Biden’s top priority for a second term: Abortion rights

President Joe Biden’s day one priority if he earns a second term?

“First of all: Roe,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said Sunday during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The president has been adamant that we need to restore Roe. It is unfathomable that women today wake up in a country with less rights than their ancestors had years ago,” Fulks said.

Biden has been poised to run on what has been described as the strongest abortion rights platform of any general election candidate as he and his allies look to notch a victory in the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

The president, who is Catholic, has described himself as personally not "big on abortion" because of his faith, but the landmark 1973 decision "got it right,” he said over the summer. And he’s slammed court rulings limiting abortion access and fought efforts to restrict the availability of abortion pills.

Last month, Biden seized on a case in Texas, where a woman, Kate Cox, was denied an abortion despite the risk to her life posed by her pregnancy.

“No woman should be forced to go to court or flee her home state just to receive the health care she needs,” Biden said of the case. “But that is exactly what happened in Texas thanks to Republican elected officials, and it is simply outrageous. This should never happen in America, period.”

When abortion rights are on the ballot, they win with voters across the political spectrum — though they don’t always boost Democratic candidates on ballots advocating for them, a POLITICO analysis found.

Still, as the Biden campaign works to turn the focus of the election away from the president himself and on to the threat posed by the possibility of Trump’s return to power, the attention on abortion rights — which Trump had a hand in through his Supreme Court nominees — is expected to continue to be a focal point of the campaign.

“Look, the president understands that this election isn't about him: it's about the American people,” Fulks said Sunday.

Restoring Roe isn’t the only item on Biden’s to-do list. In a second term, the president would aim to “finish the job,” on a slate of priorities his administration has already begun pushing for, Fulks said, including banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines, cutting the cost of insulin and expanding student loan forgiveness.