PHOENIX — The day after Labor Day, swing-state polls were showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris locked in a “dogfight” or a “showdown” or even a “knife fight in a phone booth,” 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 — 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, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, to reelection in a red state with the viral television ad in which she first 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.
