Summary
Florida voters narrowly defeated an abortion-rights ballot initiative on Tuesday, preserving the state’s six-week abortion ban.
The measure’s defeat is a significant victory for Gov. Ron DeSantis ®, whose administration actively opposed the amendment through legal challenges, public agency ads, and investigations. The measure required a 60% supermajority to pass—the highest threshold in the U.S.—and would have protected abortion rights up to 24 weeks.
Florida is now the first state to reject an abortion rights amendment since Roe v. Wade was overturned, limiting abortion access across the Southern U.S.
Florida is a solidly red state in which Trump is winning by a 13 point margin with most of the votes counted. The amendment has 57% to Trump’s 56.2% at the time of this comment.
Some states require a simple majority, but Florida’s ballot measures require 60%.
Gotta love those Pro-Choice/Trump votes.
That’s what people don’t understand. Pro-choice isn’t a single-issue vote whereas pro-life is. That’s why the GOP embraces the pro-lofe movement. They don’t give the slightest damn about “unborn children” - they just want those sweet, sweet, guaranteed voters.
An abortion-rights centered campaign is general election poison because the pro-lofe voters will all vote against it, and the pro-choice voters aren’t single-issue voters.
Look at it this way: if Trump were pro-choice and Harris were pro-life, but the candidates were otherwise unchanged, how many leftists would flip their vote to Trump? Because millions of pro-life voters would flip.
And this is made even worse when abortion is also its own separate item on the ballot, completely negating any sliver of advantage that could possibly be gained by a candidate by making abortion a central issue, since any right-leaning pro-choice voter can have it both ways.