WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – The TikTok videos haunt 26-year-old Christy Kishbaugh.
One seared into her memory shows a young mom talking about how several Idaho emergency rooms rejected her because of the state's abortion ban, leaving her to bleed for weeks after a miscarriage.
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Kishbaugh sends videos like that to friends, saying “Can you believe this?”
She can’t.
In a hushed voice near a popular park, the married suburbanite worried about her own future under the new patchwork of state laws that have prevented thousands of women across the country from having abortions.
“Thinking ahead, if anything were to go wrong,” Kishbaugh nearly whispered, iced coffee in hand. “The idea that myself, my friends, people close to me, that they could potentially die or never have kids or lose a child because they’re not getting access to the health care they need, that really dwells with me.”
Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the tensions over abortion have only intensified, setting up the presidential election as a referendum on fundamental rights for tens of millions of women.
Republicans have long relied on deep support from white women in states such as Georgia, Florida and Texas who back them at higher levels compared to white women nationwide, data from AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the electorate, show. But in a battleground state like North Carolina, where Donald Trump won 60% of the vote of white women in 2020, their allegiance could be strained by the state’s new 12-week abortion ban.
If Trump's support among white women in North Carolina drops closer to the group's national average of 52% in 2020, he could find it difficult to earn the state's 16 electoral votes again. Vice President Kamala Harris could narrowly win if just a fraction of white women decide to support her instead of Trump, who took North Carolina by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020, Trump's narrowest margin of victory.
Abortion was a top issue for just 3% of North Carolina voters in 2020, with nearly all of them backing Trump and his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the high court ruling that had guaranteed a woman's right to abortion for nearly half a century.
Now the court has left abortion rights up to the states and the issue is far from settled, with legislatures passing a range of restrictions. Harris has made fallout from the laws a focus of her campaign. And a different crop of North Carolina voters — 10% of them in 2022 — have named abortion as their highest priority, according to AP VoteCast data. Nearly 8 in 10 of North Carolina voters in 2022 who prioritized abortion backed a Democratic candidate statewide.
This presidential contest will reveal how much abortion access really matters to them and whether it’s enough to overcome their misgivings about Harris on the economy, immigration and other matters.
Did Republicans set off a hand grenade on abortion?
Targeting women under 35, North Carolina Democrats are telling voters that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and want control over women, said Morgan Jackson, a campaign adviser for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein.
“Republicans have set off their hand grenade in their own hands,” Jackson said. “They thought you were with them all the way. It’s way more complicated than that.”
Nationally, 4 in 10 women under 30 years old say abortion is their top issue, according to a poll released Oct. 11 by KFF, a health policy research organization.
North Carolina, however, is one of the only southern states that hasn't instituted the type of strict ban that have made abortions nearly impossible to obtain. That moderate approach will make this a less pressing issue for the state's voters, said Republican state senator Vickie Sawyer.
Sawyer considers what she hears from her own young adult daughters. Abortion comes up, she said, but not as much as worries about the cost of housing or everyday items.
“It's right in the wheelhouse of something that could affect them,” Sawyer said. But “they know their rights are protected” because the state's 12-week abortion ban also allows for some exceptions in the second trimester.
But Democrats are telling voters that bigger threats to abortion rights linger with the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, who once promised to outlaw “abortion in North Carolina for any reason.” During NFL games on Sunday, commercial breaks feature an ad of a woman sitting on an operating room table, explaining how she nearly bled out in a Texas emergency room because doctors were afraid to treat her with a dilation and curettage surgery — a procedure often used during abortions — after she gave birth.
With enthusiasm already high among Black women, the Harris campaign will focus on using the abortion issue to win over suburban white and Latino women, Jackson said. No Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008.
In the final weeks of the campaign, North Carolina has had a series of dueling visits from the presidential candidates and their surrogates. Trump surveyed storm damage in western North Carolina on Monday, after Harris stopped by a predominantly Black church and rallied a crowd of 7,000 at Eastern Carolina University earlier this month.
Last Thursday, as a record 353,166 votes were cast at polling sites across the state, Harris' running mate Tim Walz implored the crowd at a Winston-Salem high school gymnasium to consider that abortion access could be restricted further under a second Trump presidency. Voters, he argued, should not believe the former president's statement that he would refuse to sign a national abortion ban.
“The people in our lives — our wives, our daughters, our mothers, our friends, for Christ’s sake, our neighbors -- their lives are literally at stake on how we vote,” Walz said.
The Harris campaign has 29 field offices and over 340 staff in the state, and has made contacting Black and younger voters a priority, the campaign said. Trump's team referred an emailed request for details on his campaign's presence to Sawyer, who represents a conservative patch of Charlotte's suburbs.
Harris' campaign might find the votes she needs tucked in the hills of fast-growing Forsyth County, flush with women, college students and young working professionals. The county seat of Winston-Salem, dotted with trendy apartment lofts converted from old cigarette factories and artsy coffee shops, has added the most people, a shift that's helped Democrats take power in the once-blue collar town after years of Republican control. The city's economy runs in part on more than a half-dozen colleges, including Wake Forest University.
It’s on one of those college campuses where 21-year-old Jenny Gonzalez said the issue of abortion motivated her to register to vote in her first election. She'll cast a ballot for Harris.
“It should be access to all women, no matter the situation, because everyone goes through different things and you don’t know why they decide to get the abortion,” said Gonzalez, who is studying pharmacy technology at Forsyth Technical Community College.
About 120 miles southeast of Winston-Salem, 48-year-old Christine Ducheneaux sat on a bench in downtown Fayetteville as she explained why abortion is her top issue, too.
“For me, it’s just about body autonomy,” said Ducheneaux, a mother of three children. “I hate to use generalizations, but, you know, like older white men, making a decision about what’s good, what’s best for me and my family or my life, is crazy. You’re not my doctor, you know?”
Ducheneaux said she wasn’t excited about voting for President Joe Biden, but once he dropped out she became “super excited” to support Harris.
Abortion restrictions have 44-year-old tattoo artist Liz “Gruesome” Haycraft, a former Republican who once opposed abortion, feeling on edge. Haycraft doesn't plan to have children, but worries about women who have faced hurdles getting medical care.
“There is no reason that women should have to give up their lives or their bodies,” said Haycraft, who plans to vote for Harris.
Standing outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic, armed with bags of snacks and anti-abortion pamphlets for those walking into the facility, 45-year-old Laura Browne tried to persuade women to talk to her instead. The retired Air Force staff sergeant and mother of two daughters believes Democrats are using horror stories about abortion to scare young women.
“I believe they’re being told there’s only one option, and that they’re too young to have children," said Browne, who works for a nearby anti-abortion center that counsels pregnant women. “And I would say that that is wrong.”
Browne declined to share how she'd vote in the election.
It's still all about the economy, Republicans say
Republicans, for the most part, are downplaying the subject. Trump’s campaign is running ads in the state instead attacking Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgery. And locally, GOP loyalists are raising questions about how well the Biden administration has responded to Hurricane Helene’s devastation.
Abortion may resonate deepest with younger women, but they’re also a historically unreliable voting bloc, said Linda L. Petrou, a longtime Forsyth County Republican and district chair.
“There might be more women – younger women – coming out and voting for Harris because of that,” Petrou acknowledged, but she added, “the percentage of young people who vote is relatively small.”
Older women — even Democrats — see abortion as more of a peripheral issue when compared to their younger counterparts.
To Donna Klein, an 80-year-old retiree, women's rights are “important,” but the environment is her top concern, a worry punctuated only by the hurricane destruction for the longtime Democrat.
“It’s very important we try to figure out what’s going on, what we can do it about it,” Klein said. “As an older person, as I think about my grandkids. What kind of earth are they going to inherit?”
Petrou said Republicans are counting on widespread dissatisfaction with the economy to keep their voters firmly in Trump’s camp.
Inflation has 20-year-old Wake Forest student Leyla Herrera considering a vote for Trump in her first presidential election. The biology student, who doesn’t align with a party, says increased prices have been tough on her middle-class family, based in a Charlotte suburb.
“Donald Trump, when he was in office, there was better prices, especially for gas. Food is a really big thing, all of that has really gone up,” she said.
But on abortion, Herrera is conflicted. She’s doesn’t like new laws that have prevented women who have been raped from ending a pregnancy. But she thinks about her mom, born and adopted the year before the U.S. Supreme Court initially affirmed national abortion rights in 1973.
“I feel really lucky because if she was born a year later, I wouldn’t be here,” Herrera said. “It really weighs on me.”
Some Republican women also struggle with where they stand.
Weeks out from the election, Robin Spadt, a Canadian immigrant who doesn't like the influx of immigrants that have crossed the U.S. border illegally, is still unsure how she’ll vote. Harris won't get her vote, she says. But after voting for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, she describes his recent remarks as “a lot of crazy.”
And the 68-year-old suburban grandmother has another problem she’s trying to reconcile before she heads to the voting booth.
“I’ve got five granddaughters, and I don’t like the government telling them what to do with their bodies,” Spadt added.
___ Superville reported from Fayetteville, North Carolina. AP National Writer Allen G. Breed in Fayetteville and Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Winston-Salem and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.