Elizabeth Warren brings battle for abortion rights to battleground Michigan

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) visits East Lansing, Michigan on April 12, 2024 to garner support for President Joe Biden's re-election campaign. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is the latest high-profile Democrat to visit Michigan, dropping by East Lansing on Friday to call on the key battleground state to reelect President Joe Biden in November. 

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the House, the Democrats in the Senate, the Democrats up and down the ballot in the state races have all made clear. ‘Give us the votes in Washington and we will make Roe v. Wade the law of the land’,” Warren told attendees at a canvassing event. “Our rights are on the line. Our opportunity to make our own medical decisions are on the line, but there’s so much more about what Joe Biden has been doing. He’s fighting for working families. He’s fighting to lower the costs for working families.”

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) visits East Lansing, Michigan on April 12, 2024 to garner support for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)

Biden and his allies have been in force trying to strengthen “blue wall” states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, with Biden himself visiting Michigan twice this year. 

Before former president Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 in all three states, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had been amongst several states that have voted Democrat in the presidential election each year since at least 1992, known as the “blue wall”. 

And Trump has his eye on garnering favor in the election with those states where he won in 2016, having also visited Michigan twice this year. The second visit, in April, came hours before he trekked over to Wisconsin to rally with voters the day of the state’s presidential primary.

But since the fall of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in the summer of 2022, which revoked the federal right to an abortion, Democrats nationally have campaigned on reproductive rights. In Michigan, candidates who supported abortion rights in the 2022 midterm election won up and down the ballot.

Republicans have taken notice, Warren told canvassers in Michigan, and they’re changing their song about abortion.

“Republicans have figured out what they want to do is actually very unpopular…Americans don’t like [it],” Warren said. “He thinks he can lie his way out of this. He thinks he can stand up and tell one thing to his extremist base that is taking credit for Roe v. Wade being overturned and something else to the rest of America. We will not let him get away with that. We are not stupid.”

While Trump indicated back in March that he supported a 15 federal ban on abortion, he spoke out on Monday saying he believed the issue should be left up to the states. That latest stance followed a ruling by the Arizona Supreme Court that reinstated a 160-year-old law that forbids all procedures except those to save a woman’s life. 

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