[Click here to read the first part of this abstract from Washington Post’s second article on Door County]
Warning signs
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.
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.
“The law has to reflect what people want.”
— Wisconsin state Rep. Joel Kitchens ®
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.
The political becomes personal
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.
“It was mind-blowing to see the amount of people show up in a community as small as ours.”
— Emma Cox, local abortion rights organizer in Sister Bay
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.
“Better to stay and fight.”
— Sturgeon Bay OB/GYN Beth Gaida, on her decision not to move after Roe fell.
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.
A winning issue
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.
“I think there should be exceptions.”
— Tom Post, 79
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.
[Doordems.org will publish the first story in this series starting Monday, September 11th]
[Editing: except for formatting to suit this media and including less than half of the photos, these extracts reproduce the full text of the story as published by Washington Post]
About this story
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.
