A Georgia Democrat aiming to win the primary race for governor fired a broadside against a competitor Monday because of his previous support for an abortion ban, one of the most contentious topics of the era and a galvanizing issue for many female voters.
Jason Esteves, who resigned from his state Senate seat in Atlanta last year to run for governor, said in an online event with reporters that if elected governor, he would work to repeal Georgia’s 2019 law banning abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically six weeks into a pregnancy.
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The law penalizes doctors who disobey, leading to cases in which pregnant women were refused treatment.
“Republicans have made it less safe for people to have babies,” Esteves said.
He did not say the name of one of his opponents in the primary, Geoff Duncan, who was a Republican and the Georgia lieutenant governor when that law passed.
Esteves, instead, let his former colleague in the Senate, Minority Whip Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, target “Republicans like Duncan,” who “passed Georgia’s horrific abortion ban, which has led to the deaths of black women.”
The sharpest attack came from Shanette Williams, whose daughter Amber Nicole Thurman died after doctors, hesitant about the new law, delayed removing remnants of her fetus after she self-aborted with pills.
“The only thing I see when we talk about Geoff Duncan is him standing behind the governor of the state of Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp, as he signs the bill into law. I see Geoff Duncan smiling and clapping as if this was the right thing to do,” Williams said. “How is it that you can run for governor after you were a part of murdering my child?”
Duncan said in a statement that he had reversed his views on abortion, saying part of his path of switching to the Democratic party “was understanding the devastating situations that women experience and doing the work to learn as much as I can to make it right. I was wrong to believe a room full of legislators knew more than millions of women.”
He said that as governor, he would try to overturn the abortion ban and issue an executive order clarifying that “doctors can practice medicine without fear of persecution.”
Although Duncan’s primary opponents might want to disown him as a Democrat, some in the party have embraced him.
Rep. Michelle Au, D-Johns Creek, has publicly backed Duncan’s campaign, saying Republicans privately admit to her that the abortion ban was a mistake but refuse to say it publicly.
To reverse the ban, a Democrat must win the governor’s mansion, she said in a social media post Friday.
“Among my top priorities is repealing Georgia’s six-week abortion ban and finally expanding Medicaid in this state,” wrote Au, a medical doctor. “We can’t do any of that if we don’t win. That’s why I’m supporting Geoff.”
Esteves had raised more campaign funding than any of the other Democrats in the race as of the last reporting period in February. He was just ahead of former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. He brought in double what Duncan did and three times as much as Michael Thurmond, a former DeKalb County CEO and school superintendent who won statewide races for labor commissioner three times starting in the late 1990s.
Yet Esteves has been trailing them in independent polls. He was so far back in a recent one, at 3.7%, that 11 Alive excluded him from a live debate scheduled for Wednesday among those other three.
Bottoms had a more than 20 percentage point lead over Duncan in the independent Emerson College Poll, and Duncan was a bit ahead of Thurmond.
The Esteves campaign pushed back, pointing to a poll last month, a few weeks after the independent one used by 11 Alive, that showed Esteves moving to second place with 14% but still behind Bottoms at 32%. It was paid for by a Democrat for Secretary of State. An Esteves campaign spokeswoman said she did not know why that candidate, Penny Brown Reynolds, paid for a gubernatorial poll. Before those two polls, a University of Georgia poll last fall had Esteves in fourth place with 3%.
Still, Esteves chose to target Duncan rather than Bottoms.
It was not the first time. During a televised gubernatorial forum at a Savannah church in January, Esteves criticized Duncan for his past support for the abortion ban.
Tharon Johnson, a Democratic strategist, said Esteves probably sees this line of attack as a way to boost his own name recognition at Duncan’s expense, in recognition of how toxic the abortion ban is among female Democratic voters.
“He’s also making this an important issue that will be discussed for the remainder of this Democratic nomination,” Johnson said of the May 19 primary election. “Other people have been saying it. Jason has just been the one who has been quadrupling down on it.”
