(Headline USA) Planned Parenthood will spend $40 million ahead of November’s elections to bolster President Joe Biden and leading congressional Democrats, betting that voters angry at Republican-led efforts to protect unborn children from being killed can be the difference in key races around the country.
The political and advocacy arms of the nation’s leading abortionist organization made the announcement on Monday.
The group will initially target eight states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as North Carolina, which the Democratic president’s campaign hopes to flip after Republican Donald Trump won it four years ago, and Montana, New Hampshire and New York, which have races that could help determine control of the Senate and House.
The push will try to reach voters with volunteer and paid canvassing programs, phone banking and digital, TV, and mail advertising.
“Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be how we energize voters,” said Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes. “It will be what enables us to win.”
The spending plan, however, is a downgrade from past elections. It spent $45 million to support Biden in 2020 and $50 million before the 2022 midterms.
Planned Parenthood’s political arm focused on pouring money into contests where measures designed to protect the unborn were on the ballot after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that argued women should have a constitutional right to kill their unborn baby, a decision handed down two years ago.
“We continue to see the devastation that comes when anti-abortion politicians have power,” Lawson said of the years since. “It’s just gotten worse.”
Abortion continues to be one of the nation’s most important political issues, but dynamics around it have changed since the Supreme Court ruling. After the ruling, most Republican-controlled states imposed measures to stop the murder of unborn children.
Meanwhile, voters in seven states — California, Michigan and Vermont, as well as usually reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and Ohio — sided with supporters of abortion on ballot measures.
In November, voters in several other states, including battleground Arizona and Nevada, will have abortion referendums on the ballot, as will Florida, a onetime presidential bellwether that has gotten increasingly Republican in recent cycles but where Biden’s campaign is hoping turnout for the abortion ballot initiative can make things closer.
SBA Pro-Life America, one of the country’s most prominent pro-life groups, announced in February that it plans to spend $92 million targeting voters in eight battleground states: Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Montana and Georgia.
In addition to national efforts, local Planned Parenthood and pro-abortion organizations in California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio are planning campaigns ahead of November.
Planned Parenthood efforts also will focus on some down-ballot rates, like aiding Democrats seeking a supermajority in the Nevada statehouse, or deposing two state supreme court justices up for reelection in Arizona after they did their job and voted to recognize an 1864 law criminalizing nearly all abortions, which the state legislature has since voted to repeal.
“We can’t just vote for ballot initiatives,” said Lindsey Harmon, executive director for Nevada Advocates for Planned Parenthood Affiliates PAC. “We also have to support the infrastructure that makes abortion access possible.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
