WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The TikTok videos haunt 26-year-old Christy Kishbaugh.

One seared into her memory shows a young mom talking about how several Idaho emergency rooms rejected her because of the state’s abortion ban, leaving her to bleed for weeks after a miscarriage.

Kishbaugh sends videos like that to friends, saying “Can you believe this?”

She can’t.

In a hushed voice near a popular park, the married suburbanite worried about her own future under the new patchwork of state laws that have prevented thousands of women across the country from having abortions.

“Thinking ahead, if anything were to go wrong,” Kishbaugh nearly whispered, iced coffee in hand. “The idea that myself, my friends, people close to me, that they could potentially die or never have kids or lose a child because they’re not getting access to the health care they need, that really dwells with me.”

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the tensions over abortion have only intensified, setting up the presidential election as a referendum on fundamental rights for tens of millions of women.

Republicans have long relied on deep support from white women in states such as Georgia, Florida and Texas who back them at higher levels compared to white women nationwide, data from AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the electorate, show. But in a battleground state like North Carolina, where Donald Trump won 60% of the vote of white women in 2020, their allegiance could be strained by the state’s new 12-week abortion ban.

If Trump’s support among white women in North Carolina drops closer to the group’s national average of 52% in 2020, he could find it difficult to earn the state’s 16 electoral votes again. Vice President Kamala Harris could narrowly win if just a fraction of white women decide to support her instead of Trump, who took North Carolina by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020, Trump’s narrowest margin of victory.

Abortion was a top issue for just 3% of North Carolina voters in 2020, with nearly all of them backing Trump and his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the high court ruling that had guaranteed a woman’s right to abortion for nearly half a century.

Now the court has left abortion rights up to the states and the issue is far from settled, with legislatures passing a range of restrictions. Harris has made fallout from the laws a focus of her campaign.

This presidential contest will reveal how much abortion access really matters to them and whether it’s enough to overcome their misgivings about Harris on the economy, immigration and other matters.

Targeting women under 35, North Carolina Democrats are telling voters that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and want control over women, said Morgan Jackson, a campaign adviser for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein.

“Republicans have set off their hand grenade in their own hands,” Jackson said. “They thought you were with them all the way. It’s way more complicated than that.”

Nationally, 4 in 10 women under 30 years old say abortion is their top issue, according to a poll released Oct. 11 by KFF, a health policy research organization.