Abortion activists are concerned that Democrats are piggybacking on the cause: ‘This is not a trick’
Amy knows that many people hate every candidate on the November ballot.
As a nurse who worked for more than a decade at Bread and Roses Women’s Health Center, an abortion clinic in Gainesville, Florida, Amy has dealt with both patients and friends who are so disillusioned with party politics that they don’t want to vote at all. in the 2024 elections. She gets it: just thinking about the past elections makes her grimace.
“You don’t have to vote for the candidates if you don’t want to,” she said in an interview the day before Florida banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. (Amy asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons.) “But please just vote for the ballot measure.”
Next November, Florida will be one of about a dozen states expected to hold a ballot question asking voters to decide whether abortion rights should be protected or decimated. But Florida’s ballot measure could have higher stakes than any other in the country: If voters don’t support the measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, they will be left with a six-week ban — which, in the eyes of many, bans abortion . people even know they are pregnant.
Abortion rights advocates have won every vote since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade two years ago, and outrage over Roe’s demise may have cost Republicans a much-touted “red wave” in the 2022 elections. Those successes are credited to Democrats convinced that abortion is their panacea in the 2024 elections, especially as Joe Biden consistently trails Donald Trump in the polls and risks losing the youth vote over the war in Gaza. Democrats across the country now regularly criticize Republicans for their complicity in abortion bans.
But the Democrats’ spotlight on abortion rights has also put organizers of the nonpartisan campaign behind the Florida ballot initiative in an awkward position. They need 60% of the vote to win — and with nearly a million more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida, as well as more than 3 million independents, organizers can’t afford to seem too cozy with Democrats , especially at a time of unprecedented unrest. political disagreement.
“I understand the knee-jerk reaction because it was a Republican governor who signed the six-week ban. It was a Republican-majority House and Senate that created the bill itself,” said Trenece Robertson, a reproductive justice activist in Florida who helped collect signatures to get the measure on the ballot. “But we also have to do our best to make sure that we are united as a state and that we don’t alienate anyone at this point because we need as many votes as we can get.”
An April Emerson College poll found that 42% of Florida voters plan to vote in favor of the ballot measure. Fifty-six percent of Democrats and 44% of independents plan to vote for it, while only 30% of Republicans said the same.
‘The Democrats are cynically using these initiatives’
Despite their party’s longstanding support for abortion rights, Democrats in Congress and the White House have spent much of the Roe era sidestepping the issue. Biden, a Catholic, once stated that he was “not big on abortion”; Reproductive justice advocates famously followed what seemed like a inability to even say the word “abortion.”
Now that anger over Roe’s death has proven an electoral weapon, the president is starting to talk more openly about abortion. His campaign has released multiple ads about the consequences of banning the procedure, while Kamala Harris is on a national tour focusing on the issue. In a speech in Jacksonville, Florida, last week, the vice president raised abortion-related ballot measures.
“Momentum is on our side. Just think about it. Since Roe was overturned, every time reproductive freedom was discussed, the American people voted for freedom,” Harris told the crowd. “From Kansas to California to Kentucky, in Michigan, Montana, Vermont and Ohio, the American people voted for freedom – and not piecemeal, but often by overwhelming margins, which also proves that this is not a partisan issue – it is not a partisan issue. matter. issue – and proves that the voice of the people has been heard and will be heard.”
Even so While Harris emphasized that abortion rights are a nonpartisan issue, she also referred to state-level abortion bans five times as “Trump abortion bans.”
“Of course they’re trying to use the process. Democrats are cynically using these initiatives to get people out,” said Benjamin Case, a political sociologist at Arizona State University who studies voting measures. “They’re hoping this will be a boon for Biden because those people are more likely to vote for Biden.”
As part of his research, Case interviewed professional political operatives after the Arizona Supreme Court banned abortion in 1864 could be enforced. Their main reaction according to Case: “Oh, this is really great. Biden will win Arizona because it will make people angry.”
However, that sense of joy stands in stark contrast to the real consequences of abortion bans. “That sentiment is prevalent among the professional political class,” Case said. “It was very different among the organizers in Arizona for obvious reasons.”
The Arizona state legislature, which has a razor-thin Republican majority, has since taken steps to repeal that ban. and abortion is currently legal in the state up to 15 weeks of pregnancy. Arizona will likely hold an initiative in November to protect abortion until the viability of the fetus.
Julie Cantillo, Volunteer Coordinator at the Gainesville Radical Reproductive Rights! Network, which helped collect signatures for the Florida the ballot initiative said national Democrats’ talk about using ballot measures to turn out voters “scares” her.
“It makes it gimmicky. It also doesn’t recognize that real people’s lives are at stake here,” Cantillo said. “It’s about everyone having access to their human rights and healthcare. I don’t want to trivialize it by saying this is a ploy to keep people out. That is not why so many Floridians have put so much effort into this.”
Abortion-related ballot measures have never been tested in a presidential campaign. And despite Democrats’ hopes for higher turnout, it is not clear that support for abortion rights, which are generally popular, will translate into support for Biden or any other Democratic candidate. Whenever voters are asked to make major ballot measures, there are often more votes on the measure than the candidates, indicating that people are showing up just to vote on the measure, Case said.
When voters resort to a ballot measure, Case says, it is ultimately an indictment of the inability of elected politicians to do their jobs.
“If they are really governing in the interest of the people and there is a policy that 65% of the people want and they haven’t adopted it yet,” he said, “then that should raise questions about why not.”