In swing districts, NC’s new abortion law is already having an impact. Here’s how.

Around Wilmington, the impending passage of a 12-week abortion ban last month energized Democrats and supporters of abortion rights to keep up the pressure on Republicans.

That meant over the course of one day calling and emailing the offices of three state lawmakers representing the area, every three minutes between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., as well as helping Planned Parenthood raise nearly $140,000 in one day, according to Jill Hopman, chair of the New Hanover County Democratic Party.

“If I had to pick a silver lining, the response towards mobilization and activism over the past month and a half has been exponential compared to the past,” Hopman said.

On the receiving end were Republicans like Rep. Ted Davis, a retired attorney in Wilmington who has served in the House for more than a decade. Davis said in the days leading up to the May 16 vote to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, he received more than 5,000 phone calls, emails, and texts from his district, across the state, and outside of it as well.

Davis said he had never before received such an outpouring of response from constituents, which he said included impassioned messages from people on both sides of the issue who felt strongly about the bill, but also “some of the ugliest comments against me and my family.”

How the new law is being received by voters will be especially important next year in swing districts where races are decided by thin margins.

When he vetoed the abortion bill last month, Cooper targeted Davis and three other GOP lawmakers who he said had violated campaign promises to keep the existing 20-week law in place, visiting their Wilmington and Charlotte-area districts to put pressure on the Republicans and try to get even one of them to vote to sustain his veto.

That didn’t happen, and the law is going into effect, but those parts of the state will be important targets for both parties leading up to the 2024 elections.

Wilmington Democrats find concern ‘across party lines’

The law, which reduces the timeframe for when most abortions are allowed from 20 weeks to 12 weeks and goes into effect on July 1, is expected to be a major, campaign-defining issue for Democrats, who have vowed to fight the new restrictions. For Republicans, abortion politics will undoubtedly look different, with some candidates expected to divert attention from the new law and focus on other issues, and others expected to proactively campaign on enacting even stricter laws.

In the days after Republicans passed the bill and sent it to Cooper’s desk, the term-limited governor repeatedly called out Wilmington-area lawmakers Davis and Sen. Michael Lee, and Charlotte-area Reps. John Bradford and Tricia Cotham, for supporting their party’s abortion bill.

All four Republicans pushed back against the notion that they had changed or reversed their positions on abortion, and criticized Cooper for trying to publicly pressure them to vote differently, rather than reach out to them directly.

But in areas like Wilmington, Democrats have been encouraged by the strong opposition to the law that has surfaced.

“I do think Republicans are overplaying their hand, kind of like overturning Roe, as we’ve seen in other states from Wisconsin to Kansas,” Hopman said. “We’ve had this lawfully since the early ‘70s, and I don’t think people really think about the consequences until they make giant changes like this.”

The keen interest in Wilmington also opened doors for the party to work with other groups from across the state.

Locally, Hopman said, opposition to the new restrictions has allowed the party to expand its organizing efforts, by establishing an internal committee focused solely on mobilizing voters on abortion rights and health care access, and holding focus groups and phone banks targeted not just at young voters and women, but also independents and even some Republican women.

Some of them hung up or said they weren’t interested in talking, Hopman said, but others asked what they could do to help because they felt that a 12-week ban went too far.

“A lot of people, across party lines, this has been a shock to them. This is an issue that I think, Republicans are misleading themselves by thinking their base, other than their base really supports it,” Hopman said. “And it has allowed us to mobilize around it and get different people involved in a way I haven’t seen before.”

A new poll released Wednesday by Elon University, in partnership with The N&O and The Charlotte Observer, asked 1,268 registered North Carolina voters how they felt about the new law. In it, 45% of voters said they opposed the law, while 23% said they supported it. The remaining 33% said they neither supported nor opposed the new restrictions.

When they heard details about the law, support for it grew to 36%, but opposition held steady at 45%.

It’s not just abortion access that local Democrats plan to bring up in their outreach, however. Hopman said that the other part of their message is in anticipation of more controversial legislation on issues like education, guns, and LGBTQ+ rights, that could move forward before the end of this year’s session, or further down the road, now that Republicans have a supermajority.

“It’s kind of like a Jenga tower, you start removing these critical blocks, and the whole structure becomes shaky, dangerous and untenable, except those blocks now are people’s lives in our cities,” Hopman said.

GOP says Democrats are misreading Wilmington voters

As the bill was fast-tracked through the legislature last month, Republicans argued that Democrats describing the bill as “extreme” were out of step with the majority of voters, and said that banning abortions toward the end of the first trimester was entirely reasonable.

Nevin Carr, the chair of the New Hanover County Republican Party, said the new abortion law “simply values human life to a greater extent.” He said Republicans saw “overwhelming support” for the bill from Wilmington voters, and said that Democrats underestimate how important it is for many voters that state law protect unborn children.

“If you walk our beaches during turtle nesting season, you will witness Democrats fervently guarding turtle eggs with threats of thousands of dollar of fines and/or imprisonment if you so much as disturb a single turtle egg,” Carr said in a statement. “And yet, when it comes to human life, the Democrats at Planned Parenthood proclaim on their website ‘There are no “bad” reasons to get an abortion.’”

Carr also said that GOP lawmakers from New Hanover received “vile threats” to themselves and their families, ahead of the votes on the bill.

Davis, who has represented the area in the House since 2012, said that he and his legislative assistant pored through the more than 5,000 messages they received ahead of the override vote. Of the ones they determined were from his district, Davis said, roughly half urged him to vote to override Cooper’s veto, and half told him to vote to sustain it.

Since the override vote, Davis said he’s had “far more” people in his district thank him for voting the way he did, than not.

Despite Cooper’s public calls for him to vote to maintain his veto, Davis said that the governor never directly reached out to him.

During a town hall in October, Davis had said he supported keeping the 20-week law in place. He had also pushed back against the notion that House Speaker Tim Moore “tells me what to do,” and said there were times when he disagreed with Moore and told him he would vote for what he thought was “best for the people I represent.”

“The irony of this whole thing is that the only bullying that I got was from Roy Cooper, and Planned Parenthood,” Davis told The N&O this week. “Speaker Moore did not bully me in any way, shape, or form. He asked me how I was going to vote, and I told him, and that was it.”

When the House took up the 12-week ban for a vote on May 3, Davis did not vote and was recorded as having an excused absence. After the bill had passed and was vetoed by Cooper, and back before the House for an override vote, Davis voted with the rest of his caucus to enact the bill into law.

After the override vote, Davis said he “took a walk” during the initial vote on whether or not to pass the bill because he was doing what he told voters he would do — supporting keeping the 20-week law in place.

“I view the veto as an entirely different matter,” Davis told The N&O. “That’s not voting on the bill. That’s voting on whether or not you support Roy Cooper, and Roy Cooper’s veto. I don’t support Roy Cooper, and I do not support his veto, and that’s why I voted to override.”

“And if they want to use that against me, that’s fine,” he added. “It is what it is.”

How voters around Charlotte feel about new law

More than three hours west of Wilmington, Mecklenburg County also held a key position during the debate over abortion this legislative session.

That’s because east Mecklenburg Rep. Tricia Cotham flipped her party affiliation from Democratic to Republican, then voted with Republicans to give them just enough votes to override Cooper’s veto, catapulting her into the spotlight as Democrats accused her of betraying her constituents, and Republicans gave her a hero’s welcome, most recently at last weekend’s NCGOP convention in Greensboro.

She also shouldered a larger-than-most share of the criticism from supporters of abortion rights because of statements during the 2022 campaign in favor of codifying Roe v. Wade and her support of a bill to do as much early in the legislative session —before her party switch.

Besides Cotham, Cooper also targeted Bradford, a north Mecklenburg Republican, who was quoted by news outlets before the 2022 elections saying he supported the 20-week law staying in place.

Cotham’s district is currently drawn to be safely Democratic. Bradford’s is closely contested between Republicans and Democrats. Those district lines will be redrawn ahead of next year’s election, however, when Republicans go through a new round of redistricting this fall.

Mecklenburg County Democrat Maryjane Conti, who serves as the party’s precinct chair in Cotham’s 112th District, described her switch as a “betrayal of the people who voted for her.”

The “horrific” bills coming out of the legislature are a result of the Republican supermajority Cotham enabled, Conti told The Charlotte Observer.

Cornelius residents Diana and Luis Borges feel the opposite about recent legislation passed in the state, and say they’re proud to have Bradford representing them.

“It was embarrassing that we were a ‘destination state’ for abortions when we had our 20-week abortion law,” Diana Borges said. “The new 12-week abortion law is not unreasonable in the slightest.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, Charlotte’s Planned Parenthood reported nonresidents making up more than half of its number of patients.

A Preferred Women’s Health Center in Charlotte received an uptick in calls from patients in Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, director Calla Hales told the Observer in July 2022.

Sara Grace Todd is a TV producer who’s spent the majority of her life in Mint Hill. She also an activist who opposes abortion and said she’s pleased with Cotham’s latest votes in Raleigh.

“Even before she switched parties, she’s always been truly invested in our town and making sure it stays small business focused,” Todd said.

Autumn Alston, a former Cotham staffer, called the representative a “snake” on Twitter. Alston, a Charlotte native, said she feels betrayed after spending time campaigning for Cotham when she was a Democrat.

Alston told Spectrum News she looked to Cotham as a mentor since 2016 when she began working for her. After hearing about the party switch, Alston said Cotham hasn’t returned a text.