How Harris may win back a critical group of voters who abandoned Biden

CNN —

The quickest way for Kamala Harris to grow her support may be to consolidate the voters who agree with her on abortion.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has been a much more comfortable and cogent messenger on the issue than President Joe Biden, who wasn’t winning nearly as much support in 2024 as he did in 2020 – or major Democratic candidates did in 2022 – among voters who support legal abortion, according to previously unpublished results from multiple public polls.

Biden’s slippage with voters who support legal abortion partly reflected the same problems that hurt him with other segments of the electorate, such as concerns about his age. But his decline with those voters also underscored the risk to Democrats that abortion’s relevance has been reduced since 2022 by voter concerns about other problems, especially inflation, and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to downplay the issue.

With Harris at the top of the ticket, Democrats now see a chance to refocus voters on the issue and restore their margins among the abortion rights voters who had notably drifted away from Biden. “She is able to talk about it in a way that, quite frankly, that Biden was not,” said Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, expressing a widely held view in the party. “It’s not that the issue hasn’t been talked about at a national level, but it hasn’t been articulated in the way she does.”

Biden’s lackluster showing in polls this year among voters who support abortion rights, though rarely discussed, represented one of the most important changes in the political landscape from the past two national elections. In both the 2020 and 2022 campaigns, voters who backed legal abortion provided overwhelming support to