Jacksonville, Florida
CNN
—
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida on Wednesday just hours after a controversial ban on most abortions after six weeks of being pregnant goes into impact within the state, because the Biden marketing campaign ratchets up its strategy of blaming former President Donald Trump for abortion restrictions being adopted throughout the nation.
Harris, who has been main the cost for the Biden White Home and marketing campaign on the problem of reproductive rights, needled Trump repeatedly throughout her remarks at a marketing campaign occasion in Jacksonville, mentioning the previous president 21 instances and setting into stark phrases what a second Trump administration would imply for ladies throughout the nation: “Extra bans, extra struggling, much less freedom.”
“However we aren’t going to let that occur,” Harris mentioned. “As a result of we belief girls. We belief girls to know what’s in their very own greatest curiosity. And ladies belief all of us to combat to guard their most elementary freedom.”
The vp explicitly blamed Trump for the Supreme Court docket’s historic overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and for a slew of abortion bans that some states have adopted since.
It was probably the most instances she had talked about Trump at an occasion thus far this yr, in accordance with a Biden marketing campaign official.
“As of this morning, 4 million girls on this state awoke with fewer reproductive freedoms than that they had final evening,” Harris mentioned. “Beginning this morning, girls in Florida grew to become topic to an abortion ban so excessive it applies earlier than many ladies even know they’re pregnant.”
“Which, by the way in which, tells us the extremists who wrote this ban both don’t understand how a girls’s physique works, or they merely don’t care,” Harris added.
She additionally talked about how abortion bans just like the one going into impact in Florida on Wednesday threaten medical suppliers with felony prosecution.
Harris additionally addressed Trump’s lately revealed comments to Time magazine, during which he didn’t object when requested whether or not he was “snug” with states punishing girls who bear abortions the place it’s banned.
“I don’t should be snug or uncomfortable,” Trump mentioned. “The states are going to make that call. The states are going to should be snug or uncomfortable, not me.”
She mentioned in response: “So Florida, the distinction on this election couldn’t be extra clear: Principally beneath Donald Trump, it could be truthful sport for ladies to be monitored and punished by the federal government, whereas Joe Biden and I’ve a distinct view. We imagine the federal government ought to by no means come between a lady and her physician.”
Florida Home Minority Chief Fentrice Driskell informed CNN on the Jacksonville occasion that girls in Florida awoke Wednesday morning with “fewer rights than their moms and their grandmothers had.”
“We advocated as arduous as we may towards the six-week ban, as a result of most ladies don’t even know that they’re pregnant,” Driskell mentioned. “So, that is as near an outright ban as you will get, and it’s not simply that the state of Florida has fallen, this really has broad implications for ladies all all through the southeast who’ve come to Florida in search of abortion care.”
The vp’s trek to Florida comes only one week after President Joe Biden visited Tampa – additionally to shine a highlight on the state’s six-week abortion ban.
Throughout remarks to supporters Wednesday, Biden known as the Florida abortion ban one of many “most excessive” within the nation and squarely pinned the blame on his GOP rival.
“Probably the most excessive abortion bans within the nation, one in every of them,” Biden mentioned, in accordance with the pool. “It’s just one individual, one individual liable for it: Donald Trump.”
Biden advisers are hoping the political saliency of the reproductive rights problem may help impress voters forward of Election Day and make Florida – a state that Trump received in 2016 and 2020 – extra aggressive. Along with ringing the alarm bell on the six-week abortion ban, Democrats are additionally seizing on the truth that a constitutional modification that might codify abortion protections in the state might be on the poll within the fall, hoping that measure may help drive turnout.
The marketing campaign has been retaining shut tabs on Jacksonville, the fast-growing, most populous metropolis in Florida. No Democratic presidential candidate had received Duval County – house to Jacksonville – since Jimmy Carter in 1976; Biden broke the shedding streak in 2020 by defeating Trump there.
Nationwide Democrats hope that a few of the key dynamics that delivered Duval County for Biden in 2020, together with a lift in Black voter turnout and the rejection of Trump by suburban girls, will be replicated in swing areas throughout the nation.
“Donald Trump might imagine he can take Florida without any consideration,” Harris mentioned. “It’s your energy that may ship Joe Biden and me again to the White Home.”
The vp has emerged because the Biden marketing campaign’s most outstanding messenger on abortion rights for the reason that Supreme Court docket’s 2022 determination overturning Roe v. Wade. In remarks final month from Tucson, Arizona, she issued a blistering rebuke of the state’s Civil War-era ban whereas warning a second Trump time period may see a attainable federal abortion ban.
“What has occurred right here in Arizona is a brand new inflection level – it has demonstrated as soon as and for all that overturning Roe was … simply the opening act of a bigger technique to take girls’s rights and freedoms,” she mentioned on the time. “A part of a full-on assault, state by state, on reproductive freedom – and all of us should perceive who’s responsible. Former President Donald Trump did this.”
Whereas Trump has spent the majority of the final month in a New York courtroom over alleged hush money payments, Harris and Biden have stored a far busier marketing campaign schedule. In April alone, the vp made stops in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Georgia – all states that will show essential to delivering Biden a reelection victory in November.
In a memo final month, marketing campaign supervisor Julie Chavez Rodriguez known as Florida “winnable,” particularly pointing to the problem of abortion as “mobilizing a various and rising section of voters to assist buoy Democrats up and down the poll.”
Because the ban is about to take impact Wednesday, the nationwide Democratic Get together bought billboards in Spanish and English tying Trump to abortion bans and concentrating on high-traffic areas in Gainesville, Miami, Tampa and Orlando.
The DNC on Wednesday afternoon additionally launched a sky banner over Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Seashore that reads: “Trump’s Plan: Ban Abortion, Punish Ladies.”
Capturing the extent of alarm that nationwide Democrats are elevating, Florida Democratic Get together Chairwoman Nikki Fried warned Tuesday in a name with reporters that the Florida regulation’s implementation would imply “entry to reproductive care is now successfully eradicated.”
“The Democratic Get together is absolutely energized by the truth that the eye that we’re receiving from the administration, and so they perceive that if you wish to shield democracy and freedom throughout your complete nation, that you must come to the stomach of the beast, which is right here within the state of Florida,” Fried mentioned.
This story has been up to date with further developments.
CNN’s Sam Fossum contributed to this report.