Abortion rights activists worry about Democrats piggybacking on the cause: ‘This is not a ploy’

Amy knows that a lot of people hate every candidate on the ballot this November.

As a nurse who has 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 feel so disillusioned about partisan politics that they don’t want to vote at all in the 2024 elections. She gets it: the mere thought of the last few 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 outlawed abortion past 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.”

Related: ‘This is life and death’: inside a Florida clinic after the six-week abortion ban

Come November, Florida will be one of roughly a dozen states anticipated to hold a ballot measure asking voters to decide whether abortion rights should be protected or decimated. Florida’s ballot measure, however, may have higher stakes than any other in the country: if voters don’t support the measure to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution, they will be left with a six-week ban – which prohibits abortion before many people even know they are pregnant.

Abortion rights supporters have won every ballot measure since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade two years ago, and outrage over Roe’s demise is believed to have cost the Republicans a much-heralded “red wave” in the 2022 elections. Those successes have convinced Democrats that abortion is their silver bullet in the 2024 elections, particularly since Joe Biden consistently trails Donald Trump in polling and is at risk of losing the youth vote over the war in Gaza. Democrats across the country are now regularly blasting Republicans for their complicity in abortion bans.

But Democrats’ spotlight on abortion rights has also pushed the organizers of the nonpartisan campaign behind the Florida ballot initiative into an awkward position. They need 60% of the vote to win – and with almost a million more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida, as well as more than 3 million independents, organizers can’t afford to appear too cozy with Democrats, especially at a time of unparalleled political discord.

“I understand the knee-jerk reaction, because it was a Republican governor that signed the six-week ban. It was a Republican-majority house and senate that created the bill itself,” said Trenece Robertson, a Florida reproductive justice activist who helped collect signatures to get the measure on the ballot. “But also, we need to do our best to make sure we as a state are unified and that we do not alienate anyone at this point, because we need as many votes as we can get.”

An April poll by Emerson College found that 42% of Florida voters plan to vote for the ballot measure. Fifty-six per cent of Democrats and 44% of independents plan to vote for it, while just 30% of Republicans said the same.

‘The Democrats are cynically using these initiatives’

Despite their party’s long-standing support for abortion rights, the Democrats in Congress and the White House largely spent the Roe era sidestepping the issue. Biden, a Catholic, once declared that he was not “big on abortion”; reproductive justice advocates famously tracked what seemed like an inability to even say the word “abortion”.

Now that anger over Roe’s demise has proved to be an electoral weapon, the president has begun to talk more openly about abortion. His campaign has pumped out multiple ads about the consequences of banning the procedure, while Kamala Harris is on a nationwide tour focused on the issue. In a speech in Jacksonville, Florida, last week, the vice-president brought up abortion-related ballot measures.

“Momentum is on our side. Just think about it. Since Roe was overturned, every time reproductive freedom has been on the ballot, the people of America voted for freedom,” Harris told the crowd. “From Kansas to California to Kentucky, in Michigan, Montana, Vermont, and Ohio, the people of America voted for freedom – and not by little but often by overwhelming margins, proving also that this is not a partisan issue – it’s not a partisan issue – and proving that the voice of the people has been heard and will be heard.”

Yet even as Harris insisted that abortion rights are a nonpartisan issue, she also referred to state-level abortion bans as “Trump abortion bans” five times.

“Of course they’re trying to use the process. The Democrats are cynically using these initiatives to try to turn people out,” said the Arizona State University political sociologist Benjamin Case, who studies ballot measures. “They’re hoping that will be a boon to Biden, because those people might be more likely to vote for Biden.”

As part of his research, Case interviewed professional political operatives after Arizona’s state supreme court ruled a 1864 abortion ban could be enforced. Their main response, according to Case: “Oh, this is really great. Biden will win Arizona because it will piss people off.”

That sense of glee, however, contrasts sharply with the real-world consequences of abortion bans. “That sentiment predominates among the professional political class,” Case said. “Among organizers in Arizona, it was a lot different, for obvious reasons.”

Arizona’s state legislature, which has a razor-thin Republican majority, has since moved to repeal that ban, and abortion is currently legal in the state until 15 weeks of pregnancy. Arizona is likely to hold an initiative in November to protect abortion until fetal viability.

Julie Cantillo, a volunteer coordinator with the Gainesville Radical Reproductive Rights! Network, which helped gather signatures for the Florida ballot initiative, said that national Democrats’ talk of using ballot measures to bring out voters leaves her “scared”.

“It makes it gimmicky. Also, it doesn’t acknowledge that real people’s lives are at stake here,” Cantillo said. “This is about everyone having access to their human rights and healthcare. I don’t want to minimize it by saying this is a ploy to turn people out. That’s not why so many Floridians have been putting so much effort into this.”

Abortion-related ballot measures have never been put to the test in a presidential campaign. And despite Democrats’ hopes for boosted turnout, it is not clear that support for abortion rights, which are broadly popular, will translate to support for Biden or any other Democratic candidate. Whenever voters are asked to decide big ballot measures, votes on the measure often outnumber votes for candidates, indicating that people are showing up only to vote on the measure, according to Case.

Ultimately, if voters are resorting to a ballot measure, Case said, it’s an indictment of elected politicians’ failure to do their job.

“If they were really governing in the popular interest and there’s some policy that 65% of people want and they haven’t passed it yet,” he said, “that should raise questions about why not.”