The hurricane split pine trees like toothpicks. It chewed up chain link fences and laid highway billboards flat on their faces. It peeled the roof off Tropicana Field, where the Tampa Bay Rays play, and uncorked dozens of tornadoes, including one that ripped through a retirement community in St. Lucie County, Florida, killing six.
By the time Milton was finally over the Atlantic, it had left some $50 billion worth of damage behind, at least 24 dead, and one-third of the state’s gas stations empty.
But in a state where residents have become inured to the existential threat under which they live, Milton was, in the words of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, “not the worst-case scenario.”
I visited Florida in October, after the hurricane — and in the midst of an accelerating climate crisis and reproductive health crisis both of which DeSantis doesn’t just refuse to acknowledge, but seems intent on actively making even worse.
DeSantis has barred local governments from implementing heat protections for laborers, and signed into law a bill that strikes all mentions of “climate change” from state law. The policy was adapted from one pioneered by his predecessor, Rick Scott, who banned the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” from state correspondence. DeSantis has separately worked to discourage financial firms from factoring environmental risks into their investment decisions.
Asked, shortly after Milton, if he would attribute the storm — the second most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico — to “climate change,” DeSantis said bluntly: “I don’t subscribe to your religion.” It was an interesting way to put it, as DeSantis appears hell-bent on imposing his religion, as it relates to abortion, on Floridians.
This November, two of the most consequential races for reproductive freedom in the country are taking place in Florida. The first is Amendment 4, the popular initiative that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution, and the second is a key Senate race.
Abortion has never lost when it has appeared on the ballot since the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion in 2022 — even in staunch Republican strongholds like Kansas, Ohio, and Kentucky. But this November, there’s a real possibility that Florida puts that winning streak to an end. And if Amendment 4 loses, it won’t just be the roughly 4 million women of reproductive age who live there who lose, but millions of other women across the South who lose too.
Passing Amendment 4 is a tall order. For one thing, the threshold to amend Florida’s constitution is extraordinarily high: Ballot measures require the support of 60 percent of the electorate, the highest bar for any abortion-related measure to go before voters so far. For another, DeSantis — the man who signed back-to-back abortion bans into law here — has thrown the full force of the state government behind coordinated efforts to tank the measure.
On the same ballot this November is a Senate race that will be critical for Democrats to clinch in order for the party to have any hope of making good on their promise to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade at the federal level any time soon. That race looks even tougher to win, even though it shouldn’t be.
The Democratic candidate, former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, is challenging sitting Sen. Rick Scott, the state’s deeply and uniquely unpopular former governor. And even though Scott doesn’t appear to be putting in much effort to win this election, he has managed to maintain relatively consistent lead in polls — anywhere between 4 and 10 points — according to tracking by 538.
How is it possible that Florida — a state whose voters hold some of the most supportive views of abortion in the country, and a state that, historically, provided more abortions than almost any other (just behind California, New York, and Illinois) — could end up in this position?
“There is a combination of a [fatalistic] mindset in Florida that has squashed out hope, and a difference in infrastructure: You have 30 years of Republicans investing very heavily in sophisticated infrastructure in Florida, and in on the Democratic side, it’s atrophied in the last 20, with the exception of the Obama campaigns,” says Aaron Bos-Lun, deputy executive director for the national group Men4Choice, which is organizing and mobilizing its members in support in both Amendment 4 and Mucarsel-Powell’s Senate campaign.
“I think that the real question here — and it’s an interesting test for democracy — is: Can political operations funded by large amounts of money, that create a sense of inevitability, defeat someone like Debbie [Mucarsel-Powell], whose views are more in line with the people’s? Can that defeat something like Amendment 4 that is overwhelmingly supported by the people?”
“It’s not a question if people want this amendment. People want this amendment,” Bos-Lun says. “It’s a question of whether the tricks and the lies and the use of the infrastructure they built, both within the state [government] and their campaign activity, is going to be enough to drown out the will of the people.”
THE HEIGHT OF HURRICANE SEASON has always coincided with the height of campaign season in Florida, but as stronger hurricanes have become more frequent in the state, they’ve become an unavoidable feature of the political landscape. On a practical level, a major hurricane means door-to-door canvassing operations are suspended for an unknown period of time, organizers end up with fewer days to register voters, and there’s the reality that, as people return to their homes, their thoughts are consumed by clearing debris, filing insurance claims, and not — in most cases — the political campaigns competing for their attention.
Instead, campaigns are, increasingly, folding relief efforts into their broader strategy. On a Tuesday in mid-October the week after Milton, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s schedule included a stop at the Democratic Party of Pinellas, a small office packed with stacks of diapers, boxes of mini flashlights, disposable plates, plastic forks and knives, and other disaster relief supplies. She’s here for a conversation about climate change and how it is worsening Florida’s looming insurance crisis, which began when her opponent, Rick Scott, was governor. After this she’s dropping supplies off at another Democratic campaign office, before heading to Tropicana Field to give out meals to Floridians affected by the storm.
Mucarsel-Powell was born in Ecuador, and moved to the United States as a child. She worked her way through high school and college, eventually rising to become the first South American immigrant elected to Congress — a hopeful story in a state with 5 million immigrants, including 3 million from Latin America. A native Spanish speaker, Mucarsel-Powell represented the Miami area for two terms in the House before she was tossed from office in 2022 by the red wave that washed across Florida, even as voters furious over the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision kept Democrats in power most everywhere else. (The midterm races were expected to wipe out Democrats across the country, but instead they kept the Senate, and only narrowly lost the House.)
But even more compelling than Mucarsel-Powell’s personal story is what her potential victory would represent: the possibility of a Democratic majority in the Senate big enough to finally codify federal protections for abortion. Hers is one of three Hail Mary races — along with Texas and Montana — that national Democrats are shoveling money into in the last stretch of the 2024 election, in hopes of maintaining their fragile grip on the Senate majority as obstructionists like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin retire.
Like Colin Allred, her counterpart in Texas, Mucarsel-Powell is running against a deeply disliked Republican who lacks support even from members of his own party.
Rick Scott is widely despised in Florida: A recent survey found 49 percent of Floridians hold a negative view of him, with a scant 35 percent viewing him favorably. Among independents his rating is even worse — 58 percent disapproval to just 28 percent approval. Even Republicans are lukewarm: 59 percent of them approve of Scott’s record, while a quarter disapprove. There isn’t anywhere in the state — including Florida’s conservative panhandle — that Scott’s approval rating isn’t underwater, but it is worst in South Florida, where, the survey says, his approval rating is -26 points.
None of this should be surprising to those who know much about Scott, a former top executive at a hospital chain found liable for what was then the largest Medicare fraud case in history. The $300 million golden parachute he accepted on his way out helped Scott to purchase his first public office: He ran for governor in the Tea Party wave, spending $150 million of his own money and railing against the Affordable Care Act. As governor, he signed legislation that hastened the state’s current property insurance crisis, lowering coverage and increasing rates for private property insurance companies while working to move Floridians off the state’s public property insurance program.
Scott appears confident in his position this year. Unlike his previous races, he has barely spent any money on this year’s campaign: Scott spent $64 million to dispatch Bill Nelson in 2014. This year he’s spent just $24.5 million. He’s not getting outside help either: Both the Senate Leadership Fund, Mitch McConnell’s elections piggy bank, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the fund overseen by Sen. Steve Daines (a member of McConnell’s leadership team), have stayed on the sidelines. In fact, Republicans and their allies have spent the least amount on Florida of any Senate race this cycle — just $10 million, compared to say $148 in Ohio — even though, on paper, it should represent one of the most competitive matchups.
As unpopular as he is in Florida, Scott keeps getting reelected. The problem is that the Democratic Party has all but imploded in the once-competitive state. Once upon a time, Florida was a state split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats famously lost the presidential election in Florida by hundreds of votes in 2000, after the Supreme Court stopped the recount, but even as recently as 2018, the state was still evenly matched. That’s the year DeSantis defeated Andrew Gillum by half a percentage point, or less than 33,000 votes.
“When you lose by 30,000 votes, you can pick any data point and be like: If only we had done better with left-handed, red-headed college professors, we would have won the election. But, really, we lost the election in South Florida,” says Joshua Karp, Gillum’s deputy campaign manager that year. “Turnout in Broward County and Miami-Dade was shitty in 2018.”
Since then, however, the longtime swing state has shifted dramatically to the right. After winning by a narrow margin, DeSantis transformed the state into a grievance-fueled laboratory for Republicans’ regressive agenda. New residents who moved to South Florida during the Covid pandemic — enticed, in part by DeSantis’ rejection of mask and vaccine mandates — seem to have helped chip away at Democrats’ margins in their former strongholds.
Part of the logic behind Mucarsel-Powell’s candidacy is that she is well-positioned to help shore up support in the beleaguered stronghold. “Florida Democrats have needed to focus more on Miami-Dade and with Debbie, we have a nominee who can do it right. All of her ads are in English and in Spanish… We’ve never tried this: having a candidate from Miami.”
Karp sees signs of hope in the facts that Scott has never won a race by more than 1 percent of the vote, and he’s never run in a year with a high-turnout presidential election. And, of course, there’s the fact that Mucarsel-Powell’s race is taking place amid another, expertly-organized and well-funded campaign working to turn out an army of pro-choice voters: Organizers behind Amendment 4 will be spending $100 million dollars in their effort to get 60 percent of voters to the polls. If they can do that, it could be good news for Mucarsel-Powell, who only needs a plurality of votes to beat Scott.
FLORIDIANS WHO HAVE SURVIVED under the increasing threat of hurricanes, as well as rising sea levels and property insurance rates, are now contending with a different threat to their existence: an artificial disaster manufactured almost single-handedly by Ron DeSantis — one that is having devastating consequences for families like Deborah and Lee Dorbert.
Deborah Dorbert was five months pregnant with her second child, when she learned his kidneys and lungs were not developing properly. Her doctors diagnosed her son with Potter syndrome, a condition that meant he would not survive more than a few hours after birth. They recommended inducing her labor early to terminate the pregnancy, but, because of a 15-week abortion ban championed by DeSantis, she was not able to get the care that she needed in Florida. She and her husband couldn’t afford to leave the state, and they feared legal repercussions if they did. Deborah ended up carrying her son, Milo, for three additional months, dreading labor while planning his funeral. He lived for 94 minutes. The family — including their four-year-old son, Kaiden — is still processing the trauma.
That was before DeSantis replaced Florida’s 15-week ban with an even more regressive 6-week ban.
The Dorberts are one of the families supporting Amendment 4, and they agreed to share their story in television ads for the campaign to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. Caroline, whose last name Rolling Stone agreed to withhold for privacy, is another: Caroline was pregnant with her second child when she began experiencing problems speaking. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the deadliest form of brain cancer, and told she could only begin treatment when she was no longer pregnant. She was able to get an abortion in Florida, before DeSantis’ first abortion ban went into effect.
Like the Dorberts, Caroline shared her experience in a TV ad supporting Amendment 4, a cautionary tale about how abortion care is more difficult, if not impossible, for cancer patients like herself to obtain under Florida’s current law.
DeSantis’ office reportedly went nuclear over the ad, drafting a cease-and-desist letter that it ordered Florida Department of Health’s general counsel, John Wilson, to send to any stations airing the ad. The letter called Caroline’s assertions “false” and “dangerous,” and the ad itself a “sanitary nuisance,” and threatened criminal penalties against any stations that did not take it down within 24 hours.
(Wilson resigned a week after sending the first letter, he later said in an affidavit, to avoid being forced to send additional letters to other television stations. “A man is nothing without his conscience,” Wilson wrote in his resignation letter. “It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency.”)
Floridians Protecting Freedom — the group behind Amendment 4 — sued the state, saying the threats amounted to “viewpoint discrimination.” Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker of the Northern District of Florida agreed, blocking the DeSantis administration from issuing any more such threats. “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” he wrote as he issued an injunction.
The threat letters, though, are just one component of a full-scale assault DeSantis has mounted to take down Amendment 4. Before it was officially placed on the ballot, he worked with the Heritage Foundation to add language to the ballot measure implying that relegalizing abortion would have a negative fiscal impact on the state. His election police have made house calls to individuals who signed the petition to place Amendment 4 on the ballot — a list, by the way, that included roughly 150,000 Republicans.
State agencies have been spending millions of dollars in public money on TV and radio ads peddling misinformation about the measure, and the state also put up a website that claims Amendment 4 “threatens women’s safety.” DeSantis’ official Faith and Community Initiative has promoted campaign stops by a “No on 4” bus tour.
All of that was before Florida Secretary of State’s Office of Election Crimes and Security published a lengthy report accusing organizers of submitting “large number of forged signatures or fraudulent petitions” — the report was released in October, just weeks before the election, and months after organizers paid the state of Florida to validate those signatures.
Alan Lawson, a former Florida Supreme Court justice, has filed a lawsuit using the report as basis to declare Amendment 4 null and void — even if the proposal is ratified by voters. (Lawson has declined to say exactly who is financing the suit, describing his client as an “angel financier;” the DeSantis administration has paid Lawson’s law firm $838,000 since he retired from the court in 2022.)
“This is unprecedented,” says Anna Eskamani, a state representative who has advocated against DeSantis’ abortion bans. “To threaten that they’re going to potentially try to invalidate election results? This is fascism. It is really unsettling, regardless of your position on Amendment 4, and everyone should express concern.”
She adds: “It’s every agency, every entity, all this public money is being weaponized in ways that are really, really unsettling, undemocratic, and everyone should, should be concerned. It erodes our democracy. It erodes trust in the public institutions. And it demonstrates how far DeSantis is willing to go, and if he gets away with it, it just gives permission for other politicians to do the same.”
The most confounding thing about DeSantis’ attempt to tank Amendment 4 is the pitch is broadly popular with Floridians: A September poll showed the measure attracting support from 76 percent of voters.
And it’s not just women in Florida who would be impacted: The state, surrounded by other states with onerous bans, is one of the few with any remaining clinics that provide abortions. Even after the imposition of DeSantis’ initial 15-week ban, the number of abortions performed in Florida increased in the first six months of 2023 compared to 2020, according to a survey by the Guttmacher Institute, whose experts attribute the increase to the even more onerous bans passed by neighboring states.
DeSantis, she says, sees Amendment 4’s popularity as a direct threat to his political future. “He sees [his abortion bans] as being a major, major component to his ability to be relevant in the Republican Party,” she says. “He holds this personal viewpoint 100 percent. But I do think a bigger part of it is this risk to his political career, and I think that’s fundamentally why we’re seeing every agency be weaponized in this way.”
“Losing to Trump already hurt his political future,” Eskamani says. “He and others have tried to paint Florida as the promised land for Republicans. The Republican Party of Florida chairman said, ‘There will be no elected Democrats in Florida.’ That’s their attitude. That’s the arrogance, that is the power-hungry political agenda they are setting for themselves, and a successful Amendment 4 — and Amendment 3, but I think more so Amendment 4 — puts an end to that entire narrative.”
The question is whether or not voters in Florida are committed to delivering that message to DeSantis and Rick Scott — or whether they’re too demoralized, too busy putting their lives back together after another destructive hurricane season to show up.
“When you think about the everyday voter, they don’t have power, they lost their home, they’re experiencing flooding. They’re going through a lot of real life stress and chaos and trying to get their life back, out of survival mode, into a place of stability,” Eskamani says. “That just takes time.”
