The political arm of the reproductive rights group Planned Parenthood on Wednesday announced its endorsement of five House Democrats looking to secure seats in the upper chamber of Congress in November’s election.
In a press release, Planned Parenthood Action Fund announced it is backing 2024 U.S. Senate candidates Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Colin Allred, D-Texas, Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., and Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich.
In deep-blue California, Schiff is looking to defeat a challenge from former Los Angeles Dodgers player Republican Steve Garvey to fill the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat. He beat out two other House Democrats in the primary contest earlier this month to advance to November’s general race.
In Texas, Allred, a civil rights lawyer and former NFL player, is seeking to oust Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
In Delaware and battleground Michigan, Blunt Rochester and Slotkin are hoping to fill the seats of retiring Democratic Sens. Tom Carper and Debbie Stabenow, respectively.
Meanwhile, in one of the west’s biggest swing states, Gallego is aiming to defeat Republican Kari Lake to take over for Democratic-turned-Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Sinema announced earlier this month that she would not seek reelection after leaving the Democratic party to become an independent following the 2022 midterms. Lake narrowly lost her race for governor of Arizona to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in 2022.
“We don’t have time to waste while our freedom to control our own bodies hangs in the balance,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund said in a statement. “We know that if anti-abortion rights politicians gain control of the Senate, they will exploit their power to push through a national abortion ban.”
“That is why this slate of unflappable reproductive rights champions must be elected to the Senate,” McGill continued.
The group has already endorsed Democratic incumbents Sens. Jon Tester, Jacky Rosen, Sherrod Brown and Tammy Baldwin in the battleground states of Montana, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. It has also thrown its support behind Democratic incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a staunch supporter of reproductive rights, in New York.
Democratic candidates across the country have sought to hone in on the issue of abortion access and reproductive rights following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The ruling sparked tight restrictions or bans on abortion in states around the country.
The issue has proved electorally fruitful for Democrats, who credit it for helping the party pull off a better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterms and notch key victories in the 2023 off-year elections.
When the issue has appeared directly on the ballot, voters – even in red states like Kansas and Ohio – choose to keep abortion more widely accessible.
And Democrats are signaling they have no plans to take a step back on the issue in the first presidential election since Roe was overturned.
“When reproductive freedom was on the ballot, the American people spoke in 2022,” President Joe Biden said at a reception at the White House on Monday in which he signed an executive order seeking to boost research on women’s health. He then pointed to Vice President Kamala Harris and declared that “with the leadership of this woman to my left here, they are going to speak out again in 2024.”
The Biden campaign’s first rally of the election year that featured both the president and vice president together was focused on restoring Roe v. Wade.
Last week, Harris became the first vice president or president to visit a facility that performs abortions when she toured a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund, along with two other major reproductive rights groups NARAL Pro-Choice America and Emily’s List, endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket for another four years in the White House back in June.
Maddie Gannon
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