Could an Abortion Ballot Measure in Florida Give Democrats a Fighting Chance There in 2024?

A petition to “limit government interference with abortion” is on track to meet the requirements to appear on the ballot next year in Florida as Floridians express discontent with state Republicans’ abortion policies, and Democrats hope the measure can boost them in the Sunshine state in 2024.The Florida Division of Elections now counts nearly 690,000 signatures on a petition to put abortion rights on the ballot in Florida next year. Advocates will need to get more than 890,000 signatures by February 1 for the measure to appear on ballots in 2024.The measure would amend the state constitution to add a section reading: “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.”One of the groups backing the ballot measure, Floridians Protecting Freedom, tells the Sun that the number of signatures that have not been verified has already surpassed the threshold to appear on the ballot. The group says they’ve already collected 1.4 million signatures, meaning that it may only be a matter of time before the ballot measure has enough verified signatures to appear on the ballot.“Even with the updated total of verified signatures, our internal count is still significantly higher than what you’re seeing on the Division of Elections website, and we are very confident we will meet the deadline to have the required number of verified petitions to qualify for next year’s ballot,” the project’s campaign director, Lauren Brenzel, said in a statement.In every election directly concerning abortion rights since the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year, voters have voted in favor of protecting abortion rights.Polling on the issue in Florida indicates that the ballot measure would have a good chance of passing despite the fact that the state requires a supermajority — 60 percent — in order for this sort of amendment to pass.A recent survey from the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab found that the amendment has 62 percent support, and just 29 percent of respondents said they opposed the measure.“Even among registered Republicans, 53 percent would vote to protect abortion rights in Florida, with just 39 percent voting no,” the lab’s director, Michael Binder, said in a memo accompanying the poll. “It looks like the proposed abortion amendment is right at that threshold among these respondents.”It’s not yet guaranteed that the measure will appear on the ballot. Florida ballot initiatives must also be approved by the state attorney general, Ashley Moody, as well as the state Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority.If the attorney general and state Supreme Court do not act to prevent voters from voting on the future of abortion rights in their state, Mr. Binder tells the Sun that it’s still unlikely to affect the outcome of the state on the presidential level in 2024.“Assuming it gets on the ballot, the conventional wisdom is that it might help turnout,” Mr. Binder says. “However, during the presidential race, turnout is as high as it’s going to get, and you’re not going to have as much of an impact on overall turnout.”Mr. Binder explained that the effects of an abortion ballot measure on a presidential election stand in contrast to the effects they have on midterm elections or special elections, where the issue has been proven to be able to drive turnout.“In the fall of ‘24 I’m very skeptical about it,” Mr. Binder says. “If this were 2026 that’s a different story.”While a ballot measure might be able to affect the outcome in an “exceptionally competitive” state like Georgia in 2024, Mr. Binder says that Florida Republicans’ roughly 700,000-person registration advantage is likely to deliver the state to the Republican presidential candidate.He did caution, however, that Governor DeSantis’s landslide 2022 victory in the state’s gubernatorial election was not the new normal for the Sunshine State, saying that “DeSantis’s performance was the function of a terrible Democratic candidate.” The managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, Kyle Kondik, largely agreed with Mr. Binder’s analysis, though he did note that the stakes of abortion votes are fundamentally different than they were before Roe was overturned.Mr. Kondik says that the most comparable example he can think of to abortion referendum in 2024 was when Repblicans backed same-sex marriage ballot measures in 2004.“Republicans put same sex marriage on the ballot hoping it would help President Bush,” Mr. Kondik says. “The bottom line is that I don’t think the same sex marriage issue won the election for Bush.”Mr. Kondik added that a referendum in a state like Arizona, which was decided by about 10,000 votes in 2020, could have more of an effect on the outcome than a state like Florida.“When you’re talking about a state that is that close any sort of change is important,” Mr. Kondik says. “Arizona’s right on the butterknife and probably will be again in 2024.”

Could an Abortion Ballot Measure in Florida Give Democrats a Fighting Chance There in 2024?

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