With the clock rapidly ticking down to Election Day, Vice President Harris is set to rally at Houston on Friday for an event focusing on abortion, in a trip that Republicans say is a waste of time in “deep red Texas.”

Texas is widely regarded as a solidly Republican state ahead of the election, and RealClear’s polling averages indicate that President Trump is leading Ms. Harris in the state by six percentage points, 51.6 percent to 45.6 percent. In the seven battleground states — Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia — the candidates are within 2.5 percentage points or less, and Trump is slightly leading in every state’s polling average. 

The Harris campaign has been casting the upcoming event, which will feature women who have been affected by Texas’ strict abortion laws, as an opportunity for the vice president to zero in on state abortion bans in a post Roe v. Wade world. While abortion is an “extremely” important issue to 37 percent of registered American voters, recent Gallup polling indicates, it falls behind issues such as the economy, which 52 percent of voters ranked as “extremely” important. Abortion was also ranked by voters as less of a priority than democracy, national security, immigration, and education.

Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Democrats have been racing to get the issue on state ballots, as the Sun has reported, given that abortion proponents have been successful in every state that it’s been on the ballot so far. This year, a record-high number of states — ten in total — have abortion-related initiatives on their ballots.

Democrats in recent years have been turning away from the old “safe, legal, and rare” approach in favor of a more expansive approach to abortion. Ms. Harris, when asked on Tuesday in an NBC News interview if she would support any concessions, such as religious exemptions, to pass abortion legislation, said she would not be willing to make any concessions. 

Ahead of Ms. Harris’s campaign stop in Texas, Republicans are slamming her for the Biden administration’s immigration policies that have affected border states like Texas.

“The Lone Star State has felt the brunt of Kamala’s wide-open border policies allowing a flood of dangerous illegal migrant criminals into our communities, and innocent victims like Houston, Texas’ Jocelyn Nungaray have been brutally killed by illegal migrants,” an RNC representative, Taylor Rogers, tells the Sun in an emailed statement. “While Border Czar Kamala Harris wastes her time in deep red Texas, she should make her third stop at the southern border and apologize to Jocelyn’s family. Texas is Trump Country and that won’t change in November!”

A representative of the Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

“Texas is the stage for this event,” a senior campaign adviser, David Plouffe, said, per the Associated Press. “But for us, the most important audience are folks in the battlegrounds.”

He said the event will be to “tell a story about Donald Trump’s role in eliminating Roe v. Wade, what that’s meant for people in a state like Texas, and the stakes — if you live in a state currently without an abortion ban — that could be coming your way if Donald Trump wins.”

Trump is also using a state where he has practically no chance of winning as a stage to highlight his opponent’s policies, as he prepares to hold a rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York. Ms. Harris is leading the state by 16.5 percentage points, RealClear’s polling averages indicate.The Trump campaign has said that the event will highlight how New York is “reeling from the harmful effects of the dangerously liberal policies championed by Kamala Harris” and Democrats, including high costs, the migrant influx, and gang crime.