Seeking to mobilize voters worried about threats to abortion rights and in vitro fertilization, Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign used former President Donald Trump’s political backyard Tuesday to launch a nationwide “reproductive freedom” bus tour.
The effort aims to drive home Trump’s opposition to abortion rights, and remind voters that he appointed the Supreme Court justices who provided the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has resulted in abortion restrictions or outright bans throughout the county.
If Trump is elected to a second term, a range of Harris surrogates warned even more abortion restrictions would come — including, they said, a nationwide ban on abortion.
The event attracted 500 people, mostly women, to the Boynton Beach kickoff on a weekday morning. The speeches, sign waving, chanting and cheering produced soundbites and images aimed at a much broader audience, on TV news shows and social media posts. The rally room, in a banquet hall, had a section with a backdrop of white roses and an illuminated “trust women” sign for people to take selfies they could post online.
The location near the Mar-a-Lago Club, where Trump lives, was no accident.
Several speakers noted the kickoff location of the nationwide, 50-stop tour.
“It is not lost on us that we are just 10 miles from Mar-a-Lago, home of one Donald J. Trump. He calls it the Winter White House. I call it his retirement home,” said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the state where vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is governor.
Klobuchar, along with several Florida political leaders who spoke, noted that Trump has stated he was proudly responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“He is the one who got us into this mess,” Klobuchar said, adding that American women, “and the men who stand with them,” remember who is “responsible for these attacks on their basic rights.”
And, she said, “So let’s be clear. A second Donald Trump term would be so much worse” than the first.
Reproductive freedom, encompassing abortion rights and IVF, is seen by Democrats as a central issue that could galvanize voters this year.
For the Harris campaign, the timing of the kickoff was fortuitous. It came just days after Trump himself reinjected the issue into the forefront of the presidential campaign with his announcement that, as a Florida resident, he would vote against the state referendum that would enshrine abortion rights in the state Constitution. That came shortly after comments in an interview that he thought Florida’s abortion regulations are too restrictive.
“You can’t trust a damn word out of that liar’s mouth, no matter what he says,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee.
“Florida is ground zero for his extreme anti-reproductive freedom agenda. And he wants to keep it that way, but let’s be clear. We know you can’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth. What we can be sure of is if Donald Trump is reelected, God forbid, he will go further. He’ll ban abortion nationwide and drag us back to an era of back-alley abortion care, a time when women bled out at home or alone in hotel rooms,” Wasserman Schultz said.
She led the crowd in chanting, “We’re not going back.”
Speaker after speaker emphasized Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe, and statements that he was proud of the outcome. U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel said the result of overturning Roe is that 25 million women of reproductive age are living in states that have banned or severely restricted abortions.
“We have a choice between a vice president, a champion in the fight for reproductive freedom, and Donald Trump who’d ban abortion nationwide if elected,” Frankel said.
Frankel, whose district hosted the kickoff and includes Mar-a-Lago, welcomed attendees to Palm Beach County, “where Donald Trump calls home, but don’t hold it against us, because this crowd is ready to give Kamala Harris a promotion.”
Ana Navarro, the Miami-based television personality, political commentator and never-Trump Republican, said she does not have children, describing her personal story, of having ectopic pregnancy, which is a pregnancy that happens outside of your uterus. Decades earlier, she said, her mother nearly died from lack of access to care during an ectopic pregnancy in a small town in Nicaragua.
“I’m not sure today in Florida, I could get the treatment I desperately needed,” she said. “I am here to fight so that other women who face reproductive emergencies in Florida and across the United States can get the treatment they need without having to flee their state, flee their country, or almost die in order to get treatment.”
The messaging wasn’t completely in sync. Some speakers described Trump as a firm abortion opponent. Others said he flip flopped so much he couldn’t be trusted.
“At one point, he described himself as very pro choice. Then he became pro life. Then he went as far as to say women who have abortions should be punished,” Navarro said. “Then he appointed three very conservative Supreme Court justices who led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He has taken credit for Dobbs. And later he has tried to distance himself from it. And just this (last) week in a matter of 24 hours or less, he expressed support for Amendment 4 and then he was against Amendment 4. And now the last one is he’s saying he’s going to give everybody free IVF.”
“Does Donald Trump think we’re stupid? Does he think we don’t remember. You don’t get to create a problem and then pretend you have a solution,” she said.
Navarro said said the crowd looked great from her side of the lectern. “You know why? Because I see young women, I see women of different generations. I see women of different colors of different ethnicities. I see men who are allies,” she said, before describing herself as a “childless dog mama.”
That was a jab at U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, who lamented in a 2021 interview that the country was being run, in his view, by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Several Trump supporters stood near the tour stop, sometimes yelling at people who arrived for the Harris event and also playing an audio recording of Trump speaking.
Chris Nojay of Boynton Beach said he sees Trump winning as essential for the country. “President Trump needs to be president. Kamala Harris has no qualifications,” he said. Nojay said abortion rights is not driving his view of the candidates. “I believe you have a right to get an abortion.”
A Trump campaign representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Tuesday’s rally.
Former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the Democratic nominee challenging U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, told attendees that if her opponent and Trump win they would attempt to ban abortion nationwide. “Freedom is on the ballot in November. And if we want to stop these extreme bans, we have to stop the extreme politicians who are pushing them.”
The state’s voters will do that, she predicted. “Florida is in play, baby,” Mucarsel-Powell said.
Many political analysts don’t think Florida is a competitive state, with Trump most likely to win, something the Democratic leaders disputed on Tuesday.
The reproductive rights tour clearly had a broader, national audience, with speakers warning that the kinds of restrictions that have been enacted in Florida would occur nationwide if Trump returns as president.
Wasserman Schultz said she expects the issue to motivate voters in her home state. She called for voters to reject U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., to support the referendum that would enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution, and to vote against retaining Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso, the two state Supreme Court justices who attempted to block the referendum from the ballot. Votes in November will decide if Francis and Sasso are retained as justices.
And, she insisted, Florida could end up in the Harris column.
“It’s going to be close, my friends, so let’s not kid ourselves. The final margins could be razor thin,” she said. “Don’t sleep on Florida.”
Later, speaking to reporters, she described the chances in the state somewhat differently. “We have a chance to be in play,” she said.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
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