Abortion fight unites Democrats and rattles Republicans in Wisconsin battleground

DOOR COUNTY, Wis. — The Republican Party tent’s centerpiece sign blared appeals to potential voters: Defend America! We stand for our flag. Protect women’s sports. #Bidenflation.

If that failed to catch eyes at this summer’s Door County Fair, there was always the four-foot plastic elephant wearing an American flag top hat. But the wallet-size cards featuring illustrated fetuses? Those stayed on a table in the back-left corner. You’d have to look down, perhaps through glasses, to see anything about abortion.

“We’ve got disagreements on this issue within our own party,” said Stephanie Soucek, the GOP chairwoman in this stretch of northeast Wisconsin, who’d set up the booth between a lemonade stand and the hypnosis stage. “That’s the challenge: Finding a message we can all agree on.”

Across the fairgrounds, past a woman selling cheesecake on a stick, the Democrats had readily plunged their most popular yard banners into the grass:

Free to Choose.

Roe, Roe, Roe Your Vote.

“Fires people up, 100 percent,” said Carol Jensen-Olson, the vice chairwoman in charge of membership, beckoning the August crowds toward her email sign-up sheet.

The opposing displays captured how the Supreme Court’s move to overturn Roe v. Wade 14 months ago has reshaped the landscape of American politics, right down to the familiar ritual of county fair politicking. Long a rousing issue among conservatives, abortion is stirring voters on the left and mobilizing independents troubled by the government’s policing intimate decisions.

Most Americans aren’t in favor of revoking the option to end a pregnancy, and growing numbers of political moderates indicate that the issue will influence their vote. Republicans felt the impact in November when five states across the political spectrum put abortion referendums on the ballot, and voters in each case chose to safeguard access. Even in conservative strongholds, typically sleepy statewide contests have seen unusually high turnout when abortion access was at stake — most recently in Ohio, where a hearty majority rejected a measure that would have made it tougher to enshrine protections.

In Wisconsin, the high court’s decision reactivated a 174-year-old law interpreted as forbidding the procedure except to save a woman’s life — and ignited a fierce legal battle over whether that rule will stay on the books. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, has pledged to repeal the ban through litigation expected to land as early as next year before Wisconsin’s Supreme Court — which flipped to a liberal majority after voters this spring elected a justice who had campaigned on abortion rights.

Abortion is a galvanizing topic in Door County, a peninsular expanse between Green Bay and Lake Michigan known as “the Cape Cod of the Midwest” — and the swingiest place in what’s shaping up to be a crucial 2024 battleground. It’s one of nine U.S. counties that has sided with every presidential election’s winner since 2000. In fact, Door voted for the winning White House contender all but twice in the past 50 years — in 1992 and 1976. The county’s role as a barometer of political opinion extends to other races, too: the winners of Wisconsin’s state and federal races last year — including the governorship and House — all won this region of roughly 30,000.

In late-summer interviews with dozens of county residents, conservatives said they are feeling the fallout of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision on the ground — and are worried that Republicans will be hurt politically by a backlash in 2024. Buoyant Democrats, meanwhile, said they are benefiting from a surge of new energy from both their base and those who are not regular party activists.

No county is a crystal ball, but politicos here on both sides of the aisle say Door County offers a strangely reliable taste of the broader mood: You’ll find more Trump signs in the rural southern end, where dairy farms stretch for miles; more “RESIST” buttons on the northern tip, where transplants from bluer cities have settled into lake houses; and a kaleidoscope of expression in the fisherman’s haven of Sturgeon Bay, the county seat, where everyone converges at the fair.

For five days at this summer’s expo, the Republicans operated a straw poll asking who should be the GOP nominee as the Democrats steered passersby toward Mason jars, each labeled with what they considered America’s most pressing issues.

“Drop a bean into the ones that are important to you,” said Jensen-Olson, the membership specialist, as a woman with cropped blond hair, red-framed glasses and a can of Mug root beer walked up.

“Let me see,” replied Susan Lindner, 53, a dishwasher at a lakefront resort in town.

Inflation? The environment? Affordable child care? Reproductive rights?

She plunked a bean into reproductive rights.

“Thank you!” Jensen-Olson said. “Would you like to sign up for our emails?”

No, Lindner replied. She wasn’t a Democrat or a Republican. She liked to vote by candidate — though, during the 2020 election, she hadn’t voted at all. She’d just moved and wasn’t sure where to find her polling site.

This time around, Lindner felt more motivated, recalling how, 15 years ago, she was almost raped by a man she trusted.

“If I’d gotten pregnant …”

Lindner didn’t like to think about what could happen to a victim of sexual assault today.

“It’s the women who are punished,” she said.

Joel Kitchens, the conservative Wisconsin State Assembly member whose district includes Door County, sensed his party had a problem even before the biennial survey of his constituents went out.

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It wasn’t scientific or even neutral — the Republican state speaker’s office had crafted the questions, and Kitchens’s staff had modified them — but the response this summer validated his concerns: Less than a fifth supported banning abortion except to save a woman’s life.

The issue could box in the GOP, Kitchens fears.

He’d watched Republican businessman Tim Michels lose the gubernatorial race last year after championing the 1849 law — then backpedaling to say he’d sign a bill allowing exceptions for rape and incest.

Incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who’d campaigned on restoring the state’s pre-Dobbs access of 22 weeks, became Wisconsin’s first gubernatorial candidate to win while his party occupied the White House in more than three decades.

“If we’re going to be so dogmatic on that — no abortions no matter what — it’s not going to be a winning thing for us,” said Kitchens, a retired veterinarian who has held office since 2015. “And I think we’re already seeing that.”

He’d rather leave it up to the people. He thought Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who won his third term in 2022, had been wise to call for a statewide vote on abortion rights, rather than defend tighter restrictions. (Johnson has claimed most Wisconsinites could get behind a 12-week prohibition but declined to say how he would vote. He previously backed a 20-week nationwide ban with exceptions.)

That messaging — though the referendum Johnson proposed could not change Wisconsin law — seemed to resonate better with voters who oppose abortion yet feel squeamish about the government imposing reproductive restrictions.

Johnson acknowledged this spring that the issue has been an “important factor” in the Democrats’ recent victories, and Kitchens agreed.

“At some point, the law has to reflect what people want,” Kitchens said.

Another survey out of Marquette University Law School — this one scientific and neutral — showed that, since the Dobbs ruling, Republicans and right-leaning independents in Wisconsin were less likely to say they supported the most restrictive policies. (The share who favored abortion being “illegal in all cases” had dropped from 24 percent in February 2020 to 12 percent in June.)

Even in Door County, people who call themselves “pro-life” are struggling to reach a unifying stance. Kitchens is okay with exceptions for rape, incest and if the woman’s life is in jeopardy. Soucek, the county GOP chairwoman, is not okay with exceptions for rape and incest. (Adoption is the better answer, she said — or guiding women toward public resources like food stamps and Medicaid.) Others won’t accept termination for any reason.

The Democrats, however, seem amped up by a common cause — and are seeing political energy in unexpected places.

Before the Supreme Court struck down Roe, Emma Cox described herself as a liberal who just voted. Beyond that … did selling RESIST buttons in her family’s fair-trade gift shop count as activism?

Now the 35-year-old store manager co-leads an advocacy group in the northern Door County village of Sister Bay, population 1,180.

Eleven days after the Dobbs decision, she and two friends organized a march down the main drag, protesting a right they’d been shocked to see rescinded. They collected about 100 email addresses that July afternoon, hoping to keep the momentum going.

“It was mind-blowing to see the amount of people show up in a community as small as ours,” Cox said.

Perched on a stool in her family’s cottage-turned-shop — a maze of children’s books, rosemary candles and rainbow birdhouses, among other novelties — she outlined her strategy moving forward: Fight complacency with protests. (June’s “One Year Without Roe,” for instance, drew 10 women with “pro-choice” signs to a busy corner of Bay Shore Drive.) Alert neighbors to key races. (Cox and a team of volunteers went door-knocking before the midterm elections.) Inform people that a Republican president could push a federal abortion ban.

And restock the store’s best-selling bumper stickers, which say: My body. My choice.

Down in Sturgeon Bay, one of the county’s two full-time OB/GYNs had weighed her own choices when the law changed.

Beth Gaida, 42, moved here from Ocean Springs, Miss., three years ago, searching for fresh air and small-town charm. She loved that her three children under 12 could all go to school in the same building through senior year.

Then Roe fell, triggering Wisconsin’s pre-Civil War abortion law, and Gaida suddenly wrestled with a grim calculation: Before she could terminate a pregnancy, how close must a patient be to death?

Blood transfusion close? Chest compressions close?

“I know what the proper medical treatment is,” Gaida said, “but if I can’t do that because of a state law — then what?”

It didn’t make sense to her patients, she said — not the Democrats, not the Republicans. (She’d always voted left.) She’d thought about relocating to Minnesota, where abortion is allowed until fetal viability, which is typically around 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

But her hospital had been trying for more than a year to fill an OB/GYN vacancy. She and the one other doctor were already overwhelmed. If Gaida was gone and the other doctor was out sick, someone in Sister Bay, for instance, would have to drive two hours to reach the next-closest OB/GYN in Green Bay.

Performing abortions had been a rare part of Gaida’s role — her Catholic employer prohibited elective procedures — so she’d normally refer women to centers in Green Bay or Sheboygan. Still, she hadn’t had to worry about criminal charges when dealing with a pregnancy complication.

Now she advises patients to drive to Illinois, where abortion is allowed until the fetus is viable — a costly trek, she said, that delays their care. One charity in town has offered to fly women to Chicago by private plane.

Pregnancy is a life-threatening condition, Gaida thought. The United States, she knew, has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, and the risk tended to be higher for women in rural areas like this one.

“Better to stay and fight,” she said.

Fourteen years ago, when she was an Air Force physician in Texas, she’d started bleeding out. She’d been 21 weeks pregnant with twins conceived through in vitro fertilization when her doctor acted quickly to induce labor — effectively a termination, she knew, as the fetuses would not survive at that stage of development.

If the doctor would have hesitated, she said, she could have lost her uterus.

“Or I could have died hemorrhaging,” Gaida said.

Bill Krueger, 79, brought the wallet-size cards featuring illustrated fetuses to the Republican Party tent. As head of Door County’s Right to Life chapter, he often distributed literature meant to steer women away from abortion.

“Her life began when sperm united with your egg,” the cards said.

On this August evening, the retired steelworker who’d moved here from Milwaukee sat in a plastic chair next to the four-foot elephant, chatting with folks who stopped by. One man said he couldn’t wait to vote for Donald Trump, adding that all those indictments were phony. Another asked him what they were going to do about President Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

He wasn’t sure about that, but he planned to support Trump, who took credit for the high court’s ability to “kill” Roe and declared the federal government should play a “vital role” in stopping abortion. Krueger had heard YouTube audio of a fetus’s beating heart — was it eight years ago? — and gradually morphed from a Christian who had never liked the procedure to an activist striving to abolish it.

Lately, his group had talked about reframing its message, making it more woman-centered. He’d also packed pamphlets that listed addresses for places that supplied free baby formula and clothes. In an ideal world, he thought, there would be no exceptions to an abortion ban.

If a woman dies?

“That’s God’s plan,” he said.

Up walked a conservative friend, another 79-year-old retiree, Tom Post, who used to make catalogues for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“I think there should be exceptions,” Post said.

“What do you mean by exceptions, Tom?” Krueger replied.

“Saving the mother’s life, if that’s an issue,” Post said. “Even a strong risk to the mother’s life.”

Krueger stared down at his white tennis shoes.

Behind him, people slid their straw poll votes in a neon-green shoe box. Days later, the results would reveal a winner, with 66 percent of the vote: Donald Trump.

A couple hundred yards away, Ashley Kuzay, 37, rested on a wooden bench while her 12-year-old daughter was off roaming with friends.

The self-described independent tended to agree with the anti-Biden signs at the fair — she wasn’t a fan of what she saw as the current administration’s overreach.

“I lean toward less government regulation,” said Kuzay, who home-schools her daughter in Sturgeon Bay.

Which was why, at the moment, she disliked talk about federal efforts to limit abortion. She’d considered voting for Trump in 2024, but now, she wasn’t sure.

“The government doesn’t have a place in regulating that, either,” she said.

Over at the Democrats’ booth, more beans tumbled into Mason jars labeled with hot-button issues.

Safe roads.

Clean water.

Veterans.

Reproductive rights.

Every voter received five beans in a tiny paper cup. Julie Thyssen, a 52-year-old software analyst, dumped all of hers into reproductive rights.

“I have an 11-year-old daughter,” Thyssen, a Democrat, said. “I can’t believe she’ll grow up without the same rights as I had.”

More voters wandered over. More beans rattled into glasses.

Inflation.

Reproductive rights.

The environment.

Reproductive rights.

As the fair wound down, the Democrats tallied the winning issue — not that they had to. It was obvious from looking at the jars, just like last year:

Reproductive rights.

Dan Keating and Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.

Analyses based on data from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections and MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

Along with Door, the other bellwether counties that have voted for every presidential winner since 2000 are Delaware’s Kent; Minnesota’s Clay; Montana’s Blaine; New Hampshire’s Hillsborough; New York’s Essex and Saratoga; Virginia’s Chesapeake (independent cities are counties in the state); and Washington’s Clallam.

Editing by Matea Gold, Natalia Jiménez, Christine Nguyen, Kevin Uhrmacher and Madison Walls. Data analysis by Dan Keating. Copy editing by Phil Lueck. Design and development by Aadit Tambe and Agnes Lee.