Why Trump supporters are travelling to sign a Democrat petition
Jeff Hall, a lifelong Republican, got out of his car and walked past a row of Biden-Harris 2024 placards wedged into a grass verge outside a Democratic headquarters and signed an abortion petition.
Mr Hall, 72, like a growing number before him, had driven across his home town of Little Rock in Arkansas, to put his name to calls for the lifting of a ban imposed by his party.
The signature should help force one of the deepest red states to hold a referendum on November 5 to reverse draconian new abortion restrictions. The ballot will be held alongside the presidential vote.
Abortion is becoming a major headache for Republicans and Donald Trump, who have both been blamed for taking away women’s rights and freedoms.
Mr Hall told The Telegraph that while he supported the abortion Roe v Wade landmark case being overturned in the Supreme Court, and is opposed to abortion itself, he disagrees with the state dictating that a woman cannot terminate a pregnancy even if there are complications.
“Just get it away from the government, it’s a family decision”, he said.
“It’s not political. I’m a Republican. This is the Democratic headquarters. I’m here signing that because that’s the way I feel about abortion”, he said after his 10-year-old grandson Oscar watched him scrawl his name.
The grandfather’s signature was among more than 101,000 collected by Arkansans for Limited Government to abortion rights on the ballot this November, far exceeding the 90,704 required.
At least one man was seen putting his name to the petition while wearing Mr Trump’s trademark Make America Great Again (MAGA) caps.
If the signatures are certified, when the state’s residents vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in November they can also decide whether the right to have an abortion up to 18 weeks should be enshrined in the state constitution.
Later abortions would be permitted in instances of rape, or incest, where there is a fatal fetal anomaly and where abortion is needed to protect the mother’s life.
According to a survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, a majority of adults in most states think the practice should be legal in all or most cases.
Abortion has long been a thorny issue for Trump, who earlier this year rejected calls for a nationwide ban amid concerns an extreme position could cost him the election.
While the Republican nominee, 78, took credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade, he has struggled to find a consistent position on the issue that doesn’t alienate both his hard-right evangelical and moderate supporters.
In recent weeks he all but sidestepped the hot-button issue by saying individual states should be allowed to decide their own abortion laws.
On Monday, the GOP released a platform which for the first time in 40 years did not include calls to back a national ban on abortion.
The 16-page document, which would have been heavily influenced by Trump, said the party opposes “late-term abortion” and supports “access to birth control, and IVF”.
It comes as the Biden-Harris campaign has continued to try and make abortion one of the defining issues of the 2024 election, in the hope it will mobilise female voters.
In the handful of states where residents have voted on the issue, residents have sided with abortion rights supporters - even in conservative states including Kansas and Kentucky.
But Arkansas, a state deep in the Bible belt where, according to the Pew Research Centre just under half of residents are evangelical protestants, would be the biggest test yet.
In the Natural State, which was dubbed the most pro-life state for the past four years by the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, opponents have been waging a fierce campaign to drum up opposition to the amendment.
Pro-life groups have been accused of following and intimidating abortion campaigners across the state as they scrambled to gather signatures.
Some shouted that women should just “keep their legs closed”, while others physically pushed supporters or called the police to claim they were canvassing illegally.
Things escalated last month when the Family Council, a conservative pro-life group, published the names of 79 paid canvassers after obtaining their information through Freedom of Information requests.
In Perryville, a tiny village in rural Arkansas, a group from the Providence Baptist Church last week shouted into a megaphone about the sanctity of life while three female campaigners tried to gather signatures.
“It feels like the fifties”, said Scharmel Roussell, 65, a retired non-profit director who was among the canvassers sitting under a gazebo encouraging people to sign.
But Ms Roussell claimed the shouts of pastor Allen Nelson backfired by drawing attention to their stand and prompting people to sign.
“Obviously I don’t want it on the ballot. Christ is king and abortion is murder. I would hope that Arkansas, a conservative state, is going to reject it”, Mr Nelson said.
The amendment would overhaul abortion measures in a state where, according to the State Department, there were no reported abortions in 2023.
Women in the state have been so terrified about getting pregnant and being unable to access care some have gone to drastic measures to protect themselves, including having their fallopian tubes removed.
Campaigner Murry Newbern, 62, said she has heard from signatories in some of the most Republican pockets of the state who disagree with the state’s strict trigger laws.
The retired lobbyist for Planned Parenthood said many GOP supporters she has spoken to think the near-total ban on abortion is “too extreme”.
“They say they don’t believe the government has any business in making that decision. They do not think this is right”, she said.
In Mountain View, a city in northern Arkansas where 78 per cent of voters supported Trump in the 2020 election, signatories included a man wearing a MAGA hat.
But despite campaigners claiming most people have been sympathetic to the amendment, there is still a strong and vocal opposition.
Just a few feet away from the Democratic headquarters sits the Family Council’s head office (both groups say the other decided to set up shop next to them).
While the front of the building is adorned with posters calling for abortion rights, the car park is covered in posters urging people to “decline to sign”.
Speaking from his air-conditioned wood-panelled office, Jerry Cox, the president of the Family Council, said the amendment is “far more extreme than Roe v Wade”.
The proposed amendment is not as strict as those being proposed in other states.
Mr Cox said the amendment would see “all of our common sense abortion laws” struck down.
He also criticised the proposed measure for allowing later-term abortions in the cases of rape and incest.
“Rape and incest are horrible things... however, we have to look at the truth, which is that there is a child living in the womb”, he said.
Mr Cox brushed off concerns over whether Arkansans would vote in favour of the amendment this November.
He denied hearing any stories about Republicans like Mr Hall travelling across the state capital to sign in favour of putting the measure on the ballot.
“Arkansas has more churches per capita than any state in the United States and so a lot of people are motivated by their faith and so I think that they’ll do the right thing and stand up for the sanctity of human life”, he said.
But if the support for the amendment has shown anything, it is that for some MAGA fans, the state’s strict abortion laws are too difficult to swallow.
While Mr Hall said he disagrees with the 18-week limit, he was adamant: “You have to take the good with the bad”.