TAMPA, Fla. – TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday blamed Donald Trump for Florida’s abortion ban and other restrictions across the country that endanger access to care for pregnant women, arguing that Trump has created a “crisis health care for women across this country.”
Biden’s campaign events at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa put the president at the epicenter of the latest battle over abortion restrictions. The state’s six-week abortion ban is set to take effect May 1, just as Florida voters prepare for a ballot measure that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution.
Biden said millions of women face “pain and cruelty.” “But it’s not inevitable.
The president is looking to capitalize on the unrelenting momentum against abortion restrictions across the country, not only to boost his re-election bid in the swing states he won in 2020, but also to go on the offensive against Trump in the states that the presumptive Republican nominee won four years ago. One of those states is Florida, where Biden lost to Trump by 3.3 percentage points.
On Tuesday, he chronicled women’s growing medical concerns in the two years since the Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections.
“There was one person who was responsible for this nightmare,” Biden said. “And he recognized that and brags about it – Donald Trump.”
Biden said Trump, who has been publicly outspoken about his views on abortion and has lately said that abortion is an issue for states to decide, is concerned that voters will now hold him accountable.
“Folks, the bad news for Trump is we’re going to hold him accountable,” Biden said.
At the same time, advocates on the ground say support for abortion access cuts across all parties. They aim to make the issue as nonpartisan as possible while working to gain at least 60% voter support for the ballot initiative.
This could mean that, in some cases, Florida voters would split their tickets, supporting the Republican candidates while supporting the abortion measure.
“I think normal people are aware that a candidate campaign is really different than a ballot initiative,” said Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, which gathered signatures to put the abortion issue in front of voters. “You can vote for your preferred candidate from any political party and still not agree with them on every issue.”
Brenzel continued: “This gives voters the opportunity to make their message heard on a political platform.”
The same day, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the ballot measure could go before voters, but also upheld the state’s 15-week abortion ban. This subsequently paved the way for the new ban on the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, which often occurs before women know they are pregnant, to come into effect next week.
Organizers of the abortion vote say they collected nearly 1.5 million signatures to present the issue to voters, though the state stopped short of counting just under a million. Approximately 891,500 signatures were required. Of the total number of signatures, about 35% were from registered Republican voters or those not affiliated with any party, organizers said.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat, said that if the abortion ballot initiative is considered a partisan effort, “it will only make it harder to reach 60%.” Eskamani, who worked at Planned Parenthood before running for political office, said she is encouraging the Biden administration to focus largely on the impact of a six-week ban and to let the ballot measure speak for itself.
“Ultimately, the ballot initiative will be a multimillion-dollar campaign that stands strong on its own,” Eskamani said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to the question of whether the former president, a Florida voter, would oppose or support the ballot measure. In an interview with NBC last September, Trump called Florida’s six-week ban “terrible.” But he repeatedly highlighted the three conservative-leaning justices he chose for the high court who paved the way to overturn Roe.
Republicans have rejected Biden’s campaign and the Democratic Party’s broader efforts to use abortion as a political cudgel, arguing that other issues will be more important to voters in November.
“Biden may have forgotten that thousands of Americans have fled extremist Democratic policies for prosperous, pro-life states like Florida,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley.
Still, Trump and other Republicans are aware that voter backlash against increased restrictions could be a serious problem this fall.
Abortion rights advocates have won every time the issue has come before voters, including in solidly conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio. Last month, a Democrat in a suburban state district in Alabama wrested the seat from Republican control by campaigning for abortion rights, weeks after in vitro fertilization services were suspended in the state.
Nikki Fried, chair of the state Democratic Party, said Florida will be a competitive state at the presidential level “because of the extremism that has emerged from Florida.” No Democrat has won the state at the presidential level since 2012, but state party officials have found some glimmers of political change in much smaller races, like the open race for Jacksonville mayor last May, which saw a Democrat win in what was once a solidly republican country. city.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said at a news conference before the visit that the abortion amendment was written in a way to deliberately mislead voters, an argument the state Supreme Court disagreed with when it approved the ballot language. .
“All I can say is that Floridians are not buying what Joe Biden is selling and in November we will play a key role in sending him back to Delaware where he belongs,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.
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