Will an Abortion Referendum Help Democrats Overcome the GOP’s Florida Advantage in November?

Democrats are hoping an abortion ballot measure will turn out Floridians in November, helping deliver a win to President Biden and down-ballot candidates in the increasingly red state. 

But on the ground in Florida, some members of Biden’s coalition are skeptical that even a blowout ballot-initiative victory for abortion-rights advocates will coincide with across-the-board wins for Democratic candidates this fall. 

“The key problem would be how you message it in a way that the same people that want to vote for the amendment will go and vote up and down the ticket for Democrats,” said Maria-Elena Lopez, who is working to revamp a Miami-Dade Democratic coalition that has trended toward Republicans in recent cycles.

Florida politicos’ fixation on abortion this cycle comes after the state supreme court upheld on Monday the state’s 15-week limit and allowed a six-week ban — with some exceptions — to go into effect within 30 days. The court also ruled in favor of the Floridians Protecting Freedom committee’s effort to put their abortion-related measure on the ballot ahead of November. 

“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,” reads the initiative, which will be called “Amendment 4” at the ballot box. “This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

Republicans are already nervous that the ballot initiative will encourage low-propensity voters to show up to the polls in Florida — already a high-turnout state — and that the effort will draw millions of dollars in out-of-state funds.

“This is going to cause us to have to work harder. There’s no question about it,” said Peter Feaman, Florida’s Republican Party national committeeman.

Yet it’s far from clear that even a successful ballot-initiative effort will automatically translate to down-ballot electoral victories for Democrats, given many Republican-leaning voters may support the ballot measure while also casting a vote for Trump and other Republican congressional candidates. Recent elections suggest that abortion-rights-related ballot referenda typically outperform Democratic candidates at the ballot box, with some exceptions.

“A big part of it is going to be persuasion because this is a state with a high turnout rate as is. So it’s really gonna come down to how the parties are messaging this,” said J. Miles Coleman, an elections analyst with Sabato’s Crystal Ball. 

With that dynamic in mind, Feaman said Florida’s Republican Party leadership is hopping on a conference call later this afternoon to discuss how to message on the issue. “What I’m going to argue is that Republicans need to embrace the issue and point out the difference between the Democrat position and the Republican position on abortion,” he said. “The Democrat position is that abortion should be legal right up into the time of birth, and that’s infanticide. And the message should be the Democrats in favor infanticide. We don’t.”

Caitlin Connors, southern regional director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, says voters can expect Democrats in Florida to make abortion a central issue in November. To push back, Republican candidates will need to be “very clear on their message for life,” and must extol the compassion of the pro-life movement, she said.

The pro-life side will have to work hard to educate voters about the dangers of the amendment, she added, pointing to troubling language in the bill that leaves too much room for interpretation around viability and health exceptions and warning that the amendment would erase parental-consent laws in favor of parental-notification laws.

Lopez, the Miami-Dade Democrat, accused the GOP of “fear-mongering” on the issue of abortion and said Democrats will have to counteract Republican messaging by saying that what is at stake is not abortion but women’s right to choose their health care without the intrusion of government, particularly to reach Hispanic voters in Miami who may be willing to vote Democratic but whose religious views make them opposed to abortion. 

The Biden campaign will need to go “back to basics” by being out in communities and tailoring its messaging to each community, she said. 

Recent abortion-related initiatives suggest the electoral winds are in pro-choice advocates’ favor. In recent cycles, voters have opted overwhelmingly to protect abortion rights in varying abortion-related ballot initiatives across the country, including in battleground Michigan, Republican-leaning Ohio, and Kentucky. And in Kansas, voters rejected a proposed amendment that would have declared there was no right to an abortion in the state. 

Florida-related developments on the abortion issue come as national Republican operatives urge their congressional candidates to moderate on abortion and clearly articulate their positions on the issue early on in their race before their Democratic opponents define their views for them. They’re also encouraging GOP candidates to oppose government restrictions for in vitro fertilization, citing polling that suggests restricting the procedure is politically toxic.  

“When responding to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, it is imperative that our candidates align with the public’s overwhelming support for IVF and fertility treatments,” Jason Thielman, executive director of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, wrote in a February 23 memo to Senate candidates, as first reported by National Review. “By advocating for increased access to these services, opposing restrictions, and emphasizing the importance of supporting families in their journey to conceive, our candidates can demonstrate compassion, respect for family values, and a commitment to individual freedom.”

Trump on Tuesday indicated his campaign will be “making a statement next week on abortion” when asked whether he supports Florida’s six-week abortion ban. Yet the former president suggested back in May that Florida’s abortion policy is “too harsh.”

“If you look at what DeSantis did, a lot of people don’t even know if he knew what he was doing. But he signed six weeks, and many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh,” Trump told the Messenger (now defunct) at the time.

Democrats have hammered Republican candidates on the issue of abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In November, after the abortion issue proved politically toxic to Republicans in many races, GOP strategist Whit Ayres told NR that of all of the Republican presidential primary candidates at that time, it was Trump who had the winning position on abortion, with his more moderate, leave-the-issue-to-the-states approach.

Still, Trump’s comments on abortion have at times alienated the pro-life community. Nonetheless, he has been the “most pro-life president that we’ve had in our nation” and does have a national appeal to be concerned with, Connors says. “When it comes to Florida I think what we do know is that President Trump has been very clear that late-term abortion is something he’s very much against and he knows the American people are very much against that and this ballot amendment opens the door for that in Florida.”

Around NR

• Dan McLaughlin warns that a hypothetical Trump administration that would hire only those who believe the former president’s stolen-election claims could risk blacklisting competent conservatives, after media reports indicated the RNC is asking potential new hires just that. If true, it would be a “catastrophe”:

Why? Because it’s not true, and because, even if you think it might be true, it can neither be proven by evidence nor justified in law. And filtering your hiring for people who cling to falsehoods that won’t stand up to factual or legal scrutiny — whether they believe them or not — is a great way to ensure that you’re hiring people who will consistently fail at any job that requires command of the facts and the law.

• Noah Rothman is skeptical of Biden’s claims that he plans to court disaffected Nikki Haley supporters. On a recent episode of The Editors, he noted that Biden previously said “there is a place for them in my campaign because there’s not a place for them in Donald Trump’s campaign,” but the campaign has since offered little else beyond that. “And that’s it,” Rothman said. “No policy concessions. Nothing other than basically a moral and emotional blackmail.”

• In the latest edition of the magazine, Michael Brendan Dougherty posits there are four possible outcomes of another Trump administration: “a replay of the Limited Trump,” “the Full Trump,” “a four-year siege,” or “Trump aborted.”

While the first two broad scenarios — controlled chaos and propitious success — depend largely on Trump’s behavior and favorable political weather, the final two depend on his opponents, who would, of course, have their say. 

• Winning North Carolina remains a tall order for the Biden campaign, writes Jim Geraghty:

The Biden campaign adamantly insists that North Carolina is on its list of competitive swing states this cycle. I was skeptical when the year began, and I remain skeptical now. In 2020, when Biden was winning enough votes to flip formerly red states like Arizona and Georgia, Biden fell almost 75,000 votes, or about 1.3 percentage points, short in North Carolina. It’s not just that recent polling by Morning Consult and Marist and Redfield & Wilton Strategies all show Trump with small leads in head-to-head polling with Biden. It’s that the numbers beyond the headline demonstrate how much skepticism Biden must overcome between now and November.

• All available evidence shows Trump’s road to victory in the 2024 presidential race looks “surprisingly smooth,” Jim Geraghty says:

Can things change and turn around? Absolutely. But Biden’s hopes rely on people who have already rejected him on some level changing their mind and signing up for another four years of his administration. While voters have a wide variety of concerns about Biden, the most widely shared one is that Biden is just too old for another four years in office.