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Voters Appear Ready To Reject Arizona’s Abortion ‘Compromise’

Arizonans are poised to handily reject the 15-week ban and add abortion protections to their state constitution, just as voters did in Michigan, Ohio and other red and purple states while facing six-week and near-total bans.

PHOENIX — For the anti-abortion movement, Arizona was supposed to be different.

After two years of losing abortion ballot measure fights around the country, conservatives held up the state’s 15-week ban as a winning post-Roe strategy — a middle ground they argued most Americans embrace.

Instead, with just days left until Election Day, Arizonans are poised to handily reject the 15-week ban and add abortion protections to their state constitution, just as voters did in Michigan, Ohio and other red and purple states while facing six-week and near-total bans. It’s the latest evidence that even voters who tell pollsters they oppose second- and third-trimester abortions will, when given a chance, vote against government-imposed restrictions on the procedure — regardless of the number of weeks.

Passage of Arizona’s measure would undermine the argument from the country’s biggest anti-abortion groups and leading GOP officials — including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and, at one time, former President Donald Trump — that rallying around a 15-week cutoff would help neutralize an issue that has dogged conservatives throughout the 2024 campaign. Even as they succeed in banning the procedure in roughly one-third of the country, a loss in Arizona would show how far the anti-abortion movement has to go to win a majority of voters.

“If it passes, then we’re in a worse position than we were with Roe v. Wade,” said Kelly Copeland, an anti-abortion activist based in Tucson. “It’s a new paradigm we’d have to overcome.”

In the final weeks of the election, despite polls showing the initiative is far more popular than either presidential candidate, Arizona conservatives insist the state’s current law is their secret sauce for ending progressives’ ballot measure winning streak.

“For most Arizonans, I think a 15-week limit sounds reasonable, and a 15-week limit still allows 95 percent of abortions,” said Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, an influential conservative advocacy group. “I think that a strong majority still do not support later-term abortions.”

That was the argument a handful of Arizona Republicans made in May when they joined with Democrats to repeal the state’s 1864 near-total abortion ban before it could take effect. State Sen. Shawnna Bolick, one of a few Republicans to cross the aisle, told her colleagues in a floor speech that it would be far easier to defend a 15-week ban than a near-total ban and that embracing the Civil War-era law would compel voters to overturn it by ballot measure.

“I want to protect our state constitution from unlimited abortions,” she said. “I am here to protect more babies.”

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But with early voting underway and the ballot measure still showing overwhelming support, popular even among Republicans and independents, some conservatives feel that calculation was a mistake.

Rep. Alex Kolodin, a Republican and member of the state’s Freedom Caucus, told POLITICO he feels “rolled” by his colleagues.

“They were essentially buying the premise that it’s desirable to have some amount of abortion on demand,” he said. “I get it. They feel like they got to do it, because that’s where the society and the culture and popular opinion are at. But I don’t think you change that popular opinion by buying the premise.”

Some anti-abortion activists working to defeat the ballot measure oppose the state’s 15-week ban given that more than 90 percent of all abortions in the U.S. occur before that point in pregnancy, but they believe defeating the initiative will bring them closer to their long-term goal of making abortion not just illegal but “unthinkable.”

“We do believe in heartbeat bills and life-at-conception laws, but right now, we do have to look to what’s going to make us the most pro-life as possible,” said Jordan Brittain, the Western Regional Manager for Students for Life of America, as she led a team of recent college graduates knocking on doors in the Tucson suburbs in October.

Conservatives are correct that even as public support for abortion access hits a record high post-Roe, it’s significantly lower for abortions later in pregnancy. Still, the battleground state is expected to vote to restore abortion access through fetal viability — about 22 to 24 weeks — and allow termination in the final months of pregnancy if there’s a threat to the health or life of the mother. A New York Times poll found nearly two-thirds of Arizona voters plan to support the proposition. A Fox News poll found even higher levels of approval, with 73 percent of Arizonans surveyed saying they would vote for the measure.