The pleasant woman sitting on her porch one recent afternoon seemed intrigued by what Kristin Fulwylie had to say about a state Senate candidate and other Democrats on her North Carolina ballot. She graciously accepted a leaflet touting the party’s slate, from Vice President Kamala Harris on down.

Fulwylie then strolled down the street to continue knocking on doors in Cabarrus County, outside of Charlotte. When she doubled back to her car, a man Fulwylie took to be the woman’s husband confronted her, campaign literature in hand.

“You can have this back. We’re not supporting any of these candidates,” Fulwylie recalled the man telling her. The woman on the porch no longer made eye contact with her, she said. 

“I’m not sure how she plans to vote,” said Fulwylie, executive director of D4 Women in Action, the political arm of the ​​Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. “He made it very clear that they were doing the complete opposite of what she had originally told me.”

As for the woman, Fulwylie said, “She didn’t say anything.”

Even as one of their own vies to be the first female president, even with abortion rights high on the list of campaign issues, even after more than a century of suffrage, some women still look to their husbands and other trusted men before casting their ballots, campaign operatives and researchers told The Fuller Project. 

A minority of them are intimidated by overbearing men, but more women simply lack confidence in their own political acumen and turn to the men in their lives for guidance, they said.

“Women are very impacted by the men in their lives around voting. They don’t want any trouble or tension in their relationship,” said Democratic strategist Jill Alper. Noting that women often are overburdened by a combination of paid work and a disproportionate share of family responsibilities, she added, “They give more credence to what a man thinks because they think he has more time to do the research.”

The phenomenon is not new, but it could make the difference in a presidential race that is projected to be unusually tight. And because polls predict what could be a record-setting gender gap — with the majority of women voting for Harris and most men backing former President Donald Trump — the possibility that even a small number of women will vote like their men has Harris supporters nervous.

They have reason to be, according to a poll of women conducted for American University’s Women & Politics Institute and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. Fifteen percent of respondents who live with a partner told pollsters that they “regularly” or “sometimes” feel pressured to vote as their partners do. “And about half of women in serious relationships said that they were in a ‘mixed household’ when it came to political ideology, which means sometimes there were disagreements on issues,” said Amanda Hunter, the foundation’s former executive director.

Adding to the stress is the fact that it’s easier for partners to eye each other’s selections if they vote from home using mail-in ballots, a habit that became more common before and, especially, during the pandemic.

The problem has been exacerbated this year because Trump is running a testosterone-laden campaign replete with openly sexist and misogynistic slurs intended to bolster his support among men, said Christina Reynolds, a spokesperson for EMILYs List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women.

“It is the way that Trump speaks,” Reynolds said. “I think it maybe creates a permission structure there.”

As proof, she pointed to comments made by Fox News host Jesse Watters, who said that if his wife voted for Harris, it would be akin to her having an affair.

To counter the threat of female out-migration, Harris supporters are using tactics that range from savvy TV ads to hand-written Post-it notes to remind women that their votes are private. No lesser figures than former first lady Michelle Obama, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and actress Julia Roberts have delivered the message.

The Lincoln Project, which was founded by anti-Trump Republicans, has been airing an ad that encourages women to vote for Harris even if their husbands expect them to support Trump. The vice president’s campaign is losing men’s votes “because of the bro language that Donald Trump is using,” said Ryan Wiggins, the Lincoln Project’s chief of staff. “He talks to them like they’re in locker rooms.” Women, on the other hand, are often repulsed by Trump’s behavior, she said.

“So when we made this ad, we made it to remind women that, hey, you don’t have to vote with your guy, especially if he is macking out this whole bro culture,” Wiggins said.”He will never know how you voted. You can lie to him….He is not in that booth with you.”

In an emotional address in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Obama pleaded with men to take seriously the threat a Trump presidency would pose to women’s lives and health through the abortion bans that have proliferated since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

She also offered some counsel to women. 

“If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter,” Obama said at the Michigan rally in late October. “You get to use your judgment and cast your vote for yourself and the women in your life. Remember, women standing up for what is best for us can make the difference in this election.”

The overarching theme of the ads and the speeches and the sticky notes is clear: vote your conscience. 

At the same time, the admonitions have raised questions about what’s really going on in America.

Cindy Hohman, chair of Hendrick County Democrats in Indiana thinks she knows. When they knocked on doors, Democratic canvassers in her suburban Indianapolis county used to ask, by name, for women who had voted in the party’s primaries, she said. They stopped the practice in 2018, she said, after three women ended up in shelters.

“What was happening was that we were asking for a woman if we had her on our voter rolls as a Democrat, and her husband would answer the door, and we’d say, ‘Hi, is Hannah home?’ or whoever? And he would say, ‘No, who are you?’”

When canvassers identified themselves, some husbands responded with something akin to, “If she’s voting Democrat, I’m gonna kick her ass,” Hohman recalled.

More common, said political experts, is that women agree voluntarily to follow their husbands’ recommendations, not so much to escape physical assault (though there are no statistics on politics-related intimate partner violence), but verbal disputes.

Sometimes, they said, it’s just easier to accept a man’s political advice than to argue about it.

Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, has a lot of experience with women who seek political advice from their male partners, bosses, friends and relatives. The 49 million moderate white women that her nonpartisan organization researches are generally civic-minded and vote in high numbers, but they often feel ill-informed and, therefore, are subject to influence, she said. 

“They tell us that they really don’t like politics very much, that they avoid the news, which they view as increasingly negative, and as a result, they end up feeling like the men in their lives know more about politics than they do,” Payne said. “So pretty rationally then, that can lead to relying on these men, these men they trust, on their opinion of who to vote for, even when doing so means that issues that matter very much to these women are not being prioritized.”

These women, she said, will subordinate their interests to keep the peace. This year women are much more concerned about restoring abortion rights than are men, Payne said. In a September survey of more than 8,000 moderate white women whom Galvanize Action has been tracking for months, nearly one-third (31%) said they strongly agreed with this statement:  “I would only vote for a presidential candidate who will take action to protect abortion for everyone.” Another 17% said they agreed “somewhat.”

That would seem to bode well for Harris, a staunch and vocal advocate for abortion rights. Indeed, her campaign and those of Democrats all over the country are making sure voters remember that it was Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees who made it possible for the court to overturn Roe. (Trump also has campaigned on his role in sending abortion back to the states, falsely claiming that’s what “everybody” wanted.)

But not all women who care about abortion want to risk their relationships fighting for it, Payne said.

“I frequently have had women ask me, ‘Do I have to get divorced over this?’” she said.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake sees the same trend in polls and focus groups. “Women will say things like, ‘You should be talking to my husband. He knows more about politics than I do. Or he really follows this, I don’t. Or I listen to him about who to vote for,” Lake said. “And the men, of course, presume their superior knowledge as well. So it’s not just a power control issue, it’s a presumed expertise.”

One particular group of women, she noted, are confident in their own expertise. 

“College-educated women are trying to intimidate their husbands into voting the way they want,” Lake said. Republicans, she added, are working for the first time to prevent college-educated men, who tend to base their votes on economic issues and favor Trump, from being swayed by their wives.

The 2024 election is critical for medical advances, especially research that involves and affects women.

The Biden administration recognized decades of failure to include half the population in medical research when it established a White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research and dedicated tens of millions of dollars to study diseases affecting primarily women and to include more women in studies of diseases that affect everyone.

The National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading funder of biomedical research, is now better focused on ensuring females are included in all stages of medical study, and it’s working to include more women in the research it supports. That trajectory would likely continue and even expand if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president. 

It would likely stop dead if former President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

“It’s either going to enter its heyday or it’s going to be gutted like every other federal agency. We all know what’s going to happen,” said Emily Jacobs, a neuroscientist at the University of California Santa Barbara who is studying the effects of hormones on the brains of both men and women. “What happens in November determines whether this line of research continues or whether we are up against the strongest headwinds ever. This research depends on the support of the federal government.”

Federal efforts to improve women’s health with targeted research and treatment were just getting started in 2024, three decades after Congress directed the government to make clinical tests more equitable. Until now, women have been sorely missing from the trials, even those aimed at diseases that affect them more than men.  As a result, medical science  hasn’t figured out why women are more likely than men to die of heart attacks  or to suffer life-threatening side-effects from drugs. And there is, as first lady Jill Biden said in January, a “stunning lack of information” about menopause.

“This November, voters will face a choice between two starkly different policy approaches, one that is likely to have a direct impact on the health of American women,” the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group focused on health care, said in a recent report.

Neither candidate has said much, if anything, about plans for research involving women, and neither campaign responded to requests for comment. But many scientists say they are excited about the prospect of a Harris presidency. Her mother, after all, was a medical researcher. Shyamala Gopalan earned her Ph.D in nutrition and endocrinology from the University of California at Berkeley and studied how breast cancer develops at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Harris often cites Gopalan, who died of colon cancer in 2009, as an inspiration.

“We need a leader who understands the nuance of these topics. Otherwise it’s a scary thing for scientists to put our findings out there,” said Laura Pritschet, a Ph.D. student in Jacobs’ lab. “We feel a little bit more confident if one of those people is commander in chief.”

Harris was front and center at the signing in March of President Joe Biden’s latest executive order strengthening efforts to better include women in medical research, to focus more research on women’s needs and to close gaps in federal funding for women’s health.

Biden’s administration has acted repeatedly in the past year, establishing the Initiative on Women’s Health Research to reinvigorate 30-year-old legislation that tried, but failed to get the female sex fully included in medical research. Biden’s budget request for fiscal year 2025 would double the funding for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the NIH. Like much of the federal budget, this proposal is in limbo because Congress has yet to pass final spending bills. A new health agency established under Biden, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, has pledged $100 million in funding for “transformative research and development” in women’s health.

While Trump’s plans for medical research policy are unclear, he left an extensive record from his four years in office. He tried repeatedly to chop the budget for the NIH during those four years, only to be defied by Congress.

Trump proposed cutting the NIH budget throughout his time in office. In 2020, as Covid-19 was starting to spread, he proposed reducing NIH and its medical research budget by 12.6%. Congress gave the agency a 22% increase. NIH currently has a $48 billion budget. In 2019, Trump tried to slash NIH’s budget by 27% and in 2017, his first year in office, he tried to cut $1.2 billion to offset increases in defense spending. Congress, which has the last word on federal spending, overruled him each time.

Congress may be able to defy a president’s funding requests, but the executive branch has considerable control over how money is allocated for specific programs and who heads up the agencies and departments that spend it. Trump has already demonstrated he’s willing to push policies so far that lawsuits follow, noted Zachary Baron, a director of the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “Certainly what we saw during the previous Trump administration was a lot of chaos, a lot of disruption,” Baron said. “It takes away a lot of resources from trying to improve health outcomes in this country.”

While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Republican president, the plan has a detailed section devoted to NIH’s renewed focus on women, calling it “junk gender science.”

Instead, it says, NIH should divert money from mainstream medical research to the study of what it calls “cross-sex interventions” such as the use of puberty blockers. “HHS should create and promote a research agenda that supports pro-life policies and explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls,” it adds.

Extensive research shows that legal abortion, provided via medication or by trained professionals, is safer than pregnancy and that denying women abortions can be harmful. Before the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, many desperate women died or suffered dangerous complications from unsafe back-alley procedures. Since the court overturned that constitutional right in 2022, at least two women died when they were unable to access the care they needed, ProPublica has reported.

 Project 2025 also attacks other aspects of NIH reforms that attempt to fairly distribute funding and include women in the agency’s work. “Under Francis Collins, NIH became so focused on the #MeToo movement that it refused to sponsor scientific conferences unless there were a certain number of women panelists, which violates federal civil rights law against sex discrimination,” the document reads. Collins, the longest-serving NIH director, served under three presidents of both parties, including Trump.

The repercussions will be global. U.S. medical research underlies much, if not most, global drug development, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approvals drive medical practice worldwide. Private industry may ignore politics to some degree, but new drugs need federal government approval and the NIH and other federal research agencies, including parts of the Department of Defense, fund much early stage medical research.

One recent study showed the NIH helped pay for the development of virtually every drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019.

Voters typically don’t factor in medical research policy at the ballot box, although abortion rights are expected to motivate many voters this year as they have in the past two. But the results of the 2024 election will affect the health of Americans, especially women, possibly for decades to come.

The first time Donald Trump was president, he imposed a strict, overseas anti-abortion policy that caused 108,000 women and children to die and 360,000 people to contract HIV/AIDS, according to a journal of the National Academy of Sciences. If voters send him back to the White House, those numbers, staggering as they may be, would be dwarfed by what comes next, reproductive-rights advocates contend.

Trump, who claims responsibility for overturning the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, is widely expected to adhere to a conservative blueprint called Project 2025, which proposes to drastically reduce reproductive freedoms at home and abroad. In the U.S., that could lead to a national abortion ban or a marked reduction in medication abortions and insurance coverage of contraceptives. In other countries, it would prevent governments, nonprofits and international agencies that receive U.S. foreign assistance from providing, counseling or educating on, referring or advocating for abortion as a method of family planning—even with their own money.

And it could force thousands, perhaps millions, of women who are desperate to end unintended pregnancies to resort to unsafe, back-street procedures that put their lives at risk. 

“I think the impact of these policies would be devastating for people around the world,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports sexual and reproductive health and rights.

As the Republican presidential nominee, Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, a guide for the next conservative president drafted by the Heritage Foundation and like-minded groups with the help of numerous former Trump administration officials. It mentions Trump and his administration a few hundred times in nearly 900 pages. Trump’s campaign did not respond to inquiries for this story.

“There’s every reason in the world to believe that he will do this,” said Terry McGovern, a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York. She cited Trump’s eagerness to win over conservatives in 2016 by pledging to nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, which came to pass, and said he is the “wind beneath the wings” of the movement to ban medication abortion.

Project 2025 advocates a monumental expansion of a 40-year-old Republican policy that prevents some recipients of U.S. foreign aid from providing or discussing abortion. Although previous GOP presidents, including Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, applied the so-called Mexico City Policy to foreign non-governmental organizations that received U.S. family planning aid, Trump in 2017 enlarged it to encompass recipients of all foreign health-care assistance. He also prohibited aid recipients from subcontracting with groups that did any abortion-related work, even if that’s not what they were hiring them to do. 

Trump was able to make the changes legally via executive orders, without going through Congress. Each Republican president since Reagan has invoked the 1994 policy, called the “global gag rule” by detractors, and each Democratic president has revoked it. When it is imposed, the Mexico City Policy is layered atop a 1973 law known as the Helms Amendment, which prohibits using U.S. money to pay for overseas abortions.

Under Trump’s expanded policy, clinics in some of the poorest parts of the world had to choose between accepting U.S. money—often the bulk of their budget—and eliminating abortion-related care, or rejecting the money and reducing services, seeing fewer patients or, in many cases, closing down entirely. As clinics in remote villages shuttered, women lost access to safe abortion, to contraception, even to routine medical care such as cancer screenings.

Without access to birth control, more women had unintended pregnancies. Without access to safe abortions, particularly in countries that restrict or ban the procedure, they turned to untrained providers, according to several studies and interviews with researchers and reproductive-rights advocates in the U.S. and abroad. Many suffered infections from botched abortions conducted with dirty needles and other foreign objects. Many ended up in hospitals. Too many never went home. 

Other women tossed their newborns in rivers or poisoned them with Coca-Cola, witnesses reported. 

The bottom line: The policy that was promoted to reduce abortions actually drove up their numbers and caused women and children to die, the studies show. 

Women and men lost other services as well, including testing and treatment for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Infections shot up. About two-thirds of the health-care assistance money went to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, a bipartisan program spearheaded by then-President George W. Bush and credited with saving 25 million lives.

Now, Project 2025 wants to go further—much further—than Trump did before. “Protecting life should be among the core objectives of United States foreign assistance,” it says. The plan would apply the Mexico City Policy, which Trump renamed Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, to all foreign aid, including money earmarked for humanitarian crises. It would have Trump do unilaterally what Republican members of Congress have been unable to do with legislation.

“The danger for abortion is the same as what happened last time, but more,” said Gillian Kane, director of policy and advocacy at Ipas, an international organization that supports access to contraception and abortion. 

In 2020, Trump imposed abortion restrictions on $7.3 billion in health-care assistance, according to KFF, a nonpartisan organization that conducts health-policy research. The Congressional Research Service, which provides Congress with nonpartisan analysis, put the figure at $8.8 billion. Either way, it represented a sharp increase from the $560 million that would have been affected had he limited the policy to family planning aid. But it’s nowhere near the $51 billion in foreign assistance that Project 2025 would attach Mexico City restrictions to, KFF found in an analysis based on fiscal 2022 assistance.

What’s more, the anti-abortion rules would apply to a significantly larger set of recipients, including U.S.-based nonprofits, foreign governments and public international organizations like the United Nations and the World Health Organization. (Project 2025 calls for eliminating U.S. support for the U.N. Population Fund, a sexual and reproductive health agency and a regular casualty of Republican budgets.) None of these groups has had to deal with the restrictions in the past, and abortion-rights advocates caution that all would have a steep learning curve.

“This would be a truly radical and unprecedented expansion,” said Caitlin Ryan Horrigan, senior director of global advocacy for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “It would be the global gag rule on steroids.”

Advocates said they are particularly concerned about the consequences to women affected by humanitarian crises such as wars and natural disasters. In those cases, nonprofits and international agencies have to get up and running quickly and can’t risk being slowed by too many obstacles, they said.

McGovern, the CUNY professor and a leading researcher on the Mexico City Policy, said humanitarian agencies were long reluctant to provide abortion services, but finally did in response to escalating violence around the world. She fears that under Trump, they would stop.

“It’s truly heartbreaking and shameful,” added Horrigan. “These are entities that have never lived under the global gag rule, but we know well the harms that the global gag rule causes. So this would really be an unprecedented expansion and also a dangerous example of putting politics above people’s needs.”

Dr. Nisha Verma wants her patients to know that they don’t have to tell any doctor that they have ever had an abortion. She wants them to know that no doctor can tell the difference between a natural miscarriage and one caused by medication, and she wants her patients to know that they don’t have to report what’s causing their bleeding if, for some reason, they visit an emergency room for care.

Verma, who is senior adviser on Reproductive Health Policy and Advocacy for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made women scared to seek reproductive care. November’s election results could make matters profoundly more serious. So it’s OK for women to protect their medical information from a threat of increased government surveillance, she said in an interview.

“I think there is a lot of fear about things getting much, much worse,” said Verma.

That’s because conservatives in Congress are poised to try to force all 50 states to report on abortions and miscarriages in ways never required before. Surveillance is currently voluntary and kept carefully anonymous. But pending legislation and a conservative roadmap known as Project 2025 could change that if Republicans win control of the White House and Congress.

“There would be a monitor, monitoring your abortions and miscarriages,” Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, said during a debate with former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, this month.

Trump has boasted that he is responsible for overturning the constitutional right to abortion because he nominated three Supreme Court justices who made the ruling possible. His pledge to select justices who opposed abortion rights helped him win over evangelicals and other conservatives in 2016.

“Viewed in the context of a profound anti-abortion agenda, there are just many implications, reasons to be concerned about privacy,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean and professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.  

The Project 2025 policy roadmap lays out how, in a second Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could use billions of dollars in federal funding to control “liberal” states that try to preserve reproductive rights. One goal of the blueprint, drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation and other groups with input from former Trump administration officials, is to stop states that protect abortion access from serving women from states that don’t. 

“Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method,” Project 2025 reads.  

The language echoes the Republican-sponsored “Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2023,” introduced in the Senate by Joni Ernst of Iowa (and whose co-sponsors include vice-presidential nominee JD Vance) and in the House by Ralph Norman of South Carolina. 

“Every single life is precious. Yet right now, only a handful of states record abortion data in a comprehensive and verifiably accurate way, including tragic cases where babies are born alive during abortions,” Ernst said in a statement when she introduced the bill. Like other abortion rights opponents, Ernst says she believes that too many abortions occur after a fetus is viable and her bill is a way to demonstrate that. 

While the Senate version of the bill was stopped early by the razor-thin Democratic majority, Norman’s version was introduced to the full House, although it has not moved beyond a subcommittee.

Whether the legislation becomes law hinges on the November election, said Alina Salganicoff, senior vice president and director for women’s health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research organization. “So much is really going to be shaped by what happens in the House and Senate—not only who gets the majority, but how strong of a majority they have,” she said.

“You don’t even need to enforce the policy to make the policy have an impact,” she added, because there is a “very, very potent impact of the chilling effect and fear on individuals and clinicians and the institutions in which they work.” 

Salganicoff said the fear already is palpable in states that have passed stricter abortion laws, which also can limit care for women experiencing miscarriages or stillbirths. “You can see what’s happening with clinicians unwilling to do miscarriage management,” Salganicoff said. Even with women whose pregnancies are clearly not viable, “we are seeing that clinicians are afraid, and this is impacting how they are providing care.”

Verma, who until recently was a practicing ob/gyn in Atlanta, said she has seen that happening. Georgia law bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Lawmakers there have made it a felony for medical professionals to perform some procedures used not only in abortions, but in miscarriages. A recent investigation by ProPublica concluded that at least two women have died as a result.

“I think there is a breakdown in the trust between physicians and their patients that we are seeing in this legal environment. Patients are scared. Doctors are scared. Patients don’t feel the healthcare system is keeping them safe,” Verma said.

Already, she said, Republican-led states like Georgia have added reporting requirements for doctors who provide reproductive care. “It is burdensome. It introduces fear. I just dread providing it,” Verma said. Georgia’s new “termination of pregnancy” form asks medically irrelevant questions such as the specific start and end dates of every pregnancy a patient has ever had, she said. The proposed new federal legislation would place similar requirements on all 50 states.

“There’s fear about where this is all going. It’s not information the government needs,” Verma said.

Currently, the information goes into each patient’s medical chart. That, of course, has all the patient’s personal data. The Georgia Department of Public Health says that while doctors are required to report all abortions to the state, names are not used. Currently, data that is voluntarily reported by states to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is stripped of details that would identify a patient. 

But that doesn’t mean they never could come out, Verma noted. While the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996—widely known as HIPAA—protects medical privacy, courts can subpoena private medical records for criminal prosecutions. Verma’s organization is working with the American Medical Association to tighten protections of medical records. 

“I find myself discussing legal risks with patients more often. There are absolutely legal risks,” she said.

In 2022, prosecutors in Nebraska demanded and obtained Facebook messages between a mother and daughter and used them to convict both in connection with the daughter’s abortion.

That’s why Verma wants patients to know that what they don’t tell their doctors won’t go into their medical records. And what doesn’t go into their medical records cannot be tracked by the government.

The discretion might be needed even if Harris wins. The makeup of the Supreme Court won’t  change unless a justice retires or dies, and states with abortion bans or tough restrictions will continue to fight for medical records—even across state borders. This month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, sued the Biden Administration to try to block a new rule protecting the medical records of those crossing state lines for abortions. In 2023 the attorneys general of 18 states joined Texas in opposing the rule.

During her short campaign for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris has reinvigorated the nation’s youngest voters—particularly women under 30, who support her by a massive 3:1 margin, according to a new national poll released Tuesday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard.

Harris also gained support among young men, and enjoys a 2:1 lead over the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, among likely voters under the age of 30, the Harvard Youth Poll reported. Her strength among young people stands in sharp contrast to that of Trump and the man she replaced atop the Democratic ticket, President Joe Biden. Both men had lackluster support among youth in the same poll last spring.

“The overall vibe has shifted, as well as preferences,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, which produces the poll.

The poll of more than 2,000 young people found that 61 percent of likely young voters favor Harris and 30 percent back Trump. And while Harris, unlike Hillary Clinton before her, is not promoting her candidacy for its potential to break barriers, she is drawing the most strength from women.

Since entering the race in July, Harris has galvanized women and opened a yawning gender gap. A recent NBC News poll shows her with a 21-point advantage among women, while Trump has only an 8-point lead among men. Because Democrats typically dominate among women and Republicans win among men, Harris has to retain a greater level of female support in order to defeat Trump.

Young women appear poised to help. The vice president has nearly doubled the gender gap that existed among voters under 30 when Biden was the Democratic presidential candidate. That gap, which measures the difference in levels of support between women and men, grew from 17 points in the spring to 30 points this month, the Harvard poll reported.

A longtime advocate for abortion rights, Harris appears to be benefiting from Americans’ overwhelming support for restoring the protections lost after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Abortion has been a motivating factor in elections the past two years and is likely to be so again, especially in states where abortion initiatives are on the ballot. The divisive issue already has been at the center of the presidential campaign, with Trump taking credit for the Court’s ruling and Harris laying blame for the resulting abortion bans at his feet.

The Harvard poll shows that 59 percent of young voters want Congress to pass a law making abortion legal nationwide, something likely to occur only if Democrats win control of the Senate, the House and the White House.

Nowhere is Harris’s strength as great as it is among 18- to 29-year-old women, one group that would be most affected by new abortion laws restoring or further restricting access. The Harvard poll found that a full 70 percent of young women who are likely to vote support Harris, while just 23 percent back Trump. Harris leads among young men by 53 percent to Trump’s 36 percent.

Asked which candidate they trust more to deal with abortion, 56 percent of young women and 48 percent of young men said Harris, compared to 16 percent of women and 26 percent of men who said Trump.

Young voters also gave Harris significantly higher ratings than Trump on a number of personal attributes, including empathy, relatability, honesty and competence. They even ranked her higher on an issue that traditionally has benefited male candidates: strength.

The question now becomes whether a large segment of young voters will cast ballots. In 2018 and 2020, when Trump was in the White House, young people voted in record numbers. If the percentage of young voters declines this year, “it seems to me it’s a Republican issue,” Della Volpe said. “Democrats are motivated.”

If there was any doubt that a woman could lead this country, it was put to rest Tuesday night. From the moment she crossed the stage and reached out her hand to greet Donald Trump, Kamala Harris dominated the presidential debate on substance, style and seriousness.

Like the prosecutor she used to be, the vice president made her case sharply and cleanly, identifying and exploiting Trump’s weaknesses. In doing so, she effectively undercut her opponent’s longtime strategy of snidely attacking, denigrating and even looming over women in debates.

Harris learned from the former president’s past performances that she needed to land the first punch and never let up. She cast doubt on his character, his veracity, his judgment, his ability to be empathetic to the most vulnerable at home and to stand up to dictators abroad.

She cannot help but run as a woman. But the image Harris projected was that of the “bigger man.”

Of course, one good night does not a victory make. Trump did not win the election when President Joe Biden imploded in the last debate and subsequently dropped out of the race. There remains no guarantee that Harris will break what Hillary Clinton called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.” 

But in overpowering a former president on the debate stage, Harris passed the first test. She showed that she not only is capable of winning, but of leading. 

Further, Harris was particularly commanding on the one issue that polls show is most likely to motivate people, especially women, to vote: abortion. Although Americans say they are most concerned about the economy — a point underscored by the first question posed by ABC News moderators — a plurality of potential voters have told pollsters that abortion is the singular issue most likely to influence their candidate selection.

Here, the competitors agreed on one thing: Trump was responsible for the Supreme Court decision that repealed the constitutional right to abortion. 

Trump forcefully championed his decision to nominate three justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a ruling that polls show was opposed by the majority of Americans. He insisted, falsely, that for 52 years “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative” wanted to return decisions about abortion to the states, which the court did in 2022. And he repeated the lie that babies are “executed” after birth, which would not constitute abortion, but murder.

Harris, an outspoken supporter of abortion rights, slapped back, saying that the court’s ruling has spawned what she labeled “Trump abortion bans” in more than 20 states, some of which provide no exception for survivors of rape and incest. “A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next,” Harris said. “That is immoral.”

She continued, speaking firmly and passionately as she pointed accusingly at Trump: “I have talked with women around our country. You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”

Harris reiterated her pledge to sign legislation that would reinstate the protections afforded by Roe. She deflected a question about whether she supports codifying any restrictions, relying instead on the constitutional right that was in place for nearly half a century. Trump, who has waffled on whether he would vote for a ballot measure that would repeal Florida’s six-week abortion ban, said he would not sign a national ban. He did not respond directly to repeated queries about whether he would veto one.

On other topics as well, Harris employed biting language both to get under Trump’s skin, a ploy that appeared to be successful, and to portray him as a weak leader who kowtows to dictators and autocrats and has lost the trust of many of his own former appointees. In one pointed exchange, for instance, she said that “world leaders are laughing” at Trump and that some of his own military leaders say he’s a “disgrace.” In another, she said Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch.”

Trump tried to punch back, but not in the mean and condescending way he has with other women politicians (and journalists). He didn’t even call Harris a name, though he does on the stump. He did add to a litany of racist and sexist comments, saying this about the highest-ranking woman of color in U.S. history: “All I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out.” The last part of that remark seemed to fall beneath the radar.

Harris remained calm, not rising to Trump’s bait. He was unable to do the same. Perhaps the low point was when he repeated an unproven internet rumor, quickly knocked down by moderator David Muir, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have been eating people’s pets.

A number of commentators have pointed out that the debate was unlikely to change many minds. It doesn’t have to. The goal for both campaigns is to sway the small proportion of the electorate that has yet to pick a candidate and, just as important, to energize their supporters to cast ballots.

If history is any guide, the majority of undecided voters are women. Women tend to make up their minds on voting later than men do, perhaps reflecting the shortage of time many have to tune in between paid jobs and their still-hefty family responsibilities. Women also represent the majority of the population and the majority of voters. And for decades, they have favored Democratic candidates, while men — especially white men — support Republicans. The trick for Harris is to garner more votes from women than Trump wins from men, particularly in battleground states. 

She got a big boost at the end of the night with an endorsement from megastar Taylor Swift, who posted to her 283 million Instagram followers shortly after the debate ended. While celebrity endorsements don’t often influence elections, Swift’s unrivaled popularity has the potential to move young people to vote, something that could be decisive in a close race.

Harris has embraced popular culture, from reposting Charli XCX’s description of her as “brat” to playing Beyonce’s “Freedom” in her ads.

Last night, Harris, notably, took leave of her post-debate party to the tune of Swift’s song “The Man.” The women’s empowerment anthem seemed a fitting coda to the night, with a chorus that declares:

I’m so sick of running as fast as I can.

Wondering if I’d get there quicker

If I was a man

And I’m so sick of them coming at me again

‘Cause if I was a man

Then I’d be the man

I’d be the man

I’d be the man

Abortion rights were guaranteed by the Supreme Court in 1973 and that was that. At least that’s what supporters thought for nearly five decades. And so, when they went to the polls, they based their votes for presidents, Congress members and other elected officials on issues they considered to be more pressing.

But after the Supreme Court’s unprecedented 2022 decision to revoke a constitutional right, abortion changed the course of elections for two years running. As the nation approaches the first presidential election of the post-Roe era, Democrats—who are fielding a woman presidential candidate who champions abortion rights—are banking on the issue to bolster them again.

Many public polls predict it won’t.

While the vast majority of Americans favor abortion rights, numerous public opinion polls conducted for media organizations suggest the topic has lost its potency, even among women. If any one thing will sway them, these polls say, it is the economy (and, more specifically, inflation).

That would be bad news for Democrats and their new standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris. Women are the backbone of the party. Without their strong support, many Democratic candidates for office—from Harris on down—surely will lose.

But are these polls right?

Not so much, say numerous polling experts, most (but not all) of them partisan. Media polls on issues, they say, are greatly flawed because they fail to ask questions that could predict what will move voters to back one candidate over another. They find that the economy is top of mind among the people interviewed—usually based on how they rank a list of issues—but not whether it will influence their votes. And there are many reasons to think it will not.

In essence, experts told The Fuller Project, “it’s the economy, stupid” made sense when James Carville scribbled it on a whiteboard in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign war room, but the slogan’s salience 32 years later is less assured.

For one thing, today’s presidential nominees are further apart in both policy and persona than were George H.W. Bush and Clinton (and even independent candidate H. Ross Perot). Harris and former President Donald Trump stand in stark contrast to each other in substance, style, identity and experience. The American public is much more polarized than it was in the days when Democrats and Republicans could discuss politics without destroying lifelong relationships or disrupting Thanksgiving dinners. All but a sliver of the electorate is set in its ways, destined to vote for the party that it backed four years ago, experts say. That means relatively few voters are up for grabs.

On top of that, the economy is rather amorphous and difficult to comprehend, unlike immigration or gun rights or trans rights or any of the other culture-war issues du jour.

And very much unlike abortion.

In contrast to the economy, abortion evokes visceral reactions. Either you believe that women should be able to make decisions about their bodies, or you don’t. Either you believe that abortion is murder, or you don’t. You might support some exceptions, or you might not, but you probably have a position—a deep-seated belief—that doesn’t change with the Dow or the wind or the makeup of the Supreme Court.

You might not know what to think when the Federal Reserve raises or lowers interest rates, but you probably had an instant reaction when the Court overturned Roe v. Wade. You probably remember what you thought when the Arizona Supreme Court let stand a Civil War-era abortion ban or when Alabama, even briefly, outlawed in vitro fertilization. You probably felt something when the Texas attorney general effectively blocked Kate Cox from ending a dangerous pregnancy, though the fetus could not survive; when Ohio police arrested Brittany Watts following a miscarriage; when an Indianapolis doctor said she had performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim who had been denied medical care in her home state of Ohio; or each time you heard that a pregnant woman was turned away from an emergency room.

Whether you support abortion rights or not, you probably know how you felt when you learned about each of those incidents.

Especially if you’re a woman.

The effect is particularly profound in states that have restricted abortion access, says Rachael Russell, associate director of polling and analytics at Navigator Research, which uses its polls to help craft Democratic messaging.

“People are actually seeing people suffer under these bans. And I don’t see that changing, especially when you have the Republican nominee saying it should be up to the states. Women and men say, ‘That could be my daughter, that could be my friend, that could be my relative,’” she told The Fuller Project. “It’s galvanizing when people see it in personal terms.”

Whether you support abortion rights or not, you probably know how you felt when you learned about each of those incidents. Especially if you’re a woman.

That’s exactly what Democrats are counting on, not only to retain the White House but also to keep control of the Senate and perhaps take over the House of Representatives. Both chambers are narrowly divided, and one or both could change hands. The closer we draw to Election Day, the more pollsters and political experts expect Democratic candidates at every level to talk about abortion, contraception and women’s rights.

That stands to reason: A poll conducted by Lake Research Partners for Ms. and the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2023 found that voters are overwhelmingly in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. While abortion and the ERA are, individually, strong draws for voter turnouts, talking about the two issues together is even more powerful, the poll said.

“Harris’ best chance for winning is if abortion rights are central to voters when they make their choice between her and Trump,” says Democratic pollster Jim Gerstein.

Democrats’ advantage on the issue intensified when Harris became the presidential nominee. Unlike President Joe Biden, an observant Catholic who began his political career opposing abortion rights, Harris has been vocal and robust in her support. She is the highest elected official ever to visit a Planned Parenthood clinic, and has been the administration’s point person on the issue. Her inherent strength on abortion was apparent in a Wall Street Journal poll conducted in late July, just four days after Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed her.

Asked who is “best able to handle” abortion, 51 percent of respondents said Harris and 33 percent said Trump, a yawning gap that dwarfed the 12-point advantage Biden had over Trump in a Journal poll conducted in seven battleground states four months earlier. In both polls, Trump dominated on the economy, though Harris fared better than Biden.

Gerstein, whose firm conducts polls for the Journal in addition to several Democratic campaign committees, says it took some time for party strategists to come to terms with the importance of abortion rights in campaign messaging because it has not been prominent in the past.

“Reiterating this argument has been a driving force for myself and other strategists ever since it was clear that the Dobbs decision completely transformed the political environment two years ago,” Gerstein says, referring to the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “We also had to overcome the traditional tendency of campaigns to prioritize economic and other issues.”

Sure, the economy remains at or near the top of most poll respondents’ lists. Inflation, in particular, is something they deal with day in and day out. But “when you ask what issue is dispositive, it’s abortion,” Gerstein says.

The Harris team understands this. On the day after Labor Day—the traditional kickoff for the round-the-clock race to Election Day—the campaign is launching a 50-plus stop “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour through key states. The starting point is Palm Beach, FL, home to Donald Trump. The first-of-its-kind bus tour illustrates the profound shift in abortion politics since Roe fell.

In a Wall Street Journal poll completed in early July, respondents were given a list of issues and asked to rank their importance in the presidential election. They ranked immigration first (19 percent) and the economy second (16 percent). Democracy and abortion each came in third (9 percent). And yet, when asked to identify “the one issue” on which they could not vote for a candidate they disagreed with, the largest chunk of respondents—24 percent—named abortion. Another 19 percent said immigration is their make-or-break issue. Only 6 percent named the economy.

“They’re voting on the thing that’s pissing them off,” says Democratic pollster Jill Normington.

It’s that anger, that upset, that intensity of feeling that often gets lost when media pollsters run down a list of issues and ask participants to rank them.

Partisan polls pose different questions than media polls, in part because they serve a different purpose, Normington notes. Democratic and Republican pollsters aren’t simply taking the temperature of a race, they’re figuring out how to influence it. They ask a series of questions aimed at determining which topics resonate most, what messages participants are receptive to and what candidates can do to appeal to them. They also conduct focus groups, small gatherings in which they ask open-ended ended questions that allow participants to discuss and frame their opinions in their own words.

“When you talk about abortion as an issue in a list, it kind of obscures that something much more fundamental is going on,” says Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. “You talk about what would happen if Trump is elected. To women, it’s happening right now. It underrepresents how fundamentally disturbed women are.”

Women are “much more focused on abortion than men,” Greenberg says. “I feel like we’re going to win on the abortion issue,” which, she adds, is “existential” for women and linked to threats to democracy. “The women I talk to in focus groups say, ‘They’re taking away our rights.’ That’s huge. The American dream is freedom to choose—except for one group of people.”

Polls reflect that while the majority of men and women back abortion rights, there is a significant gender gap as women voice stronger support nationwide and in the handful of battleground states expected to decide the presidential race. In polls of likely voters in six such states conducted in May by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College, 64 percent of respondents said they believe abortion should be always or mostly legal—including 70 percent of women and 58 percent of men, a 12-point gender gap. Only 27 percent (25 percent of women and 29 percent of men) said abortion should be always or mostly illegal.

Women are much more likely than men—and more likely than at any time in nearly three decades—to call themselves “pro-choice,” according to a May poll by Gallup, a nonpartisan polling firm. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of women used the pro-choice label compared to 45 percent of men.

It goes without saying that the people who will have to live with the Court’s decision longest and more personally are young. It’s unclear whether those under 30 will flock to the polls at the same rate they did four years ago.

That year, young voters cast ballots in greater percentages than in any year since 1972, just one year after 18-year-olds won the right to vote. And they voted disproportionately for Biden.

This year, polls showed young voters souring on the president. But within just 48 hours of Harris entering the race, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote—83 percent of them in the 18-to-34 age group, according to the nonprofit Vote.org.

Democratic and Republican pollsters aren’t simply taking the temperature of a race, they’re figuring out how to influence it.

The well-regarded Harvard Institute of Politics poll of people under 30 showed this spring that their concerns mirror those of their elders. Asked which issues concerned them most, the largest group—27 percent of respondents— said economic issues, followed by 9 percent who named immigration and 8 percent who said foreign policy or national security. Abortion and reproductive rights topped the list for 6 percent of respondents. However, when asked to make head-to-head comparisons of 16 issues, the young respondents said inflation was more important than any other issue except one: women’s reproductive rights. Not surprisingly, women under 30 ranked the importance of their reproductive rights compared to all other issues higher than did their male counterparts, 58 percent to 42 percent, respectively.

“There’s nothing more tangible than whether a young woman has authority over her own body,” says John Della Volpe, the Harvard institute’s polling director. In discussions, he says, some young people have told him they are reluctant to live or attend college in states that have restricted abortion access or banned it altogether. “That’s why it has the potential to be very powerful [in the election],” he adds.

People who say abortion will affect how they vote could be on either side of the issue. But it’s clear that more of them will support abortion rights. Gallup reported in June that nearly one-third of voters—a record high—said they would vote only for candidates whose views on abortion are the same as their own. Nearly twice as many of these voters (40 percent) said they support abortion rights as those who said they oppose them (22 percent). By comparison, 20 years ago Americans who identified as antiabortion were nearly three times as likely as abortion-rights supporters to say they would vote only for candidates with whom they agreed on abortion, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

The narrative was reversed in June 2022, when the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs, the first and, for now, only ruling to repeal a constitutional right. Abortion-rights advocates got to work, quickly tapping into the fury that the ruling unleashed nationwide.

Their strategy was successful. They took abortion to the voters and won every state initiative and referendum on abortion rights, enshrining access in some state constitutions and blocking attempts to prohibit access in others. In the 2022 midterm elections, just months after the Dobbs ruling, Democrats spent half a billion dollars campaigning on abortion on network TV alone, says Melissa Williams, executive director of a super PAC for EMILYs List, which recruits, trains and sponsors Democratic women who support abortion rights. Even as the media predicted a tsunami of GOP victories, Democrats’ internal polling suggested something else—the efficacy of abortion rights— particularly among voters under 35.

“It has been a fundamental shift in paths to victory for Democrats since Dobbs,” Williams says.

This year, advocates have been working not only to elect specific candidates but also to place abortion-rights initiatives on the ballots of several more states, a move that may drive up turnout. This comes at a time when, Williams notes, 58 percent of voters under 35 and 51 percent of all voters say abortion is more important to them than it was in past election cycles.

“That’s unheard of. That’s a marked finding,” she says. “People are very rarely single-issue voters, and what they care about over time, of course, changes because your life changes and the world changes around you. But to have that for two years in a row, that a majority of people would care more about a single issue, then to have Democrats overperforming on that issue, I think it’s very telling.”

And so, she says, “abortion is a critical component of any campaign that we are running, and that is because Republicans have proven themselves to be out of step with Americans.”

Where Republicans and Trump dominate, and have for quite some time, is among men. Democrats definitely need the support of women, but Republicans already have the support of men. Therefore, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, “We need to win women by more than we lose men.”

Starting in 1980, women have consistently voted for Democrats in greater proportion than have men, creating a notable gender gap. It wasn’t until 1996, when then-President Clinton was running for reelection, that women changed the outcome of a race by voting Democratic in such great numbers that they overcame men’s preference for Republican nominee Bob Dole. Since then, a majority of women have voted Democratic in every presidential race.

Men, on the other hand, usually favor Republicans (except in 2008, when they split almost evenly between Barack Obama and John McCain).

It is often said that women (like any other group) are not a monolith. That’s an understatement. Just ask any woman if she’s interested in only one issue. The entire electorate comprises individual voters with myriad concerns about the future of this country. Women, however, are a majority of the population. They also vote in greater percentages than men, making them a potentially powerful demographic. So it is reasonable to think that if most women coalesce around one candidate or even around one issue, they will prevail. This year, abortion is the dominant issue for many women. But will that give the Democrats the boost they need?

It could turn out to be one of those seminal issues that gets people in their guts and rises above quotidian concerns about the price of milk or even housing. Advocates say that’s what the media often overlooks.

“The people who too often frame our conventional wisdom—so this is, to some degree, the pundits; this is, to some degree, the news directors and so on—still seem amazed that this is an issue that matters, and still seem amazed that the answer isn’t just to compromise, to find a number of weeks,” says Christina Reynolds, a spokesperson for EMILYs List. “And our take, writ large, and that of our candidates, is this is not a question of how many weeks—it’s a question of who gets to decide.”

“And voters are in the same place,” Reynolds continues. “What they very clearly understand is that whether or not they would ever have an abortion, whether or not they want one, etc., whether or not they are of childbearing years or anything like that, they understand that putting government in charge of these decisions is not where they want to be.”

Republicans acknowledge that the electoral power of abortion now works to the advantage of Democrats. That explains why Trump has struggled to position himself on the reproductive rights spectrum. In the spring, he landed on “states’ rights,” meaning each state should continue to establish its own laws on whether and under what conditions abortion is legal. It’s a divisive position among the staunchest abortion opponents, who believe no one should have the right to terminate a pregnancy. (That’s what Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, espoused before he joined the GOP ticket and adopted new verbiage.)

The people who too often frame our conventional wisdom … still seem amazed that this is an issue that matters, and still seem amazed that the answer isn’t just to compromise, to find a number of weeks. … This is not a question of how many weeks—it’s a question of who gets to decide.

Christina Reynolds, EMILYs List

And it plays into the hands of Democrats, who need only point to the current legal patchwork that has prompted hospitals in restrictive states to turn away pregnant women; forced people across a wide swath of the country, particularly in the South, to travel to other states to obtain abortions; and led to heart-wrenching stories from sympathetic women and girls that make people angry enough to want to do something about it. Against that backdrop, Trump told reporters in August that abortion as an issue has “tempered down.”

“It is still going to be a relevant issue because, quite frankly, it is about the only issue Democrats have an advantage on in this election,” Republican pollster Nicole McCleskey concedes. “They will continue to make it a relevant issue.”

But McCleskey believes the “shock value” of the Supreme Court’s decision to take away the constitutional right to abortion has faded. So while she agrees with Democrats that abortion has an “emotional impact,” she, like Trump, downplays its potential to influence voters.

“The two dominant issues are the economy and inflation, and immigration and border security,” McCleskey says. “And those issues are entirely dominated by Republicans, and voters believe that Republicans will handle those issues better.”

That’s what most polls predicted two years ago—when conventional wisdom had Republicans clobbering Democrats in Congress—but voters had something different in mind, notes Diana Mutz, director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the University of Pennsylvania. Democrats did lose the House, but the divide is slim, and they won a seat to secure a majority in the Senate. Since the party that occupies the White House routinely loses power during midterm congressional elections, Democrats took 2022 as a big win.

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mutz and a coauthor reviewed 2020 and 2022 surveys of the same individuals to see how they voted each year. Most, she says, voted for candidates of the same party in both elections. But following the Dobbs ruling, a number of people who support abortion rights moved into the Democratic camp just as those who oppose abortion moved into the Republican camp. The study concluded that a large proportion of people who did not vote in 2020 but did two years later were “highly motivated by abortion.” Since more Americans favor abortion rights, Democrats had the edge.

As for inflation, which by November 2022 had hit its highest point in four decades, Republicans blamed Democrats and Democrats blamed Republicans, Mutz notes. Independent voters blamed both or neither. Why were the results so muddied? Many respondents didn’t understand the economy and couldn’t answer “basic factual questions,” such as whether unemployment had risen or declined, Mutz says.

Her study concluded that the economy—even inflation—did not change votes. “The only thing that seemed to matter,” Mutz says, “was abortion.”

What does that mean for 2024? “If they don’t try and make abortion salient before the election, that would be very silly on the part of Democrats, because it does help their cause,” Mutz says.

The lesson is not lost on Democrats and abortion-rights advocates.

“This is an issue that resonates with people all over the country,” EMILYs List President Jessica Mackler said at a press conference in late July. “And we are going to win in November by talking about this issue.”

Lisa Ann Walter first marched in support of the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights when she was a kid growing up in suburban Washington. “That was just what my family did,” she said.

More than half a century later, the actor—who currently co-stars in the TV sitcom Abbott Elementary— is still fighting. 

For the exact same things.

“I consider it my duty as an American and as a woman to try to do anything I can to continue to move forward,” she told me in an interview at the Democratic National Convention. “We’ve already gone through a lot of this shit once. We’re going to have to scrape and claw our way back.”

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, the battle to restore abortion rights has been front and center, particularly this election year. Less visible are efforts to enshrine women’s equality into the Constitution, the continuation of a campaign that conservatives thought they killed more than 40 years ago.

Not true. Champions of the ERA have been working tirelessly to get Congress to publish the 101-year-old measure that would ban gender-based discrimination. The requisite 38 states have ratified the amendment, albeit three of them after an arbitrary and, advocates insist, alterable deadline of 1982.

Although women have made considerable strides in the intervening years, a constitutional right is the only guarantee they will make further gains and keep them in perpetuity, advocates say. And, they add, the need to add women to the Constitution endures. 

Exhibit A is the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reversed the constitutional right to abortion.

“I don’t even think you have a democracy if women can’t make decisions about their own body,” said former Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who was a leading voice for women’s rights during 30 years in Congress. “We’re not dictating to men what kind of procedures they can and cannot have.”

The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed in 1923, three years after women won the right to vote. Women’s rights leader Alice Paul rewrote it in 1943 and Congress passed it in 1972, sending it to the states for ratification. In the simplest of terms, the amendment would prohibit discrimination “on account of sex.” 

In the preamble to the proposed amendment, Congress set a deadline of 1979, which it later extended to June 30, 1982. Women’s rights advocates, with support from civil rights groups, worked tirelessly around the country to get the amendment ratified. 

But conservatives worked hard, too, playing on fears that passage of the ERA would force women to fight in wars, use single-sex bathrooms and lose the financial support of their husbands, among other things. Leading ERA adversaries included the Catholic Church as well as the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the insurance industry. In an politically astute move, a St. Louis lawyer named Phyllis Schlafly emerged as the face of the opposition—a woman who advised other women that codifying equal rights was not in their best interest. “What I am defending is the real rights of women,” Schlafly said during the battle. “A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.”

Nonetheless, a majority of states—35—ratified the ERA before the deadline. 

Three short.

Between 2017 and 2020, three more states came on board. And now advocates argue that Congress can and should remove the 1982 deadline. Many leading constitutional scholars, including Laurence Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky and Kathleen Sullivan, say the deadline is not binding. Notably, however, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a strong supporter of the amendment, said the effort should start over. 

Polls indicate widespread support for the ERA, and always have. Seven in 10 people who responded to a September 2023 poll conducted for Ms. and the Feminist Majority Foundation, which publishes Ms., favor placing the ERA in the Constitution, while only 12 percent oppose it. More than 60 percent of every demographic group except one—Republicans, at 46 percent—favor the ERA, with the greatest levels of support coming from Democrats (89 percent), college-educated women (82 percent), women under 50 (78 percent) and African Americans (77 percent). Six in 10 white men and the same share of men without college degrees, both of whom tend to vote Republican, also said they backed the ERA, as did 69 percent of women 50 and older. 

“The ERA is significantly more popular than all the politicians who oppose it,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, whose firm, Lake Research Partners, conducted the poll. But, she added, “it’s been impossible to get it in the public dialogue.”

Maloney is working to change that, to make the ERA more visible within Congress and the nation. At the Democratic convention, she did so quite literally: by sporting a green leather jacket with “ERA” written in large silver studs across the back.

“I would say the Equal Rights Amendment is insurance,” Maloney told me. “The only way we can protect women is to have an ironclad law. If they can roll back a woman’s right to choose, then they can roll back any right.”

For example, she said, equal pay is “not enforceable because women aren’t in the Constitution.”

At a gathering of ERA supporters sponsored by the Feminist Majority, Rep. Ayanna Pressley said ratification would provide a legal tool to combat “everyday discrimination women face, including pay discrimination, pregnancy discrimination [and] sexual and domestic violence.” 

Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-founder of the Congressional ERA Caucus, has introduced a joint resolution that would remove the deadline for ratification of the amendment. Currently, the measure has 215 co-sponsors, three shy of a majority. But with Republicans in control of the House, a vote this year is unlikely. 

Advocates, however, will not give up. Even now, with an election fast approaching, Pressley and Maloney are trying to secure the 218 votes necessary for a discharge petition, which would force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to bypass committees and bring the resolution to the House floor. Former U.S. Rep. Martha Griffiths (D-Mich.) used the same strategy to bring the ERA to the floor 52 years ago. Now, Maloney is heading a petition drive, Sign4ERA.org, that is gathering signatures to urge Congress to act. 

Feminist leaders might have a better chance next year. If congressional Democrats do well in November and if Vice President Harris becomes the first female president, they will press even harder for the equality that has eluded women all these decades.

“Given the decisions of the current Supreme Court, it is imperative—imperative—that our presidential nominee ensure gender equity through publishing the ERA,” said Walter, the actress. “And something tells me that she will make it a priority in her administration.”

Kamala Harris has changed the face of the upcoming presidential election. She also appears to be changing the face of this year’s electorate.

Even before accepting her party’s nomination Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention, polls showed that Harris’s candidacy was motivating large swaths of previously unenthused Americans to engage in the election and, if the trend holds, to vote. With her in the race, the electorate is likely to be younger, more female and more supportive of abortion rights than it would have been with President Biden as the Democratic nominee, polls have found.

“Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, compared to Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, is a sea change in overall motivation,” said Melissa Williams, executive director of a Super PAC for EMILYs List, which recruits, trains and finances Democratic women who support abortion rights. In the eight days after Biden withdrew from the race and passed the torch to Harris, the motivation to vote among people in five battleground states jumped 42 points, from 37 percent to 79 percent, according to a poll conducted for EMILYs List and released during the Chicago convention. 

The shift in enthusiasm was even greater among women, especially women between the ages of 18 and 44. Only 33 percent of all women and a moribund 18 percent of those under 45 had been motivated to vote when Biden was still in the race. Since Democratic candidates need a strong showing from women to overcome Republicans’ traditional dominance among men, that augured poorly for the president’s reelection chances. Once Harris replaced him as the likely nominee, women’s motivation to vote shot up 49 points to 82 percent, EMILYs List reported. Women under 45, meanwhile, showed an astounding 57-point increase, to 75 percent.

The same poll, conducted in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, found that in the first week of her race, Harris demonstrated that she is much more likely than Biden to win votes from those newly motivated women. Fifty percent of female respondents said they supported her, compared to 39 percent who said they backed Biden before he dropped out in July. Again Harris showed the greatest gains among younger women. Slightly more than half—52 percent—of women under 45 said they backed her, compared to just 30 percent who supported Biden. 

At the same time, Harris maintained Biden’s level of 37 percent support among men. “She’s 11 points better among women without losing a single vote among men,” said Jill Normington, whose firm conducted the poll.

“The gender gap is on steroids right now,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.  

Harris is reaping benefits from her leadership on abortion rights, even though the bulk of Americans don’t necessarily associate her with the issue yet. More than three-quarters (77 percent) of people who identify as “strongly pro-choice” told pollsters they would vote for the vice president, compared to 60 percent who said they favored Biden. “She is a much better messenger on one of the key issues of this election cycle,” Normington said. 

In sharp contrast to previous national elections, abortion will weigh heavily on this presidential contest, the first since the Supreme Court sent abortion decisions back to the states two years ago. The candidates could not be further apart. 

Former President Trump glorifies his role in overturning Roe v. Wade by nominating three anti-abortion Supreme Court justices. But most Republicans, who have long worked to limit or prohibit abortion, are shying away from the issue because it is likely to cost them votes. A full 85 percent of respondents told Gallup in May that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, compared to 12 percent who said it should be illegal in all circumstances.  

Harris and the entire Democratic Party are positioning themselves as champions of women—the only group of Americans ever to have lost a constitutional right.

The party put abortion front and center on each of the four nights of its convention. During prime time, speaker after speaker attacked Trump for failing women and girls. Elected officials and candidates pledged to fight to restore abortion rights nationwide. And several women and their partners shared emotional, scary, personal stories illustrating the challenges and dangers wrought by states that have banned or restricted abortion.

Like many Democratic women on hand for Harris’s Thursday night convention speech, Pamela Castellana, of Melbourne, FL, dressed in suffragist white from head to toe. The only color in her ensemble was the blue message on her white sash, declaring, “VOTES FOR WOMEN.” 

Castellana, chair of the Brevard County Democratic Party, said she feels confident that abortion “will get more people out to vote from all parties.” That will be particularly true in states like Florida, which have abortion initiatives on their ballots. “It will help the party that cares the most about women’s freedom to make decisions about their health care, and that’s the Democratic Party today,” she said.

Normington echoed that sentiment. Abortion is “the number one best thing that we can say to the voters. It is the most persuasive thing,” she said. “It is important in urban communities, suburban communities, in rural communities, among voters at the oldest of the spectrum and the youngest end of the spectrum. It helps in the middle of the ideological spectrum, and it helps our base.”

The Democratic Party’s base is made up of many groups, but it starts with women. In 2020, 57 percent of women and 45 percent of men voted for Biden, a 12-point gender gap, according to exit polls. (Numbers vary depending on the poll, but not significantly.) Trump won the support of just 42 percent of women, but a majority (53 percent) of men. 

In other words, women put Biden in office. 

But not all women. Biden won over just 44 percent of white women, compared to a full 90 percent of Black women and 69 percent of Latinas and Asian American women. 

This same pattern has existed for decades. When Democrats win the presidency, it is usually because of their support among women. 

Not only do women vote for Democrats more than do men, they register to vote and cast their votes in greater proportions.  

And because women make up the majority of the population, the voting booth is one place where they can wield more power than men.

Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton made history as the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party. A proud feminist, she embraced the trailblazing nature of her campaign, portraying it as a quest to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.” But winning the popular vote still didn’t enable her to shatter the glass. A greater equality, the dream of generations of women, remained just that—a dream. Another woman would have to make it come true.

This week, in what might have been the waning days of her second term, Clinton declared in a full-throated speech at the Democratic National Convention, that “the future is here.” It is Kamala Harris, she said, who can smash that centuries-old ceiling once and for all.

Vice President Harris, a strong feminist in her own right, is running less as a female candidate than as a nominee who just happens to be a woman—and a woman of color, at that. Democrats, overwhelmingly jubilant at their Chicago nominating convention, told me that they think it’s a winning strategy. Times have changed since 2016, they said. 

Have they?

It is true that Harris isn’t burdened by the baggage that Clinton carried, female-centric stereotypes that stuck to her like gum to a shoe, dating from her years as first lady, senator and secretary of state. Harris is something of a blank slate who is re-introducing herself to the American people in a way that, Democrats hope, they will find both positive and palatable.

Yes, palatable. Even in 2024, women candidates — like all women in positions of power — must come across as not only competent, right and smart, but as palatable. Another word for that is “likable.” During Clinton’s campaign in 2016, many voters told pollsters and journalists (including this one) that they’d vote for a woman, “just not that woman.” It’s a common refrain that is being put to the test yet again.

Still, the obstacle of “running while female” might be ameliorated by some big things that have happened since Clinton sought the White House, convention delegates, pollsters and women’s advocates told me.

One is the presidency of Donald Trump.

Another is the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the potential for history to repeat itself.

But perhaps the most powerful development is the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, an unpopular decision that helped Democrats avert a predicted “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections and led to successful state initiatives (with more ballot measures in the pipeline) to protect abortion rights.

While acknowledging that she is “still heartbroken” about Clinton’s loss, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told me in an interview that the country is in a different place now than it was eight years ago. In 2016, voters didn’t have a full understanding of “how awful” Trump was, she said. “We know now, and he’s even promised to be worse than he was before,” Pelosi said. “I don’t know that he keeps promises, but it’s scary. So I think that the reality of what the actual contrast is between the two candidates is much clearer now in terms of how damaging it is to our country.”

Additionally, Pelosi told me that Clinton—and even Pelosi herself, as the first and, to date, only female speaker, “paved the way” for Harris to win. “And when we do [win], she will be a great president. And it so happens, she’ll be a woman president, she’ll be a woman of color president, but she will be the best president,” Pelosi said. “That will be icing on the cake.”

As for abortion, Pelosi said succinctly: “It’s everything.”

Indeed, reproductive rights and, more specifically, the need to protect and restore them, were mentioned by the vast majority of convention speakers, from everyday Americans to former presidents and first ladies to celebrities. Women and men who live in states that have banned or restricted abortion access shared painful stories of near-death experiences when pregnancies became nonviable and women were denied the care they needed.

Oprah Winfrey called those who are telling about such travails “the new freedom fighters.” Gesturing to her body, Winfrey declared: “Because if you do not have autonomy over this, if you cannot control when and how you choose to bring your children into this world and how they are raised and supported, there is no American dream.”

That Trump nominated the three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe, that he brags that he is responsible for a decision he falsely says most Americans wanted, that the ruling could lead to further restrictions on reproductive rights, will be a major theme of the Harris campaign. 

Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, noted that soon after the Court took away the right to choose in 2022, his state moved to protect abortion rights. In Minnesota, he said during his convention speech, “we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

Clearly, Democrats have found their voice on abortion in a way that they hadn’t before. Polls explain why. In May, fully 85 percent of respondents told Gallup, a nonpartisan polling firm, that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances. Only 12 percent said it should be illegal in all circumstances. That and other, similar polls also explain why abortion was not a hot topic at the Republican National Convention a few weeks ago.

Delegates to the Democratic convention were optimistic about their second female nominee, though it’s easy to be swept up by the excitement of a festive four-day event featuring the likes of Stevie Wonder, John Legend and Winfrey, not to mention such Democratic icons as the Obamas, the Clintons and a slew of up-and-comers.

“I think the country is absolutely ready for a woman president,” Anne Schaeffer, an Illinois lobbyist and former legislative assistant, told me. “This campaign offers a lot of inspiration and a lot of connection.”

“Are you feeling the energy?” asked Mary Fosse, a state representative from Everett, Wash., who was sporting a red, white and blue “Cowboy Kamala” sash and a cowboy hat in deference to Beyonce’s latest album, Cowboy Carter. “I have not felt this kind of energy and vigor in so many years. … Kamala Harris has this appeal to women and people who have diverse backgrounds. People see themselves in her.”

Alabama state Sen. Merika Coleman went to the convention hall in a sparkly red-and-blue hat with a silver star and a pin bearing a picture of Harris.

 “It’s amazing to be part of history,” said Coleman, chair of her state’s Legislative Black Caucus. “We had an amazing opportunity with Hillary Clinton…. Kamala Harris is one of the most qualified people ever to run for president of the United States. She just happens to be a woman. She just happens to be a Black woman. She just happens to be an Asian woman.”

The question now is whether Harris will be the first female president or just another woman to hit her head on the glass.