Amanda Zurawski was lying in a hospital bed. She had lost her baby 18 weeks into her pregnancy and then nearly died twice because of Texas’s further tightening of antiabortion laws. The room’s TV set was malfunctioning, stuck on a news channel featuring coverage of the law that had taken effect days earlier and landed Zurawski in the ICU. “I was watching this endless loop and talking with my husband, saying, ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’” Zurawski tells me. “We’re like, ‘People are going to die.’ And so we decided right away we were going to take action.”
That was almost two years ago. Today, that incredible resolve found in the middle of heartbreak has put Zurawski on TV sets across the country and in the middle of what might be one of the defining issues of the 2024 presidential race. Her tragedy is the subject of a compelling new 60-second ad from Joe Biden’s campaign, in which Zurawski and her husband, Josh, sit in the loft of their Austin home and quietly go through a box full of toys and clothes that were intended for their daughter, whom they had decided to name Willow. They talk about the items until they begin to cry. Then the screen goes black, except for four words in white type: “Donald Trump did this.”
Zurawski’s ordeal, created by the Texas policies that didn’t allow a medical-exception abortion until she was “sick enough,” is plenty compelling all by itself. The Biden campaign’s packaging of her story is also fascinating politically, as the ad encapsulates several of the core challenges facing the president’s reelection effort and the messaging tactics his team believes will work. Many of the voters who are thus far disengaged also tend to distrust politicians. So the Biden campaign has invested heavily in authentic, apolitical voices like Zurawski’s. “I always voted and paid attention, but beyond that, I wasn’t any sort of activist,” the 37-year-old tech worker says.
And even if undecided voters were inclined to put stock in speeches, Biden has at times seemed distinctly uncomfortable talking about abortion, which doesn’t help his cause. “It isn’t something that he has talked about publicly for decades, and others have. So it’s an adjustment for him,” says Jen Psaki, who was the president’s first White House press secretary and is now an MSNBC host. “Although I think, in terms of where he is and what his policies are, they’re very much aligned with where the vast majority of people who feel outraged about Roe want him to be.”
Another crucial element of the Zurawski ad is the highlighting of extremism’s real-world consequences, which will likely also be a theme throughout Biden’s push. “The ideas you talk about in the campaign need to be relatable to the lives of voters—this could happen to your sister, to your friend,” strategist Eric Hyers says. Last year Hyers helped get Democratic governor Andy Beshear reelected in Kentucky—a red state—in part by crafting an ad featuring Hadley Duvall, who was raped by her stepfather and, had she become pregnant, would have been forced to deliver a baby under a Kentucky abortion ban triggered by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. While Kentucky isn’t likely to be competitive in November’s presidential race, abortion has cut across geographic and demographic lines in ways that could prove decisive in battleground states, where Zurawski’s ad is being shown widely. “In Arizona last cycle, abortion was the most motivating issue in the state—it outpaced the economy. And I don’t think that was just a product of the immediate post-Dobbs landscape,” says an Arizona Democratic operative who worked in the state for Biden’s 2020 campaign. “Arizona is a pretty libertarian state, but people were really surprised at how salient the abortion issue was.”
The most important note struck in the ad, however, is probably the final one: that Zurawski’s nightmare should be directly pinned on Trump. The Biden campaign has identified a significant pocket of amnesia in the electorate. Some of it is simply due to the fact that most civilians have better things to do than obsess over politics, and some of it stems from a yearning for a time before COVID, back when life was seemingly cheaper and less chaotic—and Trump was president. Those feelings aren’t all logical, but the Biden campaign needs to overcome them by reminding people how much bad shit Trump did as president, some of which is still rippling through the country, damaging people like Amanda Zurawski. A Biden campaign spokeswoman declined to name the person who wrote the ad’s “Donald Trump did this” line. But it’s vivid and potent and likely to be applied to issues and events other than abortion.
The Zurawski ad was shot in March and appeared hours after Trump, who’d been waffling on abortion, released his statement declaring that the issue should be left up to the states. One day later, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in favor of upholding an 1864 near-total ban on abortion. Following that decision, Zurawski has visited two swing states, North Carolina and Wisconsin, for Biden campaign appearances. “I think the campaign is probably sick of me asking for more opportunities to speak,” she says with a laugh while riding from Winston-Salem to Charlotte. “We were between events today. And on the TV in the background, I could hear our ad. Every time I see it, it’s really tough.” Still, Zurawski says, there’s nothing more important right now than trying to make sure more women don’t suffer for the sake of right-wing ideology.
