Kamala Harris to visit Florida Wednesday as six-week abortion ban goes into effect

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks about reproductive rights during an event in Washington on June 23, 2023.

Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Florida on Wednesday just hours after a controversial ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy goes into effect in the state, as the Biden campaign ratchets up its strategy of blaming former President Donald Trump for abortion restrictions being adopted across the country.

Harris, who has been leading the charge for the Biden White House and campaign on the issue of reproductive rights, is set to speak at a campaign event in Jacksonville and will be introduced by a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, according to a campaign official.

The vice president plans to explicitly blame Trump for the Supreme Court’s historic overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and for a slew of abortion bans that some states have adopted since, the official said. She will also discuss how abortion bans like the one going into effect in Florida on Wednesday threaten medical providers with criminal prosecution.

“Today at the stroke of midnight, another Trump abortion ban went into effect here in Florida,” Harris will say, according to excerpts provided to CNN. “This ban applies to many women before they even know they are pregnant – which tells us the extremists who wrote this ban don’t even know how a woman’s body works. Or they just don’t care.”

Harris also plans to address Trump’s recently published comments to Time magazine, in which he did not object when asked whether he was “comfortable” with states punishing women who undergo abortions where it is banned.

“I don’t have to be comfortable or uncomfortable,” Trump said. “The states are going to make that decision. The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.”

Harris will say in response: “Florida, the contrast could not be clearer: Under Donald Trump, it would be fair game for women to be monitored and punished by the government. Joe Biden and I have a different view: We believe no politician should ever come between a woman and a doctor.”

The vice president’s trek to Florida comes just one week after President Joe Biden visited Tampa – also to shine a spotlight on the state’s six-week abortion ban.

“Donald Trump stripped away the rights and freedoms of women in America,” Biden said in Tampa. Vowing to restore abortion rights, the president added: “It will teach Donald Trump and extreme MAGA Republicans a valuable lesson: Don’t mess with the women of American.”

Biden advisers are hoping the political saliency of the reproductive rights issue can help galvanize voters ahead of Election Day and make Florida – a state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020 – more competitive. In addition to ringing the alarm bell on the six-week abortion ban, Democrats are also seizing on the fact that a constitutional amendment that would codify abortion protections in the state will be on the ballot in the fall, hoping that measure can help drive turnout.

The campaign has been keeping close tabs on Jacksonville, the fast-growing, most populous city in Florida. No Democratic presidential candidate had won Duval County – home to Jacksonville – since Jimmy Carter in 1976; Biden broke the losing streak in 2020 by defeating Trump there.

National Democrats hope that some of the key dynamics that delivered Duval County for Biden in 2020, including a boost in Black voter turnout and the rejection of Trump by suburban women, can be replicated in swing areas across the country.

A key role for Harris

The vice president has emerged as the Biden campaign’s most prominent messenger on abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. In remarks last month from Tucson, Arizona, she issued a blistering rebuke of the state’s Civil War-era ban while warning a second Trump term could see a possible federal abortion ban.

“What has happened here in Arizona is a new inflection point – it has demonstrated once and for all that overturning Roe was … just the opening act of a larger strategy to take women’s rights and freedoms,” she said at the time. “Part of a full-on attack, state by state, on reproductive freedom – and we all must understand who is to blame. Former President Donald Trump did this.”

While Trump has spent the bulk of the last month in a New York courtroom over alleged hush money payments, Harris and Biden have kept a far busier campaign schedule. In April alone, the vice president made stops in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Georgia – all states that may prove crucial to delivering Biden a reelection victory in November.

In a memo last month, campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez called Florida “winnable,” specifically pointing to the issue of abortion as “mobilizing a diverse and growing segment of voters to help buoy Democrats up and down the ballot.”

As the ban is set to take effect Wednesday, the national Democratic Party purchased billboards in Spanish and English tying Trump to abortion bans and targeting high-traffic areas in Gainesville, Miami, Tampa and Orlando.

Capturing the level of alarm that national Democrats are raising, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried warned Tuesday in a call with reporters that the Florida law’s implementation would mean “access to reproductive care is now effectively eliminated.”

“The Democratic Party is really energized by the fact that the attention that we are receiving from the administration, and they understand that if you want to protect democracy and freedom across the entire country, that you have to come to the belly of the beast, which is here in the state of Florida,” Fried said.

CNN’s Ebony Davis contributed to this report.

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