More than a million people in Florida signed petitions to put Amendment 4 on the state’s November ballot. The measure would overturn the state’s near-total abortion ban, and limit government interference with abortion. As soon as the initiative campaign launched, Florida Rising went all-in to build the campaign alongside Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, SEIU 1199, and Voices of Florida. Florida Rising is the state’s largest independent political organization, led by its 1,500 members in 11 counties around the state; it was formed in 2021 by the merger of New Florida Majority and Organize Florida. Its Chief Campaigns Officer, Ivanna Gonzalez, spoke with Convergence Print Editor Marcy Rein about the work to pass Amendment 4 and the ways the campaign feeds the organization’s power-building work.
Convergence is pleased to be collaborating with the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center on a series of articles spotlighting progressive initiatives in play this election season. This is the fourth in the series; you can find links to previous installments here. And you can listen to an excerpt of the audio from this interview on Convergence‘s podcast Block & Build.
Marcy Rein: How did Florida Rising come to engage with the work on Amendment 4?
Ivanna Gonzalez: Our members lead the work that we do. They make decisions through our regional and our state people’s assemblies about our state and local campaigns, which we execute throughout the year. We like to talk about our integrated civic engagement work, which means that we’re campaigning on the issues year-round, not just during election season.
Florida Rising has historically had five priority issue areas that were determined by our membership. Our flagship issue has been housing justice. We also have a body of campaign work in criminal systems reform and community-led safety, expanding democracy, and climate justice. And we’ve always had what we call a Repro Warriors committee holding our reproductive justice work.
Leaders who are deeply committed to reproductive justice helped to introduce a bill in the state legislature in 2022 that would have protected pregnant tenants and tenants with children from Florida’s rapid eviction process. That’s one really beautiful representation of how Florida Rising lives intersectionality through the campaign work. People think reproductive justice and they think abortion, and it of course means that, but it also means our ability to build families in safe and sustainable communities.
The development of that bill was a really important moment for us, and we were working on that at the same time that the state legislature started to pass these horrid abortion bans. Those started in 2022 with a 15-week ban, and then in 2023 they passed a near-total ban that would have gone into effect the moment that litigation about the 15-week ban was cleared up.
In April 2024, the state Supreme Court ruled that the 15-week ban was in fact constitutional. That triggered the six-week ban going into effect.
MR: So can you talk a bit about what Amendment 4 is, and the challenges your coalition faced getting it on the ballot?
IG: Amendment 4 is a citizen-led constitutional amendment that is meant to end government interference in abortion.
We were part of crafting the initial language that we felt was going to honor the will of the majority of Floridians.
We then built an amazing operation to collect over a million petitions. We started that petition collection drive in May 2023 and finished qualifying by end of that year. In February 2024, we were before the Supreme Court. That’s the next step in the process. Once you qualify, the Supreme Court has to hear the ballot language and approve it for ballot placement.
That has historically been a rather bureaucratic process. They’re checking to make sure. That the proposed ballot language is 75 words long and that it’s not intentionally confusing or covering more than a single subject.
Even that process was highly politicized because the Florida Supreme Court is dominated by people appointed by [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis. We faced an uphill battle, but we had an amazing legal team that knew this issue inside and out and faced a truly unremarkable and unprepared opposition legal team.
We ended up getting placed on the ballot. A committee is meant to write a fiscal impact statement that is supposed to be a budgetary analysis of the ballot initiative, and that gets printed on ballots right below the official ballot language. Again, historically a bureaucratic process, but DeSantis also intervened in that and has officially submitted a fiscal impact statement that is basically opposition talking points, word for word.
And so we are more clear than ever that this ballot initiative is about protecting abortion access for upwards of 80, 000 patients in Florida a year and also about protecting the integrity of democracy. Over a million people signed a petition. Public opinion polls consistently show how much folks disagree with abortion bans like the kind that Florida has right now, and with the continued interference of government in our personal medical decisions.
We are more clear than ever that this ballot initiative is about protecting abortion access for upwards of 80, 000 patients in Florida a year, and also about protecting the integrity of democracy.
MR: As you begin the phase of campaigning for the actual vote, are you encountering voter suppression that’s also been put in place by this Republican autocracy?
IG: Things are actively happening every day. You’ve got polling locations that aren’t accessible. We’re getting reports in some counties of a high police presence. We’re a voter ID state, which is an unnecessary barrier to access to the ballot box. But in addition, the damage that the leadership of the state has already done to undermine confidence in the system is devastating.
It’s all cumulative. Back in 2023 DeSantis used our tax dollars to fund what he was calling an election police force that would be focused on pursuing election fraud cases. As is the case in all parts of this country, election fraud is a made-up concept.
One of the ways that they deployed that election police force was to arrest and charge returning citizens who had registered in good faith. They were a part of, or saw, or heard about [the rights-restoration] Amendment 4 in 2018, registered to vote thinking they were good to go, and instead were prosecuted for registering to vote when they still had fines and fees that they hadn’t paid off, which is exactly what Ron DeSantis intended. He passed legislation to put a little asterisk on the victory of Amendment 4 and say that you’re not going to be able to vote if you haven’t paid off all of your fines and fees, which to us basically amounts to a poll tax. And that really did start an increased a culture of fear among returning citizens.
So it’s not just the stuff that they’re actively doing, but the culture that they’ve established in our state over the course of the last couple of years.
MR: So in that very hostile environment, you’re faced with the task of really trying to build very broad and deep support for abortion access so you can have a very comfortable margin of victory. How are you going about that?
IG: In Florida not only do we have an extraordinarily high threshold for petition collection to even qualify to get on the ballot, but we have to win 60% of the vote. That means, by default, that this cannot be a campaign for the usual suspects. This is a campaign that has to win over people who don’t align themselves with groups like Florida Rising, people who identify as Republicans, who may very well be voting top of the ticket for Donald Trump, who may very well have voted for Ron DeSantis.
Regardless of the letter after your name in your voter registration record, you or a loved one could be a patient that needs access to care. And what we are finding consistently, not just in public opinion polling, but definitely in the field as we’re talking to folks, is that’s very much the case that when it comes to the issue of abortion, people have nuanced ideas and perspectives. And at the end of the day, really truly understand in their gut and in their hearts that should they or a loved one ever be in a situation where abortion has to be on the table or could be on the table, they would want to be able to make those decisions on their own, with their family, with their loved ones, with their faith leader, should they choose, and obviously their doctor.
It’s a patient-centered campaign. This is about ending government interference in abortion access. It’s about ending government interference in our personal medical decisions. Floridians have a right to make those decisions on their own.
It’s important for people to hear the stories of families who have been devastated by these bans, of people who have had to carry a pregnancy to term that they knew with near-certainty would not survive past a certain number of days or even hours, and just the pain of having to go through a delivery knowing that on the other side of that would be a child that was not going to live. That’s a physical and emotional trauma that no one should have to live through.
MR: So you’re doing this very broad and deep work to block this right-wing attack on reproductive justice. Can you talk also about how you’re using this initiative campaign to build political frameworks, technical expertise and infrastructure that we can use going forward?
IG: We had this rousing endorsement of fighting abortion bans as an organizational priority, but our staff and a good part of our membership weren’t deep in this work. Certainly we’re thinking about abortion as this standalone fight that we have in the “modern” age, but the reality is that the fight for access to abortion is one battle in a long history of reproductive oppression. And so for us, I think this has been an amazing opportunity to do deeper political education with our members and staff about how reproductive coercion and reproductive oppression has been used against Black communities, Latino communities, immigrants, and Indigenous communities in this country.
It was controlling the reproductive lives of slaves in the South during slavery. And then it was eugenics against people with disabilities, or eugenics against the women on the island of Puerto Rico, which is itself a colony, right? And then we’re coming into this era where the battlefield is abortion access, but it doesn’t stand alone. It’s just another phase of a long fight to protect the bodily autonomy of women and especially women of color.
Being able to go that deep lets folks see the ways that our fight for housing justice, our fight for climate, our fight for criminal systems reform are all tightly bound together with this vision of reproductive justice that this campaign is. That political education turns what could be a large-scale transactional electoral campaign into something that transforms a movement and transforms individuals, deepens our commitment to this tightly connected movement where you may have come in because you cared about your rent being too high, and you may have joined our movement because you were devastated by the impact of climate change and how every hurricane that comes is destroying communities that are then getting rebuilt for the wealthy and not for the people who have been there for generations.
But once you’ve joined us, this kind of political education helps you see how all of the underlying systems are one and the same. And so the climate fight is the housing fight and your criminal systems reform fight is my reproductive justice fight as well.
MR: I hear you talking about the way that shared politics builds up the movement’s connective tissue, which is beautiful. Can you also speak to some of the ways you’re building shared expertise and infrastructure?
IG: There are people working on this campaign who were deeply involved in the 2018 Amendment 4 rights restoration campaign. Folks who were around for the campaign to raise the minimum wage, who were around for the redistricting fight in 2010. Oftentimes one of our struggles as a movement, as a progressive infrastructure, is our turnover. And so there’s a lot of beauty in the depth of experience around the table, mixed with new folks who haven’t been through it. If given the opportunity to do something like this on some other issue that I’m going to have so much more available to me than I would have had a year ago.
MR: Your mentioning the 2018 Amendment 4 campaign brings up another question. The rights restoration was such an inspirational victory and then DeSantis and the legislature turned around and snatched it. As you lay the basis for victory in November, how are you preparing for whatever might come down afterward?
IG: There’s two pieces around protecting the victory. One is making sure that the volunteer base, the community, the coalition that has built around this campaign understands that we’re not done, right? It’s the end of a phase of this campaign to win at the ballot box. And now we have to be really clear that we need to conserve the infrastructure and the relationships and the humans. We can’t burn out every single person working on this campaign because we need to get ready for the next round of the fight. As somebody leadership at a base-building organization, that’s really significant and important for me to keep in mind.
And the second aspect is that our partners at Planned Parenthood and the network of independent providers in the state of Florida have to survive this moment, they have to survive this year to get to November. We’ve heard stories, not just in the state of Florida, but across the country, that in the face of abortion bans, clinics have had to shut down. And then rebuilding that infrastructure is a whole other bucket of work. We need the infrastructure to provide the care that we just won.
We’ve had the privilege of hearing directly from providers on the ground throughout this campaign who tell us about the emotional toll of having to turn people away under the ban, of having to work so hard to get people the care that they need in other parts of the country, and then to keep the doors open.
MR: Is there anything else you think our readers should know?
IG: Absolutely. I want to name the incredible leadership team of the Yes on 4 campaign. Florida Rising has been honored to be at the table with the ACLU of Florida, with Planned Parenthood, with the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, with Women’s Voices of Florida and with SEIU 1199. We’ve got this beautiful leadership coalition in addition to hundreds of organizational endorsements that really run the gamut of issue area and community focus. Hundreds of medical providers have also endorsed our campaign.
It’s been amazing to watch it all come alive since October 2022, when the committee exploring the possibility of this campaign first convened. And it really has required the small contribution of every single individual, every single organization to get us as far as we have. Winning a ballot initiative in the state of Florida is an intentionally gargantuan task that our legislature is trying to make harder and harder because they know that when we get a direct say, we often move against the kinds of policy agendas that they’re moving in Tallahassee.
Featured image: Florida Rising members take action for reproductive rights. Their signs read “Médicos, No Politicos,” Spanish for “Doctors, Not Politicians.” Photo by Monica White.