The Memo: Harris and Trump try to shore up key weaknesses on the border, abortion

Vice President Harris and former President Trump are seeking to ease their sharpest electoral vulnerabilities as the clock ticks down to Election Day.

For Harris, the topic is immigration, where polls show Trump with a significant advantage — and where President Biden’s record is viewed dimly by many voters.

For Trump, the issue is abortion, where Harris has a correspondingly wide edge — and where Republicans and conservatives have suffered a number of setbacks at the polls since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Harris is expected to visit the southern border on Friday, according to The New York Times, as she seeks to harden her political tone on the topic.

The vice president’s willingness to adopt more strident rhetoric on the border has received some muted criticism from progressive groups. But center-left voices insist it is the correct course.

“Tough talk about the border upsets progressive interest groups but very few progressive voters,” Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at Third Way, told this column.

Kessler argued that it was imperative for Harris to move “to the center on the border, on crime and being pro-growth on the economy — and I feel she’s done all of those things.”

There’s no mistaking the vulnerability for Harris when it comes to the border — not least because she played a leading role on the topic in the early phases of the Biden administration.

In an NBC News national poll released Sunday, Trump held a 21-point advantage over Harris when registered voters were asked which candidate would be better at “securing the border and controlling immigration.”

Harris has already moved away from some of the more progressive positions she held in the past. During her bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination, she raised her hand at a debate to indicate she favored decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings. Now, she says she believes there should be “consequences” for such crossings.

Harris has also sought to present a harder image in her TV ads and speeches.

One Harris ad opens with a narrator intoning: “Kamala Harris has spent years fighting violent crime. As a border-state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border.”

The ad promised that if elected, “She will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”

Trump, meanwhile, has walked an idiosyncratic path on abortion.

The former president expresses pride in his role in nominating the three conservative Supreme Court justices who were pivotal in striking down Roe v. Wade.

But Trump treads gingerly around the topic of a federal ban on abortion — and whether he would veto such a ban if he were president when it passed Congress.

At his Sept. 10 debate with Harris in Philadelphia, Trump appeared to rule out signing a federal ban on abortion.

After Harris asserted that he would sign such a measure, Trump responded, “I’m not signing a ban and there’s no reason to sign a ban.”

But asked by moderator Linsey Davis whether he would veto such a ban, Trump avoided a direct answer, saying the situation would not arise because such a measure could not get enough votes in Congress. 

When Davis pressed further, asking about an assertion from the former president’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), that Trump would veto such a ban, Trump replied: “Well, I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness.”

Electorally speaking, the topic of abortion for Trump is the mirror image of immigration for Harris. The NBC News poll showed Trump trailing by 21 points on the question of who would be better at “dealing with the issue of abortion.”

Trump has in the past ascribed the underwhelming GOP performance in the 2022 midterms to the abortion issue.

Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping that the topic might energize voters, tilting the razor-close election in their favor. 

In recent days, Trump has sparked fresh controversy by suggesting that, if he were back in the Oval Office, women would “no longer be thinking about abortion.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) told CNN’s “State of the Union” that this assertion was “ludicrous” and accused Trump of being “just deranged.” 

“This guy just doesn’t understand what the average woman is confronting in her life in this country, and how could he? He’s not lived a normal life,” Whitmer said.

Harris, for her part, sought to keep the spotlight on abortion this week, telling Wisconsin Public Radio in a Monday interview that she would favor eliminating the Senate filibuster for the purpose of codifying the protections in Roe v. Wade.

“I’ve been very clear,” Harris said. “I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

GOP strategist Brad Blakeman, however, contended that Trump was handling the abortion issue “perfectly” and that he was simply stating facts by stressing that the issue is now mostly decided at state level.

“American voters are not seeing a wholesale reversal of Roe v. Wade at all,” Blakeman said. “What they are seeing is each state deciding its own way on abortion.”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.