24-hour waiting period and an informational consultation, among other requirements, meant that abortion must be preserved to some extent.

The near-total ban was brought back into play by a Pima County judge who nullified an injunction holding it at bay that was erected in 1973, under the auspices of Roe.

But the Arizona Court of Appeals later ruled that the 15-week ban should supersede its predecessor, with the judges noting that if the GOP-majority legislature had intended to completely outlaw abortion, it should have been done so explicitly instead of passing what amounted to a gestational limit.

Less than two months later, Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-abortion legal firm, filed an appeal with the Arizona Supreme Court on behalf of Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, the medical director of a chain of Valley-wide anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Hazelrigg was admitted into the case to fill the role of “guardian ad litem”, representing the interests of the unborn in Arizona. The position was added in 1973 when the near-total ban was first challenged.

In a December hearing, Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Jake Warner urged the justices to reverse the appellate court’s decision, saying that the lower court erred when it ruled to permit elective abortions up to 15 weeks under the 2022 law.

Warner argued that both the 1864 near-total ban and the 15-week gestational ban outlaw all but the most life-threatening procedures. Instead, the way to harmonize the two laws is by allowing the exception baked into the 15-week law for “immediately” life-threatening situations to modify the requirements of the 1864 law, he said.

Until 15 weeks, Warner explained, all abortions would be prohibited unless the mother’s life is in danger, as the 1864 law mandates. After the 15-week point, the threshold for obtaining an abortion would be raised, so that only “immediately” life-threatening emergencies would merit a procedure. A cancer patient, Warner said, is facing a life-threatening situation, but not an “immediately” dangerous prognosis, and so they would not be permitted to obtain an abortion to begin treatment.

In a written statement issued after the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday, Warner called the decision a win for the right to life.

“Life is a human right, and today’s decision allows the state to respect that right and fully protect life again – just as the legislature intended,” he said.

Planned Parenthood Arizona attorney Andy Gaona, meanwhile, rebutted that if the Arizona legislature truly meant to outlaw virtually all abortions, it should have made its intention clearer. GOP lawmakers in Arizona modeled the state’s 15-week ban after the Mississippi law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, under the assumption that the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold that law and the Arizona copy could stand.

But Arizona lawmakers left out a key provision from the Mississippi law: a clause which stated that any abortion that complied with Mississippi’s 15-week law but violated any other abortion law was nonetheless illegal. Gaona pointed to that as proof that Arizona lawmakers never intended to completely ban abortion.

While the courts worked through the legal parameters of abortion in Arizona, the election of pro-choice Democrats to statewide offices two years ago dampened the threat of a state ban to some degree.

Gov. Katie Hobbs, who ran on a promise to protect abortion access, issued an executive order in July concentrating the prosecutorial authority for abortion law violations in the Arizona Attorney General’s office. Doing so preemptively barred any of the state’s 15 county attorneys from using Arizona’s abortion laws to take a doctor to court. At least one county attorney, Yavapai’s Dennis McGrane, who joined Hazelrigg in advocating for the 1864 law, has indicated an interest in pursuing abortion law violations. AG Kris Mayes, meanwhile, has vowed never to prosecute a single case.

But the legal strength of Hobbs’ executive order has yet to be tested in court. Shortly after she issued it, county attorneys threatened to mount a legal challenge against it, though none has since materialized.

November 2024: the solution?

Reproductive rights groups are aiming to stave off threats from the court rulings and GOP-backed laws by enshrining abortion access in the state constitution this November. The Arizona Abortion Access Act would guarantee the procedure as a right up to 24 weeks of gestation, in a mirror of the standard in Roe. The act would also include an exception for procedures performed after that time if the doctor considers it necessary to safeguard the life, physical or mental health of their patient.

Because it is a constitutional amendment, the initiative needs to collect 383,923 signatures to qualify for the ballot and be considered by Arizona voters. Earlier this month, the campaign announced it has gathered 500,000 signatures, and it plans to continue collecting more to ensure a buffer against signatures that are eventually thrown out during the verification process.

Along with securing enough signatures, supporters of the act must also contend with opposition from the It Goes Too Far Campaign, which is aiming to convince voters that the ballot proposal is too extreme. In an emailed statement, Campaign Manager Leisa Brug said that, despite the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling, the 15-week gestational ban remains the law of the land, and the campaign is focused on ensuring that the effort to enshrine abortion protections doesn’t undermine that.

“Our campaign is committed to exposing the real impact of the vague language of this amendment,” she said, in an emailed statement. “Arizonans deserve to know.”

Democrats in Arizona and across the country are counting on the abortion issue to mobilize voters and deliver wins for party candidates. Abortion access has proven to be a highly motivating concern, even in red states like Kansas, where a record number of voters showed up to reject a legislatively referred ballot measure that would have given lawmakers the power to eliminate abortion protections, and in Virginia, where voters awarded Democrats a legislative majority to defend against the anti-abortion policies of the state’s Republican governor.

Vice President Kamala Harris placed the blame for the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling squarely on former President Donald Trump, who is running to recapture the White House. The campaign to reelect President Joe Biden and Harris has sought to underscore Trump’s involvement in overturning Roe, and link his presidency to the proliferation of abortion bans across the country.

“Arizona just rolled back the clock to a time before women could vote – and, by his own admission, there’s one person responsible: Donald Trump,” Harris said in an emailed statement. “This even more extreme and dangerous ban criminalizes almost all abortion care in the state and puts women’s lives at risk. It provides no exceptions for rape, incest, or health. It’s a reality because of Donald Trump, who brags about being ‘proudly the person responsible’ for overturning Roe v. Wade, and made it possible for states to enforce cruel bans.”

Trump’s appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court bench secured a conservative majority that later struck down the constitutional right to abortion.

In a joint statement, Arizona Democratic Party Chairwoman Yolanda Bejarano and state Senator Eva Burch, who has recently become the face of abortion access in Arizona after sharing the difficulties she faced obtaining an abortion, denounced anti-abortion Republicans and vowed to back reproductive rights efforts in November.

“The decision to choose when and how to start a family belongs to each of us as individuals. Donald Trump and extremist Republicans at every level of government have been undermining these rights for years, and we have had enough,” the two said in an emailed statement. “Arizona Democrats are ready to do whatever it takes to protect the people of Arizona from these out-of-touch extremist policies, and take it to the ballot in November.”

The story is republished from the Arizona Mirror, a sister publication of the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.