I do think you hear, for example, Michelle Obama lay out what that dark reality already looks like for many men in the states where you have one in three women now living under a Trump abortion ban. Where, if your wife has a complication, you have to wait for her to be on death’s door before she can receive the medical care that she should be entitled to as an American citizen. Right? And painting that picture of what that reality could look like for men across the country, for the people who they love the most—their wives, their girlfriends, their mothers, their daughters, their nieces—is one that we think can and should be a motivating factor down the stretch in this campaign.
Michelle Obama’s words, specifically, were urging men to “take our lives seriously.” At least in my reading, that indicated that this is a message that can be delivered to men or should be delivered to men in a slightly different way. I understand what you’re saying that there’s this overall message about freedom. But I’m curious if the campaign has had any special consideration in getting this message to men who might not be as tapped in the issue.
Well, yeah. If you look at where we are in the campaign right now, we’re running two basic tracks at this point. We are running a mobilization campaign that’s targeted towards the voters who we know are supportive of the Vice President, and it’s about making sure that they have a plan to vote and they vote. That’s what the early vote operation is all about across the battleground states right now.
But we are simultaneously continuing to run a persuasion campaign that is geared to a small slice of the electorate that has still either not made up their minds over who they’re going to vote for, or have not decided whether or not they’re going to vote at all. And so for us down the stretch here, it is tapping into the issues that we know motivate these soft supporters or these people who may not be voting right now.
These are also the voters who have paid the least amount of attention to politics over the course of the past four years. So they may have heard about Dobbs, but may not necessarily understand the reality of that decision, and what it has actually caused so far and what a second Trump term might mean. And so talking about the reality as it exists across the country right now, for many women, is important to do. Talking about the fact that Donald Trump, if he were to regain power, would have the opportunity to nominate at least one, probably two more justices to the Supreme Court, locking in an anti-choice majority at the national level to extend the harm of his abortion bans across the country, for probably another generation. At least we think this is resonant for this small slice of the electorate.
