Abortion Might Be a Winning Issue — Even in Florida

Abortion rights supporters have been on a hot winning streak in state ballot initiatives since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Now here comes Florida.

The Florida Supreme Court issued a pair of decisions earlier this week that upheld a strict abortion ban in the state and also cleared the way for Amendment 4, a November referendum on whether to enshrine the right to abortion in the Florida Constitution.

Anna Hochkammer did much of the heavy lifting to get Amendment 4 on the ballot as executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, but the job is getting only trickier amid the swirl of 2024 politics. Changing the Florida Constitution via referendum requires a 60 percent majority, which means Amendment 4 will need support from a lot of Floridians who would never back Joe Biden.

Still, Hochkammer is optimistic about winning a bipartisan coalition of support after studying the 11 post-Dobbs elections that have centered on abortion rights; she found that a message promoting freedom succeeds.

“Floridians are interested in freedom — personal freedom — and that became one of the North Stars of the entire petition,” she said in this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive.

I sat down with Hochkammer for POLITICO Magazine to discuss the delicate relationship between abortion rights activists and the Biden campaign, why she thinks politicians need to use the “a” word when talking about abortion and whether she would want Donald Trump to endorse Amendment 4 and be an ally for her cause.

This transcript has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Florida's law on constitutional amendments is that they require 60 percent support. If I’m not mistaken, the abortion issue hasn't hit 60 percent in any red state so far. How do you get to 60 percent in Florida? 

You get to 60 percent in Florida by being really focused about who you're talking to, how you’re talking about abortion access and getting people to understand that it's an issue that transcends politics.

You basically have to give people who are independents and Republicans permission to agree with you on this thing, to disagree with their individual candidate or their party, and to split that ticket if that’s what they feel they need to do. Yes, 60 percent can be an intimidating threshold. Florida has passed referenda at the 60 percent threshold over and over again over the last decade.

The Biden campaign this week argued after the Supreme Court's decisions that Florida was suddenly “winnable.” You just said that voters need to split the ticket. Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, doesn’t want people to split the ticket. She wants people to support your amendment and vote for Joe Biden. How does that complicate things?

My election is to pass Amendment 4.

I do not live in a hole in the ground. We’re going to be on the November 2024 ballot in Florida, and all sorts of people and candidates in all kinds of races are looking at this as an opportunity for synergy. But I’m not trying to be naive when I say that more people support abortion access than probably support Santa Claus. It would be a crazy thing in 2024 in Florida to not support Amendment 4.

I don’t look at it as threatening. I look at it as smart people who are reading the room and realizing that 75 percent of Floridians reject the six-week abortion ban. I would never look at any candidate who agrees with me on this issue and say, “Please don't talk about Amendment 4 because you're running in a partisan race.” I say: “The more the merrier.” Just make the tent as big as possible on this particular issue, and let individual candidates and campaigns find their own way.

Would it help your campaign if Donald Trump came out and supported your amendment? 

I hope everyone who supports our amendment comes out and says so on the record, no matter who they are.

We’re in this situation because the Florida Legislature passed a 15-week ban, and then went back a year later and passed a six-week ban. We are just closing up another session of the Florida Legislature. If they had wanted to take this off the table, they could have simply undone it during the legislative session. In fact, Gov. Ron DeSantis could call a special session tomorrow on this issue, repeal the six-week ban, announce they got it wrong and take it off the table if they wanted to. That’s in their power to do.

It seems to me that it would be good for your campaign if Trump came out in favor of Amendment 4.

I want everybody who supports Amendment 4 to come out and say so — whoever you are, whatever your name, whatever your party affiliation, whatever your religious background, if you support Amendment 4, I would hope that people would have the courage to say so and say so on the record.

I’m trying to tease this out of you because the politics are so tricky. This isn’t an easy one for you, right?

I think the politics are really straightforward on this because I'm lucky enough that I’m working on an issue. I’m not working on a campaign, per se. I’m not working for a political party. It’s one of the reasons why the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition has been doing such good work as part of the coalition to get Amendment 4 on the ballot and to get it to pass is that we are a single-issue PAC. We are a bipartisan PAC. We have advisers on board like our former [state] House Rep. Carlos Lacasa, who’s come out very strongly in favor of Amendment 4. He can make very persuasive political arguments from his perspective as a conservative, Cuban, Catholic Republican, former elected official in Florida about why he thinks Amendment 4 is the right thing to do and why he’s going to be voting for it. And keeping my arms wide open has done nothing except help this initiative.

What is the relationship between voters who are enthusiastic about going to the polls and supporting Amendment 4, but who may not like Joe Biden? What does your polling say about this? Is the Biden campaign’s enthusiasm warranted?

It’s really complicated. I would say that there are some elements of the moment here that are unique to November 2024. So it’s hard to draw conclusions about what Florida voters will do and what the voter universe will do inside the ballot box, because this is the first time that we’ve had the confluence of a statewide referendum on an issue in Florida that has coincided with a statewide or nationwide campaign that has chosen to focus on that exact issue. And I think that is probably the thing that makes this situation so hard to get a handle on.

I think abortion access is the most compelling domestic political issue in America right now. Everyone in America is talking about it. I think that through a bunch of different actions at the local, state and national level, the presidential election has become a proxy election about abortion. That is really the thing that makes it different.

I think you’re going to have candidates, whatever their position on abortion, telling their voters, whether they’re in California, New York state, Texas or Florida, “A vote for your presidential candidate is a vote on access to abortion.” It’s either banning abortion at the state level or wanting abortion access protected at a national level. And that’s a pretty stark political choice to give people at the top of the ticket while simultaneously asking them to vote about an abortion amendment at the bottom.

I don’t know whether the bottom is going to push the top, or the top is going to push the bottom, but I certainly think that more people feel positively about access to abortion than they do about any particular political candidate.

Let's talk about the amendment language. There’s an art to writing these things.

Here’s the language: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.” How did you come up with those two sentences?

The first thing I have to acknowledge is that a lot of the heavy lifting was done on writing that language by working groups. Most of them were people that were associated with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU or had worked on other statewide referenda at other times in Florida.

Every state is its own universe when it comes to this sort of thing — what’s the law in the state where we are? What’s the process for getting something on the ballot? What’s the process for getting something to amend the constitution? What’s the legal history of the issue in our state?

Then you have to figure out what you want to say, what you want to do. And then you have to poll it. When you have a disagreement between one noun and another noun, one verb and another verb, you really do have to spend the time and money polling these things to see whether moving a comma or changing an adverb changes what voters perceive of this language. And so you really do have a data-informed process.

We didn’t officially launch this petition drive until June 1. And the first half of 2023 was really spent circling the horses, organizing and figuring out what we wanted to do so that we could avoid some of the problems that other referenda have had across the country. We had the great advantage in Florida of being able to learn from other states.

Tell us about that. What did you learn from the other post-Dobbs referenda? 

I looked at that Wisconsin Supreme Court race that got a ton of national attention and a huge amount of money was put into it. That was basically a proxy election about abortion access in Wisconsin. I think anybody who reads that election differently is choosing not to see what’s right in front of them.

So, I went through these 11 different elections that I considered either direct or proxy elections about abortion, and I tried to look for some common themes. I looked at the data — not only in what their polling told them about their messaging and about the voter universe that they expected, but we were lucky enough to be able to do an autopsy afterward.

My hypothesis about Florida is that as much as we like to underscore, you know, #FloridaMan, all the crazy stories out of Florida, Floridians do tend to follow some national trends. We’re not so far off the median American voter’s point of view that that data isn’t useful to us. One thing that became clear from the get-go was Floridians are interested in freedom — personal freedom — and that became one of the North Stars of the entire petition.

The top takeaway from those 11 campaigns is that abortion access is really popular with Americans. A lot of us had been trained in the political world, even in the reproductive rights and human rights world, to kind of dance around the word “abortion.”

Joe Biden recently did that.

Yeah. For a long time in politics, “reproductive health care” and “women's health care” and “women's rights” sort of became synonymous with access to abortion. I think the evidence shows, at least in the way that voters behave across America, that “abortion” is not a dirty word. And that holds true everywhere — whether it’s Kentucky, Ohio or California. And that holds true in Florida as well.

The other thing we learned is that people find abortion somewhat ethically fraught. The idea that if you support abortion access, you are hardened to the human stories — to the complicated feelings that people have about abortion — does not bear out. And in fact, I would say most Americans acknowledge that abortion is complicated. Not just medical abortion, but elective abortion. The circumstances around each and every one of these abortions can be something that gives people pause. And interestingly, it seems to me that what we need to do in politics around abortion is lean into that by saying, “It is complicated. It is fraught.”

We’re not having a referendum about pap smears. We’re not having a referendum about breast examinations. Nobody goes to a women’s clinic and says, “I need ‘care.’” You walk in, and you ask for something very specific because you need it — and that’s an abortion. And so we need to be able to say the word, and have conversations with voters assuming that they are functional grown-ups. Because when we do that on this issue, we find that time and time again across America, they vote “yes.”

Did it bother you that Joe Biden didn't use the word “abortion” in the State of the Union? 

One part of me says, “Yes, I wish he'd used the word ‘abortion’ in the State of the Union.” And the other part of me, the grown-up, who’s not selfish and is able to see the bigger picture, is amazed that about a minute-and-a-half of the State of the Union was about abortion access. Whatever euphemisms he chose to use, he talked about my issue in ways that I have not heard a president talk about abortion, ever.

You know, the president of the United States is saying the issue that’s my No. 1 priority is a No. 1 priority for him. I can’t complain too much about that, frankly, even if it wasn’t exactly the way I would want it to happen.

Let's go back to the language. Help us understand the two sentences. Why this language?

It’s 49 words. It’s two sentences. It’s plain language. You know, “viability” has been defined under Florida statute since 1979. It’s the Roe standard. So it is the most straightforward way, at least from a Floridian perspective, to talk about abortion access.

And interestingly, it’s also the way that polls the best. People who find themselves in these circumstances with their doctors talk about the issue of viability, which is a very straightforward thing. It’s the point at which you understand that the fetus will survive outside the womb without extraordinary medical intervention. And that is a fungible place. It depends on what’s wrong with the fetus, what’s wrong with a woman, and what sort of medical care is available.

The opponents like to underscore that is a weakness in the issue. I actually think it’s a strength. I think it’s all the more reason why it’s a decision that should be made by a doctor, made by a medical team, made by a patient and her family with their health care provider and not arbitrarily defined somewhere far, far away by people who don’t understand the context of any particular situation or case.

So the first part of the sentence is about viability. And then the second part of the sentence is to protect the patient's health as determined by a health care provider. 

Correct. And the second sentence is a very straightforward sentence. Under the Florida standard, a constitutional amendment has to be single-subject. There is language in the Florida Constitution that grants the authority to the Legislature to require parental notification before a minor receives abortion services. And so we included that second line to make sure that it was clear to the Florida Supreme Court and to voters that this was a single issue, and it didn’t affect that authority.

Ironically, it also makes it poll better, because it makes it very clear to people that we’re not asking them to throw up their hands and give up any sort of parental oversight over the lives of their children, and people in their families. And it’s a fabulous thing to be able to tell people so clearly what we want for them in such a succinct language.

I want to ask you about the opponents and what they are seizing on in the language. The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops is making two arguments. First, that abortions would be allowed at a point when a fetus can feel pain. And second, that it would legalize full-term abortions. How do you respond to that? 

There’s a lot of misinformation that we’re going to have to make sure that people understand. And once people understand the biology and the sociology behind pregnancy and childbirth, most people end up supporting our amendment. I don’t want to go too far down the gynecological-obstetric route here. But I can say that those are not concerns that we have. We don’t think that there’s science to support those positions.

And then the abortion “up to birth” thing is really just a misrepresentation of exactly what happens during pregnancy and childbirth. Third trimester abortions are just exceedingly rare. They’re well under 1 percent of abortions that are conducted in this country. They are always the result of truly tragic circumstances. So the only response I can have to anybody faced with the issue of a possible third trimester termination is that we all need to mind our businesses and have tremendous compassion for those people because they are dealing with an outrageous human tragedy, and they should have the privacy to do so with their medical team and their family and their faith leader. And I hope it never happens to me or anyone that I love.

Explain the other decision that the Florida Supreme Court issued on Monday, and what that means on a practical level for people in Florida.

So, interestingly, the same day that they published the ruling on our abortion access referendum, the Florida Supreme Court published its ruling on the constitutionality of the 15-week abortion ban that was passed by the Florida Legislature about 18 months ago. It does not include any exceptions for rape or incest. It was challenged immediately on the grounds that it violates the state of Florida’s right to privacy.

Not content with the 15-week abortion ban, the Florida Legislature reconvened for the following session, and passed a six-week abortion ban. Now, a six-week abortion ban is, for all intents and purposes, a total abortion ban. The vast majority of women have no idea that they’re even pregnant at six weeks. And so in the middle of this statewide referendum, we are given the opportunity to paint a pretty clear political picture about what the choice is. The choice is either total abortion ban or access to abortion before viability and when necessary to protect the patient’s health. And I think it’s a winner for us.

It’s a human tragedy. I would imagine over the next eight to 10 months, we’re going to start hearing horror stories like those we've been hearing out of Tennessee and out of Texas, where they have similarly banned abortion at these very, very early stages. And you’re going to hear stories of people bleeding out on the bathroom floors. You’re going to hear stories of women having to flee the state in order to get medical care.

I have no particular desire to see the women of Florida suffer from these barbaric circumstances. But I do have to acknowledge that it does help my movement show people in no uncertain terms exactly what the options are in front of them. It is a tremendous political opportunity on top of a horrifying human crisis.

When the six-week ban kicks in, what will the availability of medical abortions be in Florida?

That’s still very to-be-determined. Of course, we have this entire group out there now that wants to revive the Comstock Act back from 1873 and make the mailing of anything it considers “pornographic” — which, traditionally, includes birth control — illegal. The six-week abortion ban contains language in it that is somewhat vague, but does make anybody who facilitates an abortion an accessory to a crime.

So the question then becomes, who’s facilitating? How are they facilitating? What counts as facilitating? One of the consistent strategies that I’m seeing come out of this very extreme Florida branch of politics is writing these laws in ways that are quite broad and quite vague in order to intimidate people into not acting. Of course health care providers don’t want to be arrested for serving their patients; husbands don’t want to be arrested for driving their wives to a clinic or to a doctor’s appointment; and anybody who really cares about not ending up inside a courtroom and being accused of a terrible crime while providing healthcare to somebody is, I think, necessarily going to be stumped here. They want to make it as confusing, as frightening and as intimidating as possible.

I think it’s entirely likely that we’re going to see people arrested, we’re going to see people accused of and defending themselves for simply helping their family members.

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