DeSantis Orbit Keeps Up the Fight against Amendment 4 in Florida as Trump Keeps Pro-Lifers Guessing

As National Review reported back in April, Florida governor Ron DeSantis projected cautious optimism to donors in the spring that pro-choice advocates’ effort to enshrine abortion rights into his state’s constitution this November will not succeed, though he warned that defeating the abortion-rights ballot initiative will still be a tough fight for Florida pro-lifers both politically and financially.

DeSantis’s team continues to project confidence that the pro-choice ballot initiative will fail, with internal polling from the governor’s political orbit suggesting that support for Amendment 4 is in the low 50s, according to a source familiar with the matter. Constitutional amendments require a 60 percent threshold to pass. (A late-July University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab poll had that number much higher, with 69 percent of the 774 Floridians who are “definitely” or “probably” voting this fall saying in the survey that they support the amendment.)

The continued optimism from DeSantis’s orbit comes even after former President Donald Trump’s remarks on Thursday to NBC News that “I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time.” Asked by NBC News’s Dasha Burns to clarify whether he’s voting in favor of the amendment, Trump said “I’m voting that – I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.”

Trump’s team released a follow-up statement clarifying that the former president — who is now arguing that abortion should be left to the states — “simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short” and “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative.” The text of the amendment reads: “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. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

Back in the spring, Florida’s supreme court upheld the state’s 15-week ban and allowed a six-week ban to go into effect within 30 days. The state’s highest court also ruled in favor of an effort to allow the pro-choice group Floridians Protecting Freedom’s draft constitutional amendment to appear on the ballot this fall. As Florida pro-lifers point out, Amendment 4’s inclusion of the deliberately vague terms “patient’s health” and “healthcare provider” will drastically expand the right to an abortion across the state.

As the campaign heats up, anti-Amendment 4 advocates in the DeSantis orbit will continue to point out that the ballot initiative’s language is deceptively vague, and that its preservation of parental “notification” for minors seeking an abortion is not the same as protecting existing laws governing parental “consent.” Pro-life advocates will also continue to make the slippery slope argument. They will point to states like Michigan, whose passage of an a “reproductive freedom” constitutional amendment in 2022 led the ACLU to file a lawsuit in June 2024 challenging the state’s ban on Medicaid’s coverage of abortion and “related care.” If Florida’s amendment passes, the argument goes, left-leaning groups will follow in the ACLU of Michigan’s footsteps to try and pave the way for taxpayer-funded abortion in Florida.

Over the next few weeks, Florida politicos will get a clearer picture of what spending and TV messaging will look like on both sides of the constitutional amendment campaign. As National Review reported earlier this year, “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.”