As she stood in the parking lot of an auto supply store on Friday evening, Brittany Robinson was practically vibrating. With just a few days left before the 2024 presidential elections, the 32-year-old Floridian needed an outlet for her anxiety.
So Robinson decided to go knock on strangers’ doors in support of Amendment 4, a ballot measure that, if passed, would enshrine abortion rights into Florida’s constitution and overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban.
“I wish I started earlier,” said Robinson, a native of the Tampa Bay area who had never before canvassed for a political campaign. Living under Florida’s ban, she said, is “terrifying”. When she was a freshman in college 13 years ago, Robinson discovered she was seven weeks pregnant and had an abortion a week later.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do that now,” Robinson said.
Come Tuesday, Florida will be one of 10 states where voters will have the chance to amend their state constitution to add or expand abortion rights. Of all those measures, the battle in Florida may be the most intense – and the most uphill for supporters of abortion rights.
Florida has taken a sharp turn towards the right in recent years, and its hardline conservative government has effectively launched a war against the Amendment 4 campaign.
Amendment 4 needs to garner 60% of the vote to pass. Although abortion rights advocates have won every post-Roe v Wade abortion ballot measure in the US, none have hit that threshold.
“I am extremely confident that the people of Florida want Amendment 4 to be passed,” said Laura Shaw, a 21-year-old working on the campaign. “However, I am also all too aware of the steps that the Florida government is taking to suppress those ideas.”
In the last days before the election, nothing seemed certain.
“I don’t know what to think,” said Sanderlyne St Cyr, a 20-year-old who voted early for Amendment 4. “I’m just going to sit back and observe and let Jesus take the wheel.”
Over the last several weeks, Florida law enforcement has investigated people who signed a petition to get the measure on the ballot, while the health department sent cease-and-desist letters to local TV stations that aired an ad supporting it. (Abortion rights activists sued and won.) Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has also claimed that Amendment 4 would eliminate a law that requires Florida minors to obtain parental consent before getting an abortion – a claim legal experts say is overblown.
While canvassing, Makenzie Martin, a 23-year-old organizer with the campaign for Amendment 4, has run into people who wrongly believe that the measure – which would protect the right to abortion until viability, or about 24 weeks – would allow abortions into the ninth month of pregnancy.
One woman, Martin said, thought abortion rights activists wanted to allow doctors to perform abortions after birth – a wildly inaccurate talking point that Donald Trump has raised repeatedly in presidential debates. (That would be murder and it is already illegal.)
There are now more than 1 million more registered Republicans in Florida than Democrats, which means that in order to pass, the nonpartisan campaign for Amendment 4 will probably need to secure the votes of a sizable swath of Trump supporters.
One recent poll found that 58% of Florida voters supported Amendment 4, while 34% opposed it. Six per cent were undecided.
Instructions handed out to canvassers advise them not to respond to any comments about candidates and to emphasize how the amendment would “kick ALL POLITICIANS, regardless of their party affiliation, out of private medical decisions”.
The instructions also suggest that canvassers ignore public polls and claim that most of them have been surveying people “in ways that are highly misleading”.
As she knocked on doors in one Tampa neighborhood on Friday evening, Martin had little luck getting voters to answer. Although one woman heartily agreed with Amendment 4 – “You never know what a woman is going through!” she shouted from her yard at Martin, adding: “She could have gotten raped!” – Martin more often ended up just tucking purplish brochures about the measure into houses’ chain-link fences.
Robinson, too, largely struck out. However, she was delighted to encounter a teenage girl at one house, who, Robinson said, excitedly endorsed Amendment 4.
Shaw had better luck earlier in the day, when she and other organizers set up a blue tent near an early voting site on the University of Southern Florida, Tampa, campus, where they handed out Amendment 4 merchandise and neon-colored boxes of emergency contraception. Several of the dozens of people who stopped by already knew about and supported Amendment 4. When Shaw tried to walk one woman through her pitch, the woman cut her off: “This is to end the abortion ban, right?” She then unfurled a sample ballot; all she wanted was for Shaw to tell her how to vote yes.
“I’m a nurse, so I worry about my patients’ rights too. My biggest thing with all my patients is: ‘It’s your body, it’s your choice,’” said Lauren, who asked that her last name not be published due to her conservative workplace.
She’s trying not to think about election day or what its outcome may be. “Honestly, I have no idea,” she said. “I try not to get my hopes up.”
