Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
On a recent Saturday afternoon, volunteers with Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group behind the state’s abortion-rights ballot measure, trudge up a street lined with waterfront mansions and Trump-Vance 2024 yard signs. They’ve been knocking on doors in Tarpon Springs — a red city in a bellwether county near Tampa that Joe Biden won by just a few thousand votes — for nearly two hours in 100-degree heat. Amy, 56, a petite brunette who drives an SUV covered in white-marker slogans like “Crooked Donald” and “No to Project 2025,” and Joseph, 64, a white-haired man wearing a purple “Yes on 4” T-shirt, haven’t had much luck. The voters on their list either weren’t home, ignored their knocks, or, in one instance, shouted “no” and slammed the door at the sight of them.
The pair is nearing the end of their canvassing list when they reach a two-story ivory home. Amy steps onto the porch while Joseph lingers behind. Dogs start barking inside when she raps her knuckles against the door, and a middle-age man emerges with an exasperated sigh. “Hi!” Amy chirps before the man spots the brochure in her hand and cuts her off. “I’m not interested in that stuff, about the abortion ban and all that,” he says. “I’m still deciding what the hell to do. I don’t think I’m even voting.” Amy tells him that she understands his position. “We’re in a really extreme abortion ban right now,” she adds. “The amendment just allows a little more time. That’s all.” She extends a hand with the brochure and smiles when the man takes it, thanks her, and goes back inside. “I don’t even know where to put that one,” Amy whispers to Joseph as they turn toward the tree-lined sidewalk, marking the man in an app on her phone as “undecided.”
Exchanges like this one, which lasted all of 40 seconds, will make or break what is arguably the most important abortion-rights measure on the ballot this fall. Amendment 4 would codify the right to abortion until viability, or about 24 weeks of pregnancy, in Florida’s constitution and overturn the state’s devastating six-week ban. Abortion rights have won every time the issue has been on the ballot since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and if the measure passes, it’d create a safe haven for patients across the South.
But Amendment 4 also needs to win 60 percent of the vote, a steep requirement compared to the simple majority that nine other pro-choice measures need to be successful in other states. While a majority of Floridians support the amendment, recent surveys show anywhere from three-quarters of voters to slightly below that 60 percent threshold backing it. “It is our job to make sure that we don’t get complacent,” campaign manager Lauren Brenzel tells me, “and that we continue to educate people about this ban and the fact that they can end it.”
The impact of Florida’s current abortion restrictions can’t be overstated. The state implemented a 15-week abortion ban in July 2022 and still saw more than 84,000 abortions in the following year, with around 11 percent of patients coming from out of state. Then the six-week ban kicked in in May. “It’s nearly impossible for us to see patients who just found out that they were pregnant,” says Kelly Flynn, president and CEO of A Woman’s Choice, which has a clinic in Jacksonville with sister locations in North Carolina and Virginia. “We’ve had patients that have traveled from Florida on a Greyhound bus to North Carolina just to get their consent visit, go back to Florida to take care of their children, wait for three days, and then get back on that bus to North Carolina for their abortion.” In a recent report, providers told Physicians for Human Rights that confusion around the ban’s exceptions has led to life-threatening delays in care. Several Floridians have also spoken out publicly about being denied emergency abortion care, nearly dying as a result in some cases.
And yet, many voters across the state have no idea this is happening, canvassers tell me. I meet a different Amy — Amy Weintraub, reproductive-rights program director at the nonprofit Progress Florida — in a park in liberal-leaning St. Petersburg, where she and 20 other volunteers load up on orange slices and bottles of water before pairing off to door-knock. “Before I started canvassing, I would’ve said yes, people know” about the state’s near-total ban and the efforts to repeal it, she says. But now, “I know the answer is no.”
The political veteran is flying solo this morning and has a list of 31 houses to hit. She leaves brochures on the doorstep of those voters who aren’t home and recites a short, friendly message for those who’ve installed a Ring camera outside. An older woman answers the door at one home and listens to Weintraub’s pitch. “I was going to look that up,” the woman says of Amendment 4. “Sometimes it goes like, you have to vote ‘no’ to vote ‘yes.’” She seemed to be referencing previous anti-abortion ballot measures in Kansas and Kentucky, where a “no” vote in the 2022 midterms meant protecting abortion rights. That’s not the case this year in Florida. “If you are for reproductive freedom, for abortion rights, then vote yes on 4,” Weintraub clarifies.
Republican governor Ron DeSantis and anti-abortion advocates who forcefully oppose the amendment have sown some of the confusion around it. Since the state failed to stop the measure from getting on the ballot, Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration has been running a taxpayer-funded “misinformation” campaign, the ACLU alleges in a lawsuit filed earlier this month. The state agency has a page on its website and is running TV and radio ads claiming that Amendment 4 “threatens women’s safety.” Opponents have also spread misinformation around how the amendment would impact parental rights and how long into pregnancy people would be able to get an abortion. On top of that, the DeSantis administration has been deploying police to the homes of voters who signed a petition to get the measure on the ballot, claiming that the visits are part of a state investigation into alleged voting fraud — even though the deadline to challenge the signature-collection process passed months ago.
“The purpose of these types of tactics are to send a chill through our community,” says Alex Berrios, co-founder of the organizing group Mi Vecino Florida. “It’s an attack on our ability to participate in elections.”
Latino voters make up about 20 percent of the state’s electorate, and Mi Vecino is focusing on meeting face-to-face with them in Central Florida. Devon Murphy-Anderson, the group’s other co-founder, tells me it usually takes her team several conversations to persuade these voters to come through for Amendment 4 “because of the hyperpartisan nature of our politics now, and because they felt that so many things have not changed for them over the course of so many different administrations, both on a state and a federal level.” Given the lower voter turnout first in the 2022 midterms and then in Florida’s primary elections this year, Mi Vecino worries that the Latino community isn’t engaged enough. “We are not on track to have Amendment 4 pass. We feel very strongly about that,” she says. “We see our lane as connecting people being supportive of Amendment 4 to an actual vote for Amendment 4. Even if they don’t vote top-of-the-ticket, even if they don’t feel like politics impacts them and their vote doesn’t matter, at least on this issue we get a ‘yes’ bubble from them. That’s our greatest mountain to climb right now.”
Of course, Florida Democrats do hope that the ballot measure will help boost their candidates. I meet congressional candidate Whitney Fox on a Sunday afternoon as she knocks on doors in a more conservative neighborhood of St. Petersburg. The mom of two is challenging Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a far-right lawmaker who used to call herself a “pro-life extremist” and does not support abortion-ban exceptions for rape or incest but has yet to weigh in on Amendment 4. Fox has heard stories from people in her district who needed an emergency abortion or had trouble accessing other reproductive health care because doctors are leaving the state. “One gentleman I spoke to said that his daughter was pregnant with his first grandchild. He was so excited,” she says. “But he has asked her to go stay with family in Massachusetts because he doesn’t feel comfortable or safe with her being pregnant in Florida.”
The race between Luna and Fox is one of the few competitive congressional contests in the state, and because Democrats make up just a third of registered voters in Pinellas County, Fox needs to secure Republican and independent support in order to win. These voters have supported abortion-rights initiatives in other states without crossing party lines: In Kentucky, for example, voters defeated an anti-choice measure while reelecting anti-abortion senator Rand Paul. Perhaps that’s why, in the handful of chats Fox had with voters in the hour we spent together, abortion access did not come up at all. But she still believes the swing district is filled with pragmatic voters who are tired of their elected officials’ extreme policies and could be open to supporting both her and Amendment 4. “The message we’re trying to get across to voters is that you can be pro-life, and still believe that other people can make those decisions without government interference,” she says.
What Yes on 4 needs to clinch those voters is more money. “Our state is big,” Brenzel, the campaign manager, says. “We are communicating with a large number of voters, and that’s expensive.” As of last month, the campaign had the goal of raising an eye-popping $98.5 million, tens of millions of dollars more than the Ohio and Michigan abortion-rights ballot fights each cost. The coalition is currently blanketing the state in bilingual ads, mailers, and online campaigns, but as Aaron Bos-Lun of Men 4 Choice puts it, “This campaign is not gonna be one we win based on sick burns on social media. It’s going to be based on the sweat we put into direct voter contact.”
During the weekend I tag along with canvassers, the campaign knocks on 10,000 doors and makes 10,000 calls. Yes on 4 has no margin for error given the 60 percent threshold to pass the amendment, so every interaction counts. A canvasser can move someone from a maybe to a soft yes to an “I’m absolutely showing up on Election Day” in the span of a few minutes of conversation. “Typically, if you’re working for a candidate and you ask, ‘Hey, do you have a minute to talk about X candidate?,’ some people will and a lot of people won’t,” Bos-Lun says. “When you say, ‘Are you aware of Florida’s extreme abortion ban?,’ it is pretty overwhelming how many people want to have that conversation.”
Like Bos-Lun, most of the amendment’s supporters that I speak with feel the contest is Yes on 4’s to lose. “My understanding from doing election work is that if you’re polling high with a ‘yes’ vote at this point in the election cycle, you would only go down because of the opposition’s rhetoric,” Weintraub, the St. Petersburg canvasser, tells me. “That’s why knocking these doors is so important. We know that they would support it. Now, will they actually turn out on Election Day?”
Back in Tarpon Springs, Amy and Joseph, drenched in sweat, return to the parking lot where Joseph’s wife, Dana, is waiting with a clipboard to debrief. Dana tells them that fewer volunteers showed up today than expected and that the groups canvassed about half of their target areas to varying degrees of success. Anxiety creeps in as they discuss holding another event in October before early voting starts. “I’m very concerned about the 60 percent, guys,” Amy says. “I really am, because of all the Trump shit that we’ve seen.”
I, too, worry whether the blood and literal sweat the Yes on 4 campaign is putting in will be enough. Florida is shaping up to be the ultimate test of the post-Dobbs maxim that abortion wins elections. The state is infamous for having contests that are decided by a hair, and in the most gutting scenario, Amendment 4 could garner several points more support than successful abortion-rights measures elsewhere and still fall short of its supermajority requirement. Such a defeat would be a gift to anti-abortion advocates, renewing their zeal to raise the threshold required to pass a citizen-initiated ballot initiative in other states. But right now, Joseph isn’t panicking about all that. “You want to piss a woman off, take something away from her. Which is what happened here,” he says. Dana agrees. “We just have to keep pushing along,” she says. “It’s a matter of progress by inches.”
