Wittenberg, Wisconsin – For four generations, Kristin Lyerly’s family has lived in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin. But in 2022, she lost the ability to fully practise her profession there.

Lyerly, a doctor in obstetrics and gynaecology (OBGYN), specialises in reproductive health. Part of her work involved providing abortion services in the city of Sheboygan, nestled along the shores of Lake Michigan.

But in June 2022, the conservative-led Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion access, paving the way for a patchwork of restrictions to crop up across the United States.

It upended Lyerly’s life and practice. Almost immediately, an 1849 law that effectively banned all abortions, including in cases of rape or incest, snapped back to life in Wisconsin. Lyerly was forced to commute more than seven hours to the neighbouring state of Minnesota to continue offering her services.

That experience helped launch Lyerly into national politics — and now, she is hoping to make history as she campaigns to be one of the first reproductive health specialists to serve in Congress in defence of abortion access.

“There are zero pro-abortion rights OBGYNs in Congress. Zero. This year, we can change that,” Lyerly said in a June campaign video.

She is running unopposed in the Democratic primary for an open seat in the House of Representatives on August 13.

But experts say campaigns like Lyerly’s will test whether abortion access remains a powerful motivator for Democratic voters, two years after the Supreme Court’s decision.

The US is facing a pivotal election year, with the presidency on the ballot as well as every seat in the House of Representatives — and about a third of the seats in the Senate.

The Democrats’ leading candidate for the presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris, has made “reproductive freedom” a key pillar of her platform. In states from Florida to Nevada, voters will have the chance to make abortion access a constitutional right on the state level.

And in the 8th Congressional District of Wisconsin, Lyerly and her supporters are hoping reproductive rights can help flip a seat in the House of Representatives that has been held by Republicans for more than a decade.

“We have, at this point, over 30,000 individual donors all pitching in 25 bucks here, 50 bucks there, because people — not just in the district and not just in Wisconsin but across the country — recognise how important this race is,” Lyerly told Al Jazeera.

She described the kinds of messages she receives daily on Facebook as proof.

“Donated from California: ‘Go get ’em.’ Donated from Virginia: ‘You’re our hope.’ ‘I sent you 50 bucks because my grandkids in Florida can’t get the healthcare that they need.’”

A mother of four with long blonde hair and black-rimmed glasses, Lyerly has become one of Wisconsin’s most visible advocates for the issue of abortion care.

In 2022, as the Supreme Court prepared to announce its decision, Lyerly started to make media appearances to advocate for repealing Wisconsin’s 19th-century abortion ban. She also signed onto a lawsuit that sought to overturn it, led by the state’s Democratic attorney general.

“When politicians started interfering in our personal healthcare decisions, that was the ticket for me to start interfering in political decisions,” she told the TV station NBC26 earlier this year.

Her media blitz even took her to the White House, where she spoke to President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris as part of a task force on reproductive healthcare access.

Ultimately, in December of last year, a judge in Dane County, Wisconsin, struck down the 1849 abortion law — although an appeal remains ongoing.

And other restrictions continue to be debated. Earlier this year, Republicans in the state legislature floated the idea of introducing a ballot referendum to limit abortion access to the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.

Currently, Wisconsin allows abortions up to 20 weeks, a timeframe critics argue is too tight to allow for the detection of fetal abnormalities.

But all the uncertainty surrounding Wisconsin’s abortion law comes at a cost to patients, Lyerly argues.

Since the state Supreme Court hasn’t issued a final ruling on the 1849 law, healthcare providers outside of Wisconsin’s two largest cities, Madison and Milwaukee, still are not offering abortion care, Lyerly said.

That highlights the disparities facing rural communities, something she believes will mobilise voters in November.

“If you are in (a small, rural town) and you have an ectopic pregnancy, you still have to get three doctors to sign off on your medical chart before they will perform the surgery that will save your life,” she explained.

Lyerly is not alone in believing abortion will galvanise voters. Political strategists note that abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats thus far.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022, seven states have weighed whether to protect abortion through ballot referendums. In all seven cases, voters sided with the right to abortion access — even in deep-red states like Kentucky and Montana.

But critics point out that Wisconsin presents particular challenges as a key swing state with deeply conservative pockets.

Wisconsin’s 8th District, for example, has consistently leaned Republican for the last decade. The last representative to serve the district in Congress was Mike Gallagher, a Republican, who won his seat by 25 points in 2022. His only opposition was a Democratic write-in candidate.

Republican politician Reid Ribble, who preceded Gallagher in Congress, said he believes a Democrat can indeed flip the 8th District.

But Ribble cautions against focusing too intently on abortion — and losing sight of other issues like infrastructure and security.

“Dr Lyerly, being an OBGYN, she can get so zoned in on abortion that she loses the bigger picture that we need roads to drive on. We need trucks to do transportation,” said Ribble. “We need a military to take care of us in a dangerous world.”

Ribble described the district’s voters as working-class moderates: “Reagan Democrats who loved to deer hunt but were part of a union and attended a Catholic church”.

But while voters in the district supported Republican candidate Donald Trump during the last two presidential election cycles, Ribble said there was also a strong base of support for figures like Bernie Sanders, the left-leaning progressive from Vermont.

“If you get into the rural areas of Wisconsin’s 8th District, which is a lot of it, there’s an awful lot of Bernie Sanders voters in those regions as well,” Ribble explained.

“I don’t think the district is as is as conservative as it is populist.”

Other experts warn that Democrats may not be able to count on the same wave of indignant voters who supported them after the Supreme Court’s decision.

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette University Law School Poll, told Al Jazeera that polling conducted prior to the June presidential debate suggested that voters in Wisconsin ranked abortion third among their top priorities, behind the economy and immigration.

Less than 10 percent of the independents polled placed abortion as their primary issue — despite 76 percent saying they supported abortion rights wholeheartedly.

“Preaching to the choir may get a lot of cheers at Democratic rallies. They agree on the issue of abortion rights,” Franklin said. “But can the campaign raise the salience of the issue so that more votes are swayed by their abortion position, rather than by the economy or the immigration position?

Jackie Esker, 37, is among the voters in Wisconsin’s 8th District. She describes herself as “not a political person”. Speaking from her family’s hardware store in the small town of Wittenberg, she too expressed scepticism that abortion alone will draw voters to the Democratic Party.

The recent July 13 assassination attempt against Trump felt like a more pressing issue, Esker explained. “I’m sure (abortion is) going to be on the back burner because gun control is on more people’s minds than abortion is.”

Still, Lyerly and her allies see the issue of reproductive rights as entwined with questions of democracy and day-to-day “kitchen-table issues” like childcare and affordable housing.

She explained that more children mean greater household expenses for food, healthcare and other necessities.

“Any woman of child-bearing age who is sexually active understands on an instinctive level that, if we can’t control our fertility, we can’t control the direction of our life,” Lyerly said to Al Jazeera.

“They understand that freedom isn’t just about the ability to say what you want or to carry guns, the First and Second Amendment rights. It’s also about the freedom to make decisions about what you want to do with your life.”

Lyerly also hopes that her grassroots campaign can help humanise the issue of reproductive rights, which can be divisive in the US.

At a recent campaign stop in a Wittenberg bar, the topic of abortion didn’t even come up. Instead, Lyerly teased one woman about their high school teams’ rivalry before sharing a suggestion about gynaecological specialists.

Lyerly was a pom-pom girl and explained she received an award for her efforts to boost school spirit.

“What I’m seeing in my interactions with people in the district, which is the other critical piece of this campaign, is people want to talk. They want to be heard. They want to find that common ground. They’re tired of being stuck in that echo chamber,” Lyerly said afterwards.

Abortion, she said, is just part of her push for Congress this November.