Deadlocked in the polls less than two weeks before election day, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump headed to staunchly Republican Texas on Friday in a bid to sway undecided voters by focusing on the key issues of reproductive freedom and border security.
Texas is not a pivotal 2024 battleground. Polling averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com show Trump with a 6.8-percentage-point lead in the state over Harris. But the vice president’s foray into Texas is less about flipping that state blue than issuing a national warning on reproductive rights from a part of the country that her campaign dubs the epicenter of GOP abortion bans.
Harris will make abortion the key theme of her Houston rally, featuring pop megastar Beyoncé, a Texan whose song “Freedom” is frequently played at Harris events, and country music icon Willie Nelson.
“We are here to really highlight that, sadly, the elected leaders of Texas, a lot of them have made Texas ground zero in this fundamental fight for the freedom of women to make decisions about their own body,” Harris told reporters as she arrived in Houston.
Harris said she hoped to highlight the impact of abortion bans on women from Texas and other red states.
“I do believe it is critically important to acknowledge that this is not just a political debate,” Harris added. “This is not just some theoretical concept. Real harm has occurred in this country. … People die.”
A senior Harris campaign official said ahead of the event: “If Trump is elected, he will take this nightmare nationwide — enacting a national abortion ban and installing a permanent anti-choice majority on the Supreme Court. Women in states across the country — including battleground states — could face the same consequences we have seen in Texas.”
Trump, who has repeatedly shifted his position on abortion, has denied that he would push for a federal abortion ban. At the beginning of this month, the former president wrote on Truth Social that he did not support such a ban “and would, in fact, veto it” because he believes it is up to the states to decide. He added that he fully supports exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.
But Trump was not scheduled to talk about abortion when he spoke from a private airplane hangar in Austin. Instead, he delivered remarks on border security and crime in a state that he said had “turned into ground zero for the largest border invasion in the history of the world.”
“Over the past four years, this state has become Kamala’s staging ground to import her army of migrant gangs and illegal alien criminals into every state in America — and every state’s a border state, you’ve heard that, it’s true — paving a trail of bloodshed, suffering and death all across our land,” Trump said. “And it’s only getting worse.”
The former president made the false claim that “many” of the millions of migrants who illegally entered the U.S. over the last 3½ years “are murderers, drug dealers, people from jails.” In fact, research shows people living in the U.S. illegally are arrested at significantly lower rates for violent, drug and property crimes than native-born Americans.
“We’re like a dumping ground,” Trump said. “What Kamala Harris has done on our border is cruel, it’s vile, and it’s absolutely heartless”
Trump highlighted crimes committed by migrants living illegally in Texas, including two Venezuelan men charged with sexually assaulting and strangling to death of Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl in Houston. He invited Alexis Nungaray, Jocelyn’s mother, to speak about her daughter, who was a rising seventh grader.
“The Biden-Harris policies we have here are why she’s not here anymore,” Nungaray said. “They made her a target and ran with that, and now I will forever be a grieving mother, and my son will forever be a grieving brother who will no longer get to grow up with his sister.”
Nungaray said Harris had never reached out to her to give her condolences, but days before the election had attempted to apologize. “I think it’s very sad,” she said, “that she can’t even just give me an open … sincere apology.”
If reelected, Trump has said he will deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.” But his campaign has offered few details.
Speaking to reporters in Houston, Harris criticized Trump for comments he made Thursday and again Friday, dubbing the U.S. a “garbage can for the world” because of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies.
“This is someone who is a former president of the United States who has a bully pulpit, and this is how he uses it — to tell the rest of the world that somehow the United States of America is trash,” Harris said.
“The president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are,” Harris added.
In the final weeks of the campaign, polls show Trump and Harris neck and neck. A national poll released Friday by the New York Times and Siena College found Harris and Trump deadlocked at 48% to 48%. Polling averages by FiveThirtyEight.com show Harris leading Trump nationally by 1.5 percentage points, well within the margin of error.
The Harris campaign is highlighting Trump’s appointment of three Supreme Court justices who helped deliver the 2022 decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade and warning of the dangers posed by Project 25, the Heritage Foundation’s detailed blueprint for the next Republican president.
Those issues, it argues, have proved effective in winning over white non-college-educated women whom Trump counted as part of his base and male voters concerned by the harm abortion bans could pose to their loved ones.
Texas has been at the forefront of abortion restrictions ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and the state blocked doctors from performing abortions as soon as cardiac activity is detected — as early as six weeks or before. Since then, Texas women who experience miscarriages or complications have faced challenges receiving medical care.
Harris’ rally will feature women who say their lives were endangered by abortion bans, including Amanda Zurawski, an Austin resident who became pregnant after months of fertility treatments and nearly died when she was denied care when she went into premature labor and developed a septic infection at 18 weeks.
Ondrea, a Texas woman who first shared her story this week in a new Harris campaign ad “You Will Be Protected,” will recount her experience of having a miscarriage at 16 weeks and being denied medical help to prevent an infection.
The crowd will also hear from Shanette Williams, the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after doctors refused her a routine medical procedure after she took abortion pills and developed an infection.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, Trump has repeatedly shifted his message on abortion.
The former president has called himself the “most pro-life president ever” and boasted about appointing three justices who voted to overturn Roe. But he has also blamed the “abortion issue” for the GOP’s poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections, slammed Florida’s six-week abortion ban as “a terrible mistake” and pledged to work with Democrats to pass a national bipartisan law on abortion.
If Harris becomes president, she seeks to pass a law that would codify Roe vs. Wade into law.
Earlier this week, the Democratic presidential nominee said that if she were elected and Congress were controlled by the GOP she would be unwilling to compromise on abortion legislation, such as offering religious exemptions, to gain the support of moderate Republican senators, such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.
“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said Tuesday in an interview with NBC News.
“I’m not gonna engage in hypotheticals because we could go on a variety of scenarios,” Harris added. “Let’s just start with a fundamental fact, a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America: the freedom to make decisions about their own body. And that cannot be negotiable, which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe vs. Wade. And that is it.”
