OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Tea Rohrberg was heading into her county's treasurer's office in Omaha, Nebraska, on Monday when she says she was approached by a man and asked if she wanted to sign a “pro-choice petition.” Because she believes access to abortion is a right all women should have, she readily signed.
But Rohrberg soon learned from a different volunteer that she had actually signed a petition being circulated by Protect Women and Children, which seeks to ask voters in November to codify Nebraska's new 12-week abortion ban in the state constitution. She approached the man who she said had coerced her into signing the petition by calling it a “pro-choice” measure. She told him she wanted to cross her name off the petition. He told her he'd cross it off later, she said.
“I was like, ‘No, I just want my name off it.' Then he said, 'Well then just vote no later,'" she said.
What she did instead was head to the Omaha office of Protect Our Rights, which is seeking to enshrine abortion rights in the Nebraska Constitution, to file a notarized affidavit to have her name officially removed. She then signed the organization's petition to protect abortion rights through fetal viability or at any time in pregnancy to protect the health of the woman.
Rohrberg is far from alone in being misled to sign a Nebraska abortion petition. The Nebraska Secretary of State's office said that by late Friday, it had received 91 affidavits from voters seeking to have their names removed from an abortion petition.
The vast majority — 67 — came from those seeking to have their name removed from Protect Women and Children or other petitions seeking to ban abortions. Only seven had sought to remove their names from a petition to protect abortion rights.
Organizers with Protect Women and Children did not return emails seeking comment.
Both sides accuse the other of dirty tricks to gather the roughly 123,000 signatures needed before Wednesday's deadline to turn them in.
“They are explicitly lying to voters,” Protect Our Rights campaign manager Allie Berry said of organizers seeking to solidify Nebraska's 12-week abortion ban. “They’re using really deceptive tactics to get people to sign.”
Conversely, Nebraska Right to Life Executive Director Sandy Danek said the group has heard from anti-abortion allies that abortion rights petition circulators have tried duping people into signing.
Nebraska is among at least seven states where initiatives aimed at codifying abortion and reproductive rights are proposed for the November ballot, the latest sign of the deep divisions created by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision two years ago to end a constitutional right to abortion.
In the wake of that ruling, Republicans who dominate Nebraska's state government sought to immediately issue abortion restrictions, including a total abortion ban that failed in 2022. Last year, another bill failed that would have outlawed abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy — before most women know they’re pregnant.
Last year, lawmakers settled for a 12-week ban with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.
Abortion rights advocates in the state have been emboldened by voter initiatives elsewhere that have either enshrined abortion rights or turned back attempts to restrict it.
Nearly 6 in 10 Nebraska voters in the 2022 midterm elections said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and about 8 in 10 said the state should allow abortion if the mother's health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate. Slightly less than half said Nebraska should allow a legal abortion if the woman does not want to be pregnant for any reason.
Anti-abortion advocates have offered at least three petition efforts this year, including an effort seeking to ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy by recognizing embryos as people. It's unlikely to garner the number of signatures needed to make the November ballot.
The petition to codify a 12-week abortion ban into the state constitution is being bankrolled almost exclusively by Nebraska multimillionaires, including Republican U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts — one of the wealthiest members of the Senate — who has donated $1 million of his own money of the $2 million raised.
The Nebraska Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of the Roman Catholic Church in Nebraska, has for months blanketed the state with presentations to push support for the 12-week ban petition. Marion Miner with the conference said in a June 6 presentation that anti-abortion groups would prefer a total ban that makes no exceptions for rape and incest but acknowledged they're unlikely to get public support.
“It’s been tried in other states in recent years, and it’s not been competitive even in, you know, very pro-life states,” he said.
FILE - Protesters chant, "one vote to save our lives," as they are heard in the legislative chamber during a final reading on LB574, the Let Them Grow Act, on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, at State Capitol in Lincoln, Neb. Organizers of competing petition efforts seeking to squelch or expand abortion access are looking to gather enough signatures before the early July 2024, deadline to make the November ballot. (Kenneth Ferriera/Lincoln Journal Star via AP, File)
FILE - Hundreds of people gather at the Nebraska Capitol to protest against a proposed abortion ban, in Lincoln, on May 16, 2023. Organizers of competing petition efforts seeking to squelch or expand abortion access are looking to gather enough signatures before the early July 2024, deadline to make the November ballot. (AP Photo/Margery Beck, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A defiant President Joe Biden vowed Wednesday to keep running for reelection, rejecting growing pressure from Democrats to withdraw after a disastrous debate performance raised questions about his readiness to keep campaigning, much less win in November.
But increasingly ominous signs were mounting for the president. Two Democratic lawmakers have called on Biden to exit the race while a leading ally publicly suggested how the party might choose someone else. And senior aides said they believed he might only have a matter of days to show he was up to the challenge before anxiety in the party boils over.
“Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running … no one’s pushing me out," Biden said on a call with staffers from his reelection campaign. "I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”
In his private conversations, Biden was focused on efforts to course correct from his rocky debate and on the threat that, in his view, Trump poses to the country, as he scoured for feedback on what went wrong last Thursday in Atlanta and took responsibility for his performance.
“We had a direct, open, clear-eyed conversation about the debate, his thoughts on what happened and why it wasn't his best evening or best debate,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who spoke with Biden on Tuesday, said in an interview with the Associated Press. “He wanted advice. He was asking earnestly for input and comment on what he should do to restore confidence and support, and what's the best path forward.”
Coons, the president's closest ally on Capitol Hill, said Biden clearly understood the urgency, the difficulty and the importance of the election, as the senator advised that the president do more unscripted, open-ended events to restore confidence in his candidacy. The two also spoke about Biden's schedule and its impact on his political efforts, particularly as he balances that task with critical governing tasks such as the NATO summit in Washington next week.
Still, despite Biden's efforts to pull multiple levers — whether it was his impromptu appearance with campaign aides, private conversations with senior lawmakers, a weekend blitz of travel and a network television interview — to salvage his faltering reelection, Biden was confronting serious and mounting indications that support for him was rapidly eroding on Capitol Hill and among other allies.
Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., told The New York Times that though he backs Biden as long as he is a candidate, this “is an opportunity to look elsewhere” and what Biden "needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.”
Senior advisers say they believe the 81-year-old Biden may have mere days to mount a convincing display of his fitness for office before his party’s panic over his debate performance and anger about his response boils over, according to two people with knowledge who insisted on anonymity to more freely discuss strategy. The president accepts the urgency of the task — having reviewed the polling and mountains of media coverage — but he is convinced he can do that in the coming days and insistent that he will not step out of the race, they said.
Biden met for more than hour at the White House on Wednesday night, in person and virtually, with more than 20 Democratic governors who afterward described the conversation as “candid” but said they were standing behind Biden despite being concerned about a Trump victory in November.
“The president is our nominee. The president is our party leader,” said Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland. He added that, in the meeting, Biden “was very clear that he’s in this to win."
Despite such reassuring sentiments, a major Democratic donor, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, also called on the president to exit the race, saying, “Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous.” The statement was first reported by The New York Times.
And all that followed Rep. Jim Clyburn, a longtime Biden friend and confidant, saying he'd back a “mini-primary” in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention next month if Biden were to leave the race. The South Carolina Democrat floated an idea that appeared to be laying the groundwork for alternative choices by delegates during the Democrats’ planned virtual roll call that is scheduled before the more formal party convention set to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago.
On CNN, Clyburn said Vice President Kamala Harris, governors and others could join the competition: “It would be fair to everybody.”
Clyburn, a senior lawmaker who is a former member of his party's House leadership team, said he has not personally seen the president act as he did on the debate stage last week and called it “concerning.”
And even as other Democratic allies have remained quiet since Thursday’s debate, there is a growing private frustration about the Biden campaign’s response to his disastrous debate performance at a crucial moment in the campaign — particularly in Biden waiting several days to do direct damage control with senior members of his own party.
One Democratic aide said the lacking response has been worse than the debate performance itself, saying lawmakers who support Biden want to see him directly combatting the concerns about his stamina in front of reporters and voters. The aide was granted anonymity to candidly discuss interparty dynamics.
Most Democratic lawmakers are taking a wait-and-see approach with Biden, though, holding out for a better idea of how the situation plays out through new polling and Biden’s scheduled ABC News interview, according to Democratic lawmakers who requested anonymity to speak bluntly about the president.
When Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who called on Biden to leave the race this week, shopped around his move for support from other Democratic lawmakers, he had no takers and eventually issued a statement on his own, according to a person familiar with the effort granted anonymity to discuss it.
But there was also a sense that the waiting period will soon expire if Biden does not step up his outreach to Capitol Hill or prove otherwise that he’s up to the job.
Some suggested Harris was emerging as the favorite to replace Biden if he were to withdraw, although those involved in private discussions acknowledge that Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan remain viable alternatives. But for some insiders, Harris is viewed as the best prospect to quickly unify the party and avoid a messy and divisive convention fight.
Even as pressure around Biden mounted, he and Harris made a surprise appearance on an all-staff reelection campaign call and offered a pep talk. They stressed how important it was to beat former President Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee, in November and returned to Biden’s previous post-debate vow that when he gets knocked down, he gets up again.
“Just as we beat Donald Trump in 2020, we’re going to beat him again in 2024,” said Biden, who told participants that he would not be dragged out of the race. Harris added: “We will not back down. We will follow our president’s lead. We will fight, and we will win.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked during her briefing with reporters whether Biden would consider stepping down. “Absolutely not,” she said.
“I cannot lay out something that would change the president’s mind," Jean-Pierre said about Biden continuing to seek a second term.
Still, Democrats are unsatisfied with the explanations of Biden’s debate performance, from both White House staff and the president himself. And there is a deeper frustration among some in the party who feel that Biden should have handled questions about his stumbling debate performance much sooner and that he has put them in a difficult position by staying in the race.
The Leadership Now Project, a group of business executives, academics and thought leaders, said in a letter that the “threat of a second Trump term” is great enough that Biden should “pass the torch of this year’s presidential nomination to the next generation of highly capable Democrats.”
Trump’s campaign issued a statement noting that “every Democrat” now calling on the president “to quit was once a supporter of Biden.”
Trump had a slight lead over Biden in two polls of voters conducted after last week's debate. One poll, conducted by SSRS for CNN, found that three-quarters of voters — including more than half of Democratic voters — said the party has a better chance of winning the presidency in November with a candidate other than Biden.
About 7 in 10 voters, and 45% of Democrats, said Biden’s physical and mental ability is a reason to vote against him, according to the CNN/SSRS poll.
And about 6 in 10 voters, including about one-quarter of Democrats, said reelecting Biden would be a risky choice for the country rather than a safe one, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. That poll found that Democrats were split on whether Biden should remain the nominee.
Biden campaign pollster Molly Murphy said "today’s polling doesn’t fundamentally change the course of the race."
In a further effort to boost morale, Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients urged White House aides during an all-staff meeting to tune out the “noise” and focus on the task of governing.
Biden himself began making personal outreach on his own, speaking privately with senior Democratic lawmakers such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Coons and Clyburn.
Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Zeke Miller, Colleen Long, Josh Boak and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington and Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks to reporters after meeting with President Joe Biden, Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at the White House in Washington, as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, right, listen. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore speaks to reporters after meeting with President Joe Biden, Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at the White House in Washington, as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz listen. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
President Joe Biden listens during a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, July 3, 2024, posthumously honoring two U.S. Army privates who were part of a daring Union Army contingent that stole a Confederate train during the Civil War. U.S. Army Pvts. Philip G. Shadrach and George D. Wilson were captured by Confederates and executed by hanging. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Joe Biden speaks during a Medal of Honor Ceremony at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, July 3, 2024, posthumously honoring two U.S. Army privates who were part of a daring Union Army contingent that stole a Confederate train during the Civil War. U.S. Army Pvts. Philip G. Shadrach and George D. Wilson were captured by Confederates and executed by hanging. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during a press briefing, Wednesday, July 3, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a post debate campaign rally, Friday, June 28, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Ronda Churchill)
Vice President Kamala Harris takes the stage to speak at a post debate campaign rally, Friday, June 28, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Ronda Churchill)
President Joe Biden speaks during a visit to the D.C. Emergency Operations Center, Tuesday, July 2, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Joe Biden listens during a visit to the D.C. Emergency Operations Center, Tuesday, July 2, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
