The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 1 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Thursday, Kamala Harris’s campaign released a very hard-hitting ad featuring Donald Trump’s quotes about the need for a “punishment” for abortion. It tied this directly to the terrible stories we’ve been hearing about women suffering and dying under abortion bans passed after Dobbs. If Harris is going to win this election, it’ll probably be due to women who are driven to the polls in part by messages just like this one. Is it possible that we’re underestimating the political energy of women in the post-Dobbs era, just as happened in 2022? Today, we’re discussing this with Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of political communications who writes and tweets a lot about how political rhetoric and public opinion really work. Great to have you on, Jennifer.
Jennifer Mercieca: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Sargent: First, let’s play this ad in full.
Chris Matthews (audio voiceover): Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no?
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): There has to be some form of punishment.
Matthews (audio voiceover): For the woman?
Trump (audio voiceover): Yeah.
Narrator (audio voiceover): And the punishment is real. Women denied care. Unable to get pregnant again. Traumatized. Scarred for life. Young women who didn’t need to die. Now one in three women live under a Trump abortion ban. And if he’s elected, everyone will.
Trump (audio voiceover): There has to be some form of punishment.
Kamala Harris (audio voiceover): I’m Kamala Harris and I approve this message.
Sargent: Jennifer, what’s interesting here is how this ad takes Trump’s misogyny and gives it powerful, concrete, real-world relevance. What’s your takeaway from all this?
Mercieca: Absolutely. The connection of the word punishment—“there must be some punishment for the woman”—which is repeated several times in the Q&A with Trump, and then the juxtaposition of all of the women who suffered really extreme medical emergencies, life threatening situations, really does connect that notion of Trump is punishing women physically, emotionally, and in all other ways because of the abortion ban.
Sargent: Yes. The ad makes it really visceral, but it essentially says: You see that misogyny all the time on your TV screen; well, it’s actually ill will toward you. I haven’t seen it made this visceral before myself. Have you?
Mercieca: I have, because I went to the Houston rally that Harris had. The entirety of the rally was about this issue explicitly. When I think when conservatives and religious people think about abortion and abortion bans, they think about elective abortion. What the Harris campaign has done very wisely, I think, is show how it’s actually health care. It’s not these women who are getting elective abortions that are being punished. It’s actually women who just in the routine matters of pregnancy and the things that can go wrong with pregnancy end up suffering directly from Trump’s ban.
The thing about it being a visceral response is really key because what it does is it takes Trump’s threats away from just something that happens on the screen, and it makes it something that every single woman understands can happen to them. Any woman who’s been pregnant and has a child, any woman who’s been through that situation, they know all of the things that can go wrong because all of the messages that are directed at women while they’re pregnant are about the dangers and risks—it’s a very high stakes thing. More women die giving birth than in any other situation. It’s really threatening.
Sargent: That talk about doctors and patients is really directly aimed toward this particular constituency of right-leaning, maybe independent, maybe moderate Republican women whose negative partisanship gets triggered by talk that’s overly democratic sounding. When it’s about doctors and patients, this is something everyone can relate to. It doesn’t have that partisan trigger in it, right?
Mercieca: Absolutely. All of the research that we have is that things like freedom and choice resonate across the political spectrum. Nobody thinks that the government should be making health care decisions for them personally. The message that the Harris campaign is using, which is Donald Trump should not be making your health care decisions for you, the government should not be making the health care decisions for you, that should be between you and your doctor, period—those messages resonate across the political spectrum.
Sargent: Absolutely. By the way, to your point about how this is really about Trump wanting to punish women, Trump has embraced that idea himself. I want to play something Trump said on the campaign trail. Listen to this.
Trump (audio voiceover): They said, “Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say” ... You pay these guys a lot of money, can you believe it? I said, “Well, I’m going to do it whether the........© New Republic