Two of the biggest issues in the 2024 race for the presidency, immigration and abortion, have strong ties to events playing out in Texas.
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Coming out of last week’s presidential debate, and sprinting toward the final seven weeks of the campaign, Texas is poised to play a pivotal role in the Nov. 5 contest for the nation’s top office.
That’s not to say Texas’ 40 electoral votes are up for grabs. By all accounts, they will remain in the Republican column. But the issues that have framed the race so far and are coming into sharper focus down the stretch — immigration and abortion — are inescapably tied to Texas.
Early in Tuesday night’s debate in Philadelphia, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris found her footing when the question of abortion was raised. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, praised the three Supreme Court justices he appointed who anchored the 2022 ruling ending a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy and leaving it up to individual states to set abortion policy.
And he was corrected by the moderators when he falsely said an unwanted baby could be “executed” after birth in some states where Democrats are in charge.
That gave Harris the opening she needed to take charge of the issue, and most of the examples she used were rooted in Texas, even though she never mentioned the state. There’s no exception for an abortion in cases in which rape or incest cause a pregnancy in Texas.
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Doctors fearing the loss of their medical license or even a jail sentence if they perform what they consider to be a medically necessary abortion has been most dramatically illustrated by a lawsuit challenging Texas’ strict law. Harris’ examples of women going out of state to receive doctor-recommended abortions because their home state forces them to carry an unviable fetus to term also involved Texas women.
Harris’ first TV ad after the debate used the exchange with Trump to signal she intends to press the abortion issue all the way to the Nov. 5 election.
Heading into the debate, and long before Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, one of the most effective issues for Trump was unlawful immigration, which ballooned along the Texas border not long after Trump was defeated in 2020. And ever since, Trump has had a willing and effective driver for his message in Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Even before Trump formally announced his comeback attempt, Abbott skillfully steered immigration back onto the national stage with his decision to deploy thousands of National Guard soldiers and airmen to points along the Rio Grande and by inviting his fellow Republican governors to the Texas border for dramatic photos of armed troops and camouflage-painted tactical vehicles meant to demonstrate that migrants cross the international river at their own peril.
Abbott’s actions also have had the effect of further elevating immigration and border security from parochial matters confined largely to the four states that touch Mexico into the national political conversation. After he sent tens of thousands of immigrants who have been granted at least temporary status to remain in the country to cities outside of Texas, Democratic mayors and governors were compelled to acknowledge that the Biden administration had allowed a crisis to fester and spread nationwide.
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Abbott also hosted Trump in Eagle Pass earlier this year so the former president could get a firsthand look at Texas’ efforts to secure the border.
No Trump campaign event has ended without a withering assessment of the Democratic administration’s approach to immigration and without virtually anyone invited to speak eagerly pointing out that Biden had tasked Harris with ferreting out the root causes of unlawful immigration and presumably getting it under control.
On the stump and at the debate, Harris has tried to blunt the issue that has had the Democrats on the defensive for three-plus years by pointing out that it was Trump who successfully urged congressional Republicans to scuttle sweeping immigration-related legislation that would have put more agents and enhanced technology on the ground. It has also helped that illegal crossings have declined since Biden issued an executive order in June that includes setting limits and other measures.
Despite that, Trump has shown no sign — nor is he likely to — of walking away from the immigration issue, which worked largely in his favor in the two previous presidential campaigns.
While immigration has been shown to be a needle mover for moderate voters during election cycles, abortion has been less so for middle-of-the-road voters who favor reproductive rights. In 2016, when Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would be open to rolling back abortion rights granted under Roe v. Wade, a poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that of the top 14 issues in the election, abortion ranked 13th, even though some 60% of voters favored abortion rights. Immigration ranked sixth.
A Pew poll taken two days before the debate but well after the legal challenges to Texas’ abortion ban made national news, including when Texas women directly affected by the ban addressed the 2024 Democratic National Convention, showed the abortion issue is ranked eighth, just two places beneath immigration.
That’s why both candidates will continue to talk a lot about Texas without having to spend time or money in the state.
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Publish date : 2024-09-15 00:05:00
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