Harris spent $2.4M on reproductive health ads targeting Georgia voters in campaign’s closing month

Since the Georgia Supreme Court reinstated the state’s restrictive abortion law about one month ago, 40% of the advertising released by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris airing on Georgia broadcast stations has focused on the issue.

One of these ads focuses on the death of 28-year-old Georgia woman Amber Thurman and is the only presidential campaign-backed ad airing exclusively for Georgia voters on the issue. Thurman died Aug. 19, 2022, from a septic infection after doctors at Piedmont Henry Hospital waited 20 hours to perform a routine dilation and curettage procedure after she experienced complications from taking an abortion pill, according to Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee, first reported by ProPublica.

The Thurman ad is not the only one of this kind, according to a review of ad spending conducted for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by students and researchers with Big Local News, a journalism project at Stanford University.

Since the state high court ruling, which temporarily set aside the decision by a Fulton County Superior Court judge that the state law was unconstitutional, the Harris campaign has spent at least $2.4 million on broadcast advertising in Georgia on ads that mention women’s reproductive health.

This is just one slice of the more than $118 million that Democratic political action committees have spent on ads supporting the Harris campaign in Georgia this election cycle.

“What recent events have suggested is that abortion may be the issue with which to create more swing voters than we thought possible,” said Beth Reingold, a professor of political science and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Emory University.