On a recent sunny morning, Riley Heesch stopped outside a coffee shop and signed her name to a petition aimed at putting the abortion issue on Arizona’s November ballot.

She was glad to do so.

“I am really passionate about abortion access,” Heesch said. “It is, especially in Arizona, something that’s being threatened and it shouldn’t be. It needs to be available to everyone and anyone that needs it.”

But her passion fizzled when it came to the presidential race.

The 22-year-old childcare worker, who just graduated from Arizona State University in Tempe, has paid little mind to the contest. And while she definitely won’t back Donald Trump, she’s not at all certain she’ll support Joe Biden, as she did in 2020.

She couldn’t say why. “Maybe he’s not the best candidate?” Heesch ventured, before tepidly pledging a maybe-vote for the president.

“I will if I have to,” she said. “I think.”

As Biden battles for a second term, he’s counting on reluctant voters like Heesch to eventually come around — and ballot measures like the abortion rights initiative in Arizona to help prod them in his direction.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, and with it a 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion, the issue has played to Democrats’ considerable advantage.

It helped the party avoid a widely predicted wipeout in the 2022 midterm elections and has also forced Republicans, including Trump, to contort themselves as they try to satisfy social conservatives without alienating the majority of Americans who believe abortion should be legal in most cases.

Voters in seven states — including such GOP strongholds as Kansas, Kentucky and Montana — have either upheld abortion rights at the ballot box or rejected efforts to restrict access.

The issue has yet to be tested, however, in a presidential election year, when turnout will be significantly higher and any number of issues — the economy, border security, the war in Gaza — will compete for voters’ attention.

That doesn’t diminish the importance of the abortion issue. “It’s just a matter of priorities, given all the other ones that matter,” said Republican pollster David Winston.

Nearly a dozen states could have abortion rights initiatives on their ballot in November. (Efforts to place antiabortion measures before voters in Iowa and Pennsylvania fell short.)

Democratic strategists see the issue as vital not just to keeping hold of the White House, but boosting their candidates for Congress and statehouses across the country, in part by engaging voters — in particular Democrats and independents — who might otherwise sit out the election.

“I hear all the arguments about the border and immigration and the economy,” said Mini Tammaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, a national abortion rights organization. “But we can motivate voters on this issue and we can motivate young voters who are, frankly, a little disaffected right now and don’t feel like they’re being listened to.”

Most of the abortion measures that have reached the ballot, or might, are in states such as Maryland, New York and South Dakota that are not seriously contested in the presidential race.

In Florida, voters will decide whether to repeal a six-week abortion ban and codify a right to abortion in the state’s constitution. But Florida is no longer the political battleground it was, having moved decisively toward Republicans in recent years. It is only marginally competitive in November.

That leaves two important swing states, Arizona and Nevada, where Democrats hope abortion rights and measures enshrining them into law will help put Biden over the top.

Both were narrowly decided in 2020, but Arizona was the closer of the two; Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes, a margin of 0.3%.

The state has since become a focal point of the abortion debate, after its Supreme Court upheld an 1864 law imposing a near-total ban. (Bowing to pressure, the Republican-run Legislature passed a measure defaulting to a 15-week limit, with few exceptions. It was swiftly signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.)

The court’s decision “rocked the body politic,” said Stan Barnes, a GOP strategist in Phoenix, and gave a big boost to Democrats up and down the ballot — though he expects the sentiment to dissipate by fall.

Chuck Coughlin, an independent pollster in Phoenix, isn’t so sure.

The abortion issue “unquestionably helps Democrats” as a “motivational thing to turn people out and hang around [Trump’s] neck,” said Coughlin, who used to work for Republicans but left the party after Trump’s election.

“It’s a major tsunami in American political life to take away a right that people have assumed they’ve had,” Coughlin said. “And so the electoral response is, ‘Get your government off my body!’”

On the far north side of Phoenix, where scraps of desert are still visible amid the relentless urban sprawl, Ruth Lambert was collecting signatures to put the abortion question before voters.

It was already nearing 80 degrees at 8:30 in the morning and Lambert was seated in the corner of a strip mall, sheltered beneath the partial shade of a palo verde tree.

The 73-year-old retiree moved to Arizona in 2004, just as her daughter was about to give birth. That grandchild is now 20, Lambert said, and “can’t wrap her head around” the countrywide rollback of abortion rights.

“It’s almost like a foreign concept,” said Lambert, who has volunteered for the initiative campaign since September.

She’s surprised at how easy it’s been gathering support — organizers expect to turn in the most signatures in state history — and struck by the number of Republicans and self-described conservatives who’ve affixed their names to petitions.

“I really don’t like to talk party. It’s good policy,” Lambert said of the Arizona Abortion Access Act, as the measure is formally known. “It’s not necessarily political.”

But, of course, it very much is. The ballot measure engenders strong resistance from abortion opponents and others who feel it goes too far.

The initiative would amend the state constitution to ensure a “fundamental right” to abortion until fetal viability — or roughly the 24th week of pregnancy — and beyond that if a healthcare professional deemed it necessary to “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual.”

Opponents say that would amount to abortion on demand and that is why Coughlin, among others, intends to vote against the initiative — provided it makes the ballot.

That is by no means certain.

After Arizona voters passed a 2016 measure raising the minimum wage, Republican lawmakers pushed through legislation making it much tougher to qualify ballot initiatives, imposing a number of nitpicky rules.

If, for instance, a signature on a petition extends into the one below, both can be disqualified. If someone who is registered to vote as “Jonathan” signs their name “John,” that, too, can be rejected.

And so on.

Organizers say they have already collected well in excess of the roughly 400,000 signatures needed to make the ballot, with more than a month left before the July 3 deadline. The cutoff to start printing ballots is late August.

That opens up “a seven-week gauntlet where every imaginable line on the petition sheets will be challenged,” said Stacy Pearson, a Democratic strategist who has run several initiative campaigns. The final arbiter will the same conservative-leaning Supreme Court that upheld the Civil War-era abortion law.

Polling suggests if the initiative makes the ballot, it will likely pass. And it would probably help Biden and boost the rest of the Democratic ticket at least some.

While abortion may not be top of the mind for most voters, the issue could engage those like Heesch, the 22-year-old childcare worker who otherwise has little use for the president.

“In a lot of ways, Democrats are going to be fighting against the couch” — that is the stay-at-home indifference of voters the party is counting on, said pollster Natalie Jackson.

“In a close election, you’d rather be on the side of the vast majority of the population,” said Jackson, a Democrat who has extensively researched attitudes on abortion. While it won’t be “the top driver” for most, Biden would definitely rather have “the issue at his back.”

It could make all the difference.

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. voiced opposition to the removal of Confederate monuments, including the Robert E. Lee statue that was taken down and melted in Charlottesville, Virginia, adding he did not think “it’s a good, healthy thing for any culture to erase history.”

Kennedy appeared on the “TimCast IRL” podcast on Friday, where the host, independent journalist Tim Pool, asked the Independent presidential candidate about activists tearing down statues like those from the Civil War or of former slaves like Frederick Douglass, who fought against slavery.

The host particularly asked if he would condemn those who melted a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that was removed from Charlottesville in 2021.

“I don’t think it’s a good, healthy thing for any culture to erase its history,” Kennedy said. “I have a visceral reaction against, against the attacks on those statues.”

ROBERT E. LEE STATUE MELTED IN SECRET, ‘SYMBOLIC’ CEREMONY, TO BE REMADE INTO ‘INCLUSIVE’ PUBLIC ART

He said he grew up in Virginia, and that there were heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves.

“I just have a visceral reaction against destroying history. I don’t like it. I think we should celebrate who we are,” Kennedy said. “We should celebrate the good qualities of everybody…If we want to find people who are completely virtuous on every issue throughout history, we would erase all of history.”

A part of the discussion centered around Columbus Day, which Kennedy refers to as Indigenous People’s Day.

NYC TO CONSIDER REMOVING STATUES OF GEORGE WASHINGTON, CREATE REPARATIONS TASK FORCE AMID BUDGET CUTS

A tow truck removes a statue of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, after it was toppled in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, June 10, 2020.  (Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Kennedy told Pool that he thinks it is important to recognize all kinds of people, whether Italian-Americans, who celebrate Columbus Day, or indigenous people.

“We can recognize the indigenous people who, you know, made the ultimate sacrifice as one of the greatest genocides in history,” Kennedy said. “My father always believed that our country would never live up to its ideals if we didn’t make some kind of amends…to the group that was exterminated in order for us to settle in this country, and I think it’s a good aspiration for every American.”

Kennedy did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for further comment on the matter.

PRO-NATIVE AMERICAN ACTIVISTS FIGHTING TO SAVE INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS IN NATIONWIDE WAR AGAINST WOKENESS

Workers remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, after years of a legal battle over the contentious monument, in Charlottesville, Va., July 10, 2021. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)

The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that once stood in Charlottesville was secretly melted down at a ceremonial event.

After both cultural and legal battles, the statue of Lee that sparked the infamous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally was reportedly melted in a secretive ceremony in order to ensure the safety of those involved. The Washington Post reported that the statue met its end “in a 2,250-degree furnace” when it was “secretly melted down” to become a new piece of public art.

Footage of Lee’s likeness being melted went viral across social media.

The “Unite the Right” rally took place in Charlottesville in August 2017, and participants included far-right White supremacist sympathizers upset over the proposed removal of Lee’s statue, as well as many counter-protesters. 

On Aug. 12, James Fields Jr. deliberately rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

Fox News Digital’s Alexander Hall contributed to this report.

A measure that would have required schools to notify parents about their child’s gender identity and limited transgender youth medical care has failed to get enough signatures in support to qualify for the November ballot, proponents said Tuesday.

The proposal sought to notify parents if their child changes their name or pronouns at school or requests to use facilities or play sports that don’t match their gender on official records. It also would have banned California doctors from prescribing hormones or otherwise providing gender-affirming care to minors.

For the measure to qualify for the ballot, proponents had to submit the signatures of more than half a million registered voters by Tuesday, the deadline set by the California secretary of state.

The campaign fell short but gathered more than 400,000 signatures, according to Jonathan Zachreson, a Roseville school board member who was leading the initiative.

“If we had a little more time and a little more money, we would have easily qualified for the ballot,” he said.

Zachreson said the initiative had the support of tens of thousands of volunteers, with the most signatures collected from counties including Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino.

But the measure was always a political long shot in left-leaning California, home to some of the strongest LGBTQ+ protections in the nation.

The campaign raised $200,000, according to Zachreson, a paltry number in a state where some past ballot measure campaigns have had hundreds of millions of dollars in backing.

Supporters of the measure sought to bring Republican-backed debates over “parental rights” that have been playing out on school boards in conservative pockets of California to the statewide level. California Democrats in turn have fought to thwart gender notification policies considered by several school boards, measures they said are harmful to transgender students who may feel safe at school but not at home.

Last week, Democratic state lawmakers in Sacramento introduced a bill that seeks to ban such school policies and shield teachers from retaliation for supporting transgender students as lawsuits over the issue are pending across the state.

The legislation comes after California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit last year against the Chino school district alleging its parental notification policy was discriminatory and violated civil rights and privacy laws.

Bonta also challenged the ballot title of the proposed measure that fell short Tuesday. Last month, a Sacramento Superior Court Judge tentatively sided with Bonta, who titled the measure the “Restrict Rights of Transgender Youth” initiative, while backers wanted to call it the “Protect Kids of California Act.”

Zachreson said supporters plan to appeal that decision. They will “absolutely” continue to push for similar ballot measures in the future and are now throwing their weight behind opposing the state legislation introduced last week, he said.

They are hoping for the financial support of billionaire Elon Musk, who has criticized healthcare for transgender youth.

LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have warned that parental rights debates over gender identity are harmful to youth who already face high rates of suicide.

“Across the country and here in California, LGBTQ+ young people are under attack from extremist politicians and school boards seeking to ban books, terrorize teachers and make transgender youth afraid to be themselves at school,” Equality California Executive Director Tony Hoang said in a statement.