Florida’s ballot initiative to protect abortion is winning and has more support among voters than either Vice President Kamala Harris or Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a new poll shows.
According to the poll from University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab (PORL), 69 percent of respondents said they would vote for Amendment 4, which would prohibit laws from restricting or banning abortion until fetal viability.
Constitutional amendments in Florida need 60 percent of the votes to become law.
“We have yet to see campaigns on either side of this really get moving,” PORL faculty director and political science professor Michael Binder said in a statement. “Factor in the highly contested and contentious financial impact statement recently added to the ballot summary, and I would expect to see support for this amendment drop before November.”
The amendment has faced headwinds from state officials, even after Florida’s Supreme Court greenlit it for the ballot in May. Most recently, amendment backers Floridians Protecting Freedom challenged what they said was a politically biased financial impact statement. The state Supreme Court has scheduled expedited hearings in the challenge.
The poll also showed an amendment to legalize recreational cannabis has enough support to pass, with 64 percent of respondents supporting it.
The poll of 774 Floridians who said that they were either definitely or probably voting in the coming election was conducted between July 24 and July 27. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.6 percentage points.
If the presidential election were held today, 49 percent of respondents said they would vote for former President Donald Trump, while 42 percent said Vice President Kamala Harris.
Four percent said they would vote for another candidate, and six percent were either undecided or refused to answer.
The survey is the first in Florida to compare Trump to Harris, the new presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Respondents were also asked about the Senate race between incumbent Sen. Rick Scott (R) and former Rep. Mucarsel-Powell (D). The poll showed 47 percent said they would vote for Scott, and 43 percent said they’d support Mucarsel-Powell.
“What’s really interesting is that Trump has a couple point bigger lead than Rick Scott, who’s only up by four – just inside the margin of error of this poll,” said Binder. “Scott has a history of winning razor-thin statewide races in Florida, and in a state that has become significantly more red in the past six years, this could be another close race for Scott.”
The polling differences between candidates and the amendments shows why abortion supporters have been trying to keep the issue separate from party politics out of fear it will sink their effort.
Among backers of the abortion amendment, 53 percent identified as Republican, and 51 percent said they voted for Trump in 2020. There are almost 900,000 more registered Republican voters in Florida than Democrats.
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