Brendan Farrington/AP Photo
Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mathew Staver speaks to reporters in front of the Florida Supreme Court after telling justices a proposed amendment to protect abortion rights should be kept off the ballot, February 7, 2024, in Tallahassee, Florida.
The Florida Supreme Court’s decision to drop a proposed constitutional amendment that would establish a right to an abortion into the hands of Florida voters has been greeted with something approaching fatalistic jubilation. On the same day that they allowed that measure to appear on November’s ballot, the justices also upheld a lower-court ruling ratifying a 15-week ban on abortions that enables the state’s draconian six-week abortion ban to go into effect on May 1.
Fatalistic, because, two years after Dobbs, Florida lawmakers and jurists have crafted the most restrictive abortion and reproductive policies in the country and walled off the South as hostile territory for women’s health care. Already reeling from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s anti–reproductive rights crusading, doctors and abortion providers must balance frantic demands for the procedure against the looming deadline and the future out-of-state assistance that women will need to address pregnancy complications and related traumas.
But the prospect of an electoral remedy—state voters are now in a position come November to overturn that ruling—has energized Democrats in a way that few developments have so far this election season. In Washington, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries proclaimed Florida to be “ground zero for abortion access,” a phrase that will be repeated ad nauseam from now until November.
Nevertheless, Democrats need to slow their roll. The state’s political landscape may have shifted dramatically, but to conclude, as so many national party leaders have, that Florida is “in play” in the presidential and senatorial races is a stretch. Independent younger voters and disaffected Republicans will be central to the amendment campaign, and candidate races still could go either way. Nor does that enthusiasm take into account Florida’s distinctive state geopolitics.
On Tuesday, Susan MacManus was in Sarasota County on Florida’s west coast, speaking with a local Democratic club, the Longboat Key Democrats. The retired University of South Florida political science professor says that the constitutional amendment question was a “shot of adrenaline for a lot of Democrats,” particularly in a state with a late-April filing deadline for the August 20 statewide primary. “Being in that room,” says MacManus, who meets with groups on both sides of the aisle, “and hearing people talking, there’s a bit of optimism that they can now field and entice some number of Democratic candidates to run in some of these state legislative and congressional districts.”
As critical as this momentum is for the national races, it is even more central to stoking interest for down-ballot races for the state Senate and House of Representatives. There are “double haters,” as MacManus calls them, who “can’t stand Biden or Trump.” “How many of them will just skip that race and then look for the amendment but going down they might see local candidates that they know or whatever and vote on them?”
The new dynamic created by the abortion debate will define the difference particularly in the state’s most competitive area, the Central Florida-Interstate 4 corridor, with its Tampa and Orlando media markets and its mix of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Democrats will also be competitive in Miami-Dade, Gainesville, and Tallahassee, as well as Palm Beach and Jacksonville.
Florida lawmakers and jurists have crafted the most restrictive abortion and reproductive policies in the country and walled off the South as hostile territory for women’s health care.
The abortion amendment shifts the center of electoral gravity from a traditional focus on older voters, especially boomers and older Generation X voters who lean Republican, to young independents under 40 who care less about party affiliation and more about issues like abortion, marijuana, and climate. Both parties will also have to shift their get-out-the-vote strategies to focus on college students and young working adults, groups toward whom state Democrats’ grassroots efforts have been lackluster and sparse in recent elections.
“They’re going to be the real battleground for a lot of things in Florida this time around,” MacManus says, adding that nearly 60 percent of current registered voters are members of the three younger generations: Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X. “People don’t get that about Florida.”
And yet, if the amendment does pass, history shows that Floridians don’t always get what they voted for. Republicans in the legislature and the governor’s office are masters at direct-democracy backsliding; they’ve shown that implementing the will of the people is always optional for them. Consider Amendment 4, the 2018 Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative.
More than five million Floridians, nearly 65 percent of voters, decided that returning citizens should be granted the right to vote. DeSantis then stepped in and secured a law stipulating that returning citizens could not vote until they had paid off all fines, fees, and other costs associated with their sentences (unless they were murderers or sex offenders who could not vote under the amendment). Even if a person could pay the accumulated debts, there is no centralized database that tracks how much a returning citizen owes. The records are maintained by the counties, and there is a wide disparity in how county offices maintain those records. Almost 800,000 people could not vote because of that legislatively imposed restriction.
DeSantis also created an election police force, the Office of Election Crimes and Security, to arrest people suspected of voting illegally. In 2022, the force arrested 20 people, all of whom had committed sex offenses or murders and were registered to vote in error in their communities.
The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition filed a lawsuit against the state last year alleging that the governor and other Florida state officials interfered with Amendment 4’s grant of the right to vote for most returning citizens.
What does felon voting rights suppression have to do with the possible success of an abortion rights constitutional amendment? If Republicans maintain their current supermajority in the legislature after the November elections, there is little doubt that DeSantis and state lawmakers will pivot to narrowing the measure to keep abortion functionally illegal.
The Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion reads in part, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” The term “viability,” usually defined as 24 weeks, alone generates persistent controversy. Defining viability may prove to be an inviting target to construe in a way that has more to do with the predilections of anti-abortion jurists and lawmakers than it does with the health of the average pregnant person, or with the standard that Floridians will think they were voting on.
In tandem with the abortion amendment, the Florida Supreme Court also advanced a recreational marijuana ballot initiative. A decade ago, Florida voters defeated a medical marijuana ballot initiative. In 2016, however, 71 percent of voters finally passed one. But the legislature also placed strict limits on the amounts, where it can be consumed, and other restrictions.
The Florida abortion amendment needs a supermajority, 60 percent of voters, to pass. In other state ballot measure contests, similar proposals have edged up to, but not surpassed, that threshold. In Kansas, a similar measure passed with nearly 59 percent support, and in Ohio, with nearly 57 percent. Polls have shown the proposed constitutional amendment gaining the support of the required 60 percent, by anywhere from a couple of points to a dozen.
And in beginning to focus on such down-ticket races as those for the state legislature, Democrats may consider Republican legislators’ history of negating ballot measures passed by state voters to be a rich line of attack. In a state where Democrats have struggled to find a compelling message, they could make inroads in some contests by persuading pro-choice voters to vote against state legislators who’ve already negated previously enacted ballot measures.
