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THE YOUNG WOMAN MAKING KAMALA HARRIS’ STRONGEST CASE ON ABORTION
RIGHTS  
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Kathy Gilsinan
September 12, 2024
Politico
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_ Hadley Duvall helped a Democratic governor win in a red state. The
vice president is counting on her to deliver votes in multiple
battlegrounds. _

Hadley Duvall, screen grab

 

PHOENIX — The day after Labor Day, swing-state polls were showing
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris locked in a “dogfight
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or a “showdown
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or even a “knife fight in a phone booth
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depending on the news outlet. That morning, a young Harris surrogate
named Hadley Duvall was in the battleground state of Arizona, having
breakfast with some staffers, looking friendly and serene. She’d
been deployed there — as she has to several swing states since
delivering a stunning speech to the Democratic National Convention
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to tell her story as a survivor of incest.

Three times that day, she would repeat matter-of-factly, in front of
different sets of strangers far from her Kentucky home, a secret
she’d kept for 10 years as a child. “From the age of five years
old,” she would say, “I was sexually abused by my stepfather at
the time. When I was 12, I was impregnated from him.” She would
explain being told, with _Roe v. Wade _then still in effect, that
she had options and would have had an abortion had she not miscarried.
In three different rooms in three different towns, she would offer
proof that debates over abortion restrictions, especially ones like
Arizona’s that prohibit the procedure after 15 weeks with no
exceptions for rape or incest, are not abstract or theoretical
exercises.

Before all that, at breakfast in a Phoenix restaurant festooned with
owl-related decor, Duvall, now 22, explained to me why she had
launched herself into the middle of one of the most divisive issues at
the center of an exceptionally divisive election. She wanted to show
people, she said, “I could be your neighbor. … Nobody’s safe.
And no matter what type of [laws] your state has, no matter what you
think is good for your state, no matter how much you feel like this
abortion topic doesn’t matter to you or doesn’t affect you, it
does.”

Duvall has proven herself particularly effective among the small world
of assault survivors who have spoken out against laws that restrict or
ban abortion. She is credited with helping lift one Democrat
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Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, to reelection in a red state with
the viral television ad
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stepped into politics after _Roe_ fell. Her story is as shocking as
she herself is ordinary. She’s just a recent graduate of a Christian
college with a boyfriend and a dog named Honey — “she’s a golden
retriever-wiener dog-lab-aussiedoodle” she says proudly, showing a
photo of a little mutt in a pumpkin Halloween costume on her phone.
She’s got a pleasant Kentucky accent and sports a gold necklace with
the letter “H” on it; she is warm and largely at ease discussing
one of the most disturbing topics imaginable because, she says,
“I’ve already been through the worst.” Thus the Harris
campaign’s eagerness to send Duvall to swing states — including
places like Arizona with upcoming referenda to protect abortion —
hoping to turn out a base motivated by abortion and also try to
persuade voters across party lines.

“What we’ve seen is that Hadley’s story, as well as abortion
rights, resonates strongly with Democrats, Independents and
Republicans across the board,” said Jen Cox, a senior adviser to the
Harris campaign in Arizona. Given the state’s narrow margins —
Biden won it by less than a percentage point in 2020 with roughly
11,000 votes, and Trump is leading there now by a percent or less in
multiple polling averages — Cox said, “in Arizona, we have to do
everything. We have to make sure that Democrats and younger voters and
voters of color, especially Latino voters, are energized about the
campaign, are turning out to vote. We also need to reach out to more
moderate voters, Republicans and independents, especially folks in the
suburbs.” (In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Harris alluded to
Duvall when she assailed Donald Trump for saying people wanted _Roe
v. Wade_ overturned. “A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest
forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”)

Still, it’s a strange place for Duvall to be, repeating something
she once thought she’d never be able to say out loud in a sentence,
trying to get a president elected. “I used to always say, like, I
don’t argue politics because I don’t know enough about it. I’ve
always known my place,” she said at breakfast. But something snapped
after _Roe_ fell, and she published the social media post about her
abuse that caught the attention of the Beshear campaign, which led to
the ad, which led to the DNC speech, which led here.

“I know my place now, and that’s why I’m speaking up now,” she
said. “It is my place.” It wasn’t just about politics, either
— when she was younger, it would have meant a great deal to her to
see someone like the adult version of herself, speaking out and
telling her she wasn’t alone. “If not me,” Duvall said, “then
who?”

She then walked to an adjacent venue to talk to some Republicans.

SPECIFICALLY, THESE WERE “REPUBLICANS FOR HARRIS,” some of the
aisle-crossing women (and they were all women at the podium) who could
help put Harris in the White House. “We are coming together,”
Duvall remarked, “not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans,
because there is too much at stake. Trump brags about
overturning _Roe v. Wade_. He says he’s proud to be responsible for
each and every one of the cruel abortion bans, including the one in
effect here in Arizona.”

Arizona’s current abortion ban is not among the country’s most
restrictive — the 15-week limit is within the time frame that more
than 90 percent of abortions take place, according to CDC data
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it includes exemptions after that to protect the life and health of
the mother. Cindy Dahlgren, the communications director for It Goes
Too Far, which opposes Arizona’s upcoming abortion referendum, told
me later that “my heart goes out to [Hadley], of course, and every
rape victim,” but that current law allows for almost four months to
decide whether to have an abortion. “Voters here in Arizona are not
voting for either abortion or no abortion,” she said. “They’re
voting for abortion at 15 weeks and beyond for qualified medical
emergencies … [versus] unlimited and unregulated abortion.”

Yet this spring, the state Supreme Court sparked chaos when it upheld
an 1864 law, passed before Arizona was a state and the age of consent
was 10 years old, that banned abortion almost entirely. In the
political uproar that followed, the state’s Republican-led
legislature repealed that ban
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with some arguing it would hurt the party in November.

“It is a hot-button issue that certainly paints a picture of
Republicans being on the wrong side of it,” said Paul Bentz, an
Arizona pollster who is a Republican himself. “It’s basically
two-thirds would prefer legal, safe abortions; only about a third or
less want criminalization.” And Bentz said the issue was a big
factor in the Senate race two years ago, when Democrat Mark Kelly
defeated Republican Blake Masters — who called abortion
“demonic” and advocated federal limits
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for the seat formerly held by Republican John McCain.

In a race that could swing by a few thousand votes, of course, any
number of factors could be decisive — and Bentz pointed to election
denialism as a particular turnoff for otherwise Republican-leaning
voters. But the key swing demographic, Bentz said, is “a portion of
crossover individuals, independents and Republicans, generally female,
generally higher education attainment, generally higher wage, that are
the ones that sort of pick and choose the outcomes of these races.”

Arizona abortion-rights supporters deliver over 800,000 petition
signatures to the capitol to get abortion rights on the November
general election ballot, top ,and gather for a news conference,
bottom, Wednesday, July 3, 2024, in Phoenix. | Ross D. Franklin/AP

Witness the “McCain Republicans,” a fair chunk of whom put a
Democrat in the senator’s old seat, and just enough of whom, with
Cindy McCain’s backing of Joe Biden in 2020, helped swing the
presidential election to the Democrats
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year. While the Republicans for Harris event was ongoing, in fact, the
late senator’s younger son Jimmy set off a bit of a scramble among
the comms staff by endorsing Kamala Harris himself
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And Bettina Nava, who worked for McCain for nearly two decades,
including as his state director and his presidential campaign manager
for the southwest, was among those standing with Duvall at the podium
to advocate for Harris.

I caught up with Nava afterward; she called Duvall a “hero.” “I
just met her today,” she said. “I care even more than an election,
win or lose, that this young woman gets to have a voice, and tell her
story, and normalize the fact that what happened to her is not
acceptable.”

The Republican Party in its current form, Nava said, was no longer her
party. “I’m in no-man’s land, no-woman’s land,” she mused.
Then something occurred to her. “Actually, I found a woman” in
Kamala Harris, she said. “I’m in woman’s land. And you know
what? It’s about time.”

UP IN THE COLLEGE TOWN OF FLAGSTAFF A FEW hours later, the heat
dissipated with the higher elevation, and Duvall stopped at a
community center to address a group largely comprising students,
retirees and Democratic leaders. Greeting a young activist by the
door, Duvall remarked warmly how much she liked Arizona, and the woman
laughed. “You say that to all the swing states.”

Duvall is very much still a youth herself — she just got her degree
in psychology with a concentration in drug and alcohol counseling and
had been thinking about clinical social work. She had no background in
public speaking prior to taking the DNC stage to address millions of
people; she doesn’t even do karaoke. But earlier that morning, one
former Arizona state representative had urged her to run for office.

And now for her third speech of the day, Duvall was more relaxed and
informal, ad libbing off her prepared paper, throwing in improbable
moments of levity despite the subject. She got to the part about this
election being the “most impactful of our lives” and paused. “I
know that the politicians say that every year, but I’m not a
politician, so really listen when I say it,” she said to some
knowing chuckles. She had a specific appeal to young people as well:
“There is not a better time to get educated in politics, especially
if you are young. … We’ve seen the power of youth and we need the
older generation to help with that. We need the guidance. We need the
wisdom. But we also, you know, just need to be taken seriously.”

Sarah Benatar, the Democratic Coconino County treasurer, is a youth in
politics too, having been elected the youngest county treasurer in the
state 10 years ago at the age of 27. She’s also among those
advocates who now get up in front of audiences to tell intensely
personal stories about why she feels abortion access is necessary —
in her case, she and her young daughter both survived a dangerous
pregnancy involving a blood clot in her placenta that necessitated an
emergency C-section. She did not contemplate getting an abortion at
the time, but given the risks, she is avoiding another pregnancy until
Arizona law changes. She tells this story more often than she’d
like, she told me later. She believes Duvall will shape the election
in her state. “This is a state that does not vote party line,” she
said. “We are a state that votes for values. … And so that’s
where Hadley coming here is hugely impactful.”

It’s also a state with higher-than-average youth turnout, a figure
that’s jumped substantially from a decade ago. A recent study from
Arizona State University
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that Gen Z voters are even more independent than their over-30
counterparts — nearly half were registered independent. And 70
percent of these voters said they were more likely to vote with an
abortion referendum on the ballot.

At the community center in Flagstaff, an older voter told Duvall after
the speeches that she’d worked to register college students, some of
whom declined, telling her, “You know better than me” about
politics. “Like, what do you say to that?” she asked in
exasperation. Duvall advised: “Tell them you might know better than
they know, but MAGA people do _not. _…That’s what I tell
’em.”

_Kathy Gilsinan is a POLITICO Magazine contributing writer based in
St. Louis and author of The Helpers: Profiles From the Front Lines of
the Pandemic [[link removed]]._

_POLITICO [[link removed]] is the global authority
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* Hadley Duvall
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* Kamala Harris
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* abortion
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* Reproductive rights
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* Republicans for Harris
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