‘Texas is the stage and the audience is the battlegrounds’: Why Harris is barnstorming the Lone Star State

Donald Trump is warning the country will end up like Detroit if Kamala Harris is elected.

Now, Harris is cautioning that if voters put him in office, it’ll look like Texas instead.

It’s an argument the vice president will make on Friday as she steps off the swing-state campaign trail to rally supporters in deep-red Texas, a focal point not only for the abortion-rights fight, but for the kinds of conservative policies Harris and other Democrats warn could spread across the country if Trump returns to the White House.

In essence, she’s moving to turn Texas, a lodestar of Republican politics, into a foil.

“If we don’t stop Donald Trump now, we’re going to have 50 Texases,” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, who will attend the Friday rally in Houston. “The tip of the spear of the crisis is Texas.”

The trip comes as part of Harris’ push in the final week of the campaign to court moderate Republican voters — including suburban women, a crucial demographic — who may dislike Trump but are hesitant to vote for a Democrat. And she’s leaning on issues like abortion and democracy to persuade them.

And beyond the campaign message, the event itself — a star-studded affair featuring Houston native Beyoncé — will give Harris a chance to return to her sweet spot: A major rally in front of thousands of fans, reminiscent of her 2019 presidential campaign rollout in Oakland before an estimated 20,000 people.

At her rally, Harris is expected to zero in on abortion rights by highlighting the impact that Trump’s appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices key to overturning Roe v. Wade has had on reproductive health care, including in deeply red states like Texas. The state, which Donald Trump is almost certain to win, is not part of her campaign’s path to 270 electoral votes. But it is a place where the effects from that ruling have resonated deeply — and are also deeply unpopular. A recent poll from the Texas Politics Project found that 54 percent of likely voters in Texas think Harris would do a better job on abortion, compared to 28 percent who said the same about Trump.

“Texas is not just a good showcase for how restrictive policies can get on abortion when you leave it to the states, but also the degree to which that kind of restrictive approach gets in front of — and does not align with — public opinion, including public opinion with a sizable share of Republicans,” said Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project and co-directs the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll. “[Houston is] the biggest city in a state where even Republicans think that leaving it to the state produced a pretty bad result.”

Texas has what are arguably the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, banning abortion starting at conception, with violations punishable by up to 99 years in prison and a fine of at least $100,000. The law contains no exceptions for rape or incest — and women in the state have been denied abortions in life-threatening situations despite an exception in state law that allows doctors to provide the procedure if necessary to save a mother’s life.

The Harris campaign views Texas’ policies as a way to focus voters on one of their most salient issues in the final days, and more importantly to capture the news cycle.

“Texas is the stage and the audience is the battlegrounds. It definitely arrests people’s attention in a way that is hard to do by just going back to another battleground at this point in the cycle. This is our strategic way to break through the news,” a senior campaign official granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy told POLITICO.

It also fits in a theme of Harris’ making throughout her vice presidency: heading to states that represent, in her eyes, the worst of policy impacts even if Democrats have little to no chance of flipping them. Last year, Harris went to conservative-leaning Florida on what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, made a surprise trip to Tennessee to talk about gun safety laws and to support state officials who’d been expelled from the state house, and returned to Florida to blast the state’s guidelines on teaching African American history, which in part said that slavery benefited enslaved people.

Harris and Cheney talk ‘consequences’ of Trump presidency

Former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, the former No. 2 House Republican-turned-Harris supporter, called out Texas — specifically, its effort to obtain the medical records of women seeking out of state abortions — during a whirlwind battleground barnstorm with Harris earlier this week.

“There are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision, and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” Cheney said. “This is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people come together to say, what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need?”

For two years, Republicans have struggled to figure out how to message on abortion as waves of bans took effect across the country, helping Democrats win key gubernatorial, Senate and legislative races. It is such a vulnerability for Republicans that Bill Miller, a GOP strategist in Texas, predicted if the election was entirely about abortion, Harris would win his state.

“It’s a winning issue for her,” he said. “If that were the only issue in this election, this election wouldn’t be close.”

Trump has tried to neutralize the issue by rejecting federal limits on abortion and saying the fall of Roe returned the issue of abortion to the states. But Harris’ Texas visit is expected to demonstrate the consequences of that approach, as scores of women have come forward to share stories of how they have struggled to receive emergency abortion care under their state’s bans.

Some of them, including a handful from Texas, have become key messengers as the campaign seeks to demonstrate the far-reaching impacts of abortion bans. The campaign on Wednesday released its most visceral ad on abortion to date, telling the story of a Texas woman who was denied an abortion after miscarrying at 16 weeks and developed a life-threatening septic infection that required her being cut open from her chest to her pelvis during a six-hour surgery. The ad shows her scar — as well as photos from her three-week hospitalization — and notes she may never be able to have children again.

“Texas has been ground zero for Project 2025 in a lot of ways — and specific to reproductive rights,” said Amanda Zurawski, another one of the women, who was denied an abortion at 18 weeks of pregnancy until she developed sepsis. “We’re in a perilous situation right now. We’re at a precipice in this country.”

Anti-abortion groups have voiced sympathy over such stories — but have blamed them not on the anti-abortion laws but on doctors for failing to provide care in emergency situations. And in cases where women have died from being provided abortion care — like 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thuman in Georgia — abortion opponents have blamed abortion pills.

“As a mother with two children whose diseases are commonly used as justification of abortion legalization, the vice president’s rhetoric is not only hurtful but it ignores all the help that is available as well as the humanity and dignity of every child in the womb,” said Students for Life Action President Kristan Hawkins.

Democratic strategists in Texas argue the trip also offers Harris a chance to draw a contrast with Trump on more than just abortion — as she tries to peel away moderates — by demonstrating that the GOP is no longer the party of former President George W. Bush or former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

The Harris campaign has their eyes especially set on white women without college degrees, a group internal polling suggests could be won over, according to the senior campaign official granted anonymity to describe internal polling. Those women, the official said, are “fueling the rise in female support for Harris.”

Texas hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976, and it’s expected to hand Trump this third victory in the state in just a little over a week. Republicans in Texas over the last four years embraced their state’s role as one of the Biden administration’s key adversaries. It has taken the federal government and others to court not only on reproductive rights but a host of other hot-button issues including Bible teaching in classrooms, gender-affirming care and immigration.

But the narrowness of the race between Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and his challenger, Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, has given some Democrats in Texas hope that they could make inroads in the state. Or at least hold it out as an example.

“Republicans have held every statewide office for the last 30 years, but the nature of who holds those offices has changed a lot in the last 10 years — and really since 2016,” said Matt Angle, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state. “Now, they reflect a much more destructive and a much more polarizing brand of extreme Republican.”