There was never any doubt that an imminent Supreme Court decision on abortion, expected in the summer, would have a disproportionate effect on this year’s midterm campaigns. The problem was simply not expected to disrupt the races so quickly.
But with the leak of a draft opinion this week indicating that the Supreme Court is likely to overthrow Roe v. Wade, both right and left are tackling the issue. Democrats, who want to maintain their little control over Congress, hope abortion will boost their voters in an otherwise difficult year for the party — one marked by low approval ratings for President Biden and frustrations over the economy and inflation.
Stacey Abrams, the Democrat vying to become Georgia’s next governor in what will be one of the country’s most-watched contests this fall, temporarily halted her campaign fundraising efforts to raise money for abortion rights groups.
And current Georgia governor Brian Kemp is being pushed further to the right on this matter by his main challenger, David Perdue, the Trump-backed former senator. Perdue on Thursday pressured Mr. Kemp to promise to call a special session of the legislature to outlaw abortion if the court lifts federal protections for abortion rights.
In the high-spending Republican Senate primaries, a new ad Thursday from a super PAC that backed David McCormick in the race warns that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former host of “The Dr. Oz Show” and the top of Mr. McCormick rival, “will betray us” because he is “not completely pro-life.”
The issue may also raise the profile of a much lesser-known Republican candidate in Pennsylvania’s race: Kathy Barnette, a political commentator who has said the only exception should be when the mother’s life is at stake. The morning after the draft decision was published, Ms. Barnette wrote on Twitter that she was the “byproduct of rape” and added a four minute video, which has been viewed more than 350,000 times.
In North Carolina, where an open Senate seat has drawn overcrowded primaries on both sides of the aisle, presumptive Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley is lining up Republicans in the race as extremists who oppose abortion “even in the case of incest, rape whether a mother’s health is in danger.”
The presumptive Democratic nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, is not waiting for a winner to be chosen in the May 17 Republican primaries to go on the offensive. On Thursday, Mr. Shapiro’s campaign ran a TV ad against state senator Doug Mastriano, a leading Republican contender, who said he “wants to ban abortion.”
The leaked draft opinion has also raised the stakes for a critical Democratic rematch taking place in Texas, where progressive attorney Jessica Cisneros is in a runoff on May 24 with Representative Henry Cuellar, who was the only congressional Democrat to oppose a U.S. House bill. voted that would have overturned Texas’s near-total abortion ban.
Minutes after the draft decision was published, framed the race as an opportunity to protect those rights.
In Arizona, as several Republicans compete for the chance to challenge Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, Mr. Kelly conceived of the abortion issue as a generational struggle for freedoms. “It is wrong that my granddaughter may soon have fewer rights than my grandmother,” he wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
The candidates in the race’s Republican primaries have also jumped on the issue. Blake Masters, a venture capitalist, described abortion in graphic terms on Twitter, and said mr. Kelly “wants to force your state to allow it.”
Mark Brnovich, another leading Republican in the Arizona Senate primaries and the state attorney general, has made the opposition to abortion a hot topic of conversation. He said the Supreme Court should send Roe v. Wade “to the ash heap of history where it belongs.”