Abortion Rights Supporters Won’t Get Their Amendment Passed Without Republican Women Like Audrey McNiff

PALM BEACH, Florida — Audrey McNiff, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, is often heading back up north this time of year, flitting between vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and Greenwich, Connecticut, her longtime home. But it’s late April, and we’re sitting on a private beach cabana on Palm Beach, where she spends the winter. This year, she decided to stay a little while longer, even as humidity and thunderstorms begin to settle like a blanket.

There’s another reason this spring is unusual for McNiff: All season, she has been busy hosting casual dinners with the aim of convincing friends and acquaintances to vote yes on Amendment 4, a ballot initiative that would amend the Florida Constitution to “limit government interference with abortion.”

McNiff’s activism on this issue is particularly powerful because, despite her commitment to abortion rights, she is not a Democrat. In fact, she’s a lifelong Republican. Alongside walls covered in wallpaper overflowing with blue and green flowers, she has framed photos of herself posing with former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Sen. Mitt Romney. That a proud member of the Republican donor class is willing to speak out publicly on a hot-button political issue that has the potential to benefit the opposing party is a rarity in the polarized politics of 2024 — but, for McNiff, it’s actually not so complicated.

“During my meaningful years, Roe v. Wade was enforced. For me, my girlfriends, my relatives, my girlfriends’ relatives, we always felt that there was some protection if we ever needed to make that difficult decision to have an abortion,” McNiff told POLITICO Magazine. “It was a choice that I had, and I want to make sure that other generations have that choice as well.” McNiff has a stepdaughter and a stepdaughter-in-law, and she wishes they had the same options that had been accessible when she was younger.

McNiff, 65, doesn’t have a formal role with the campaign to pass Amendment 4. But she has become a reliable infantrywoman in abortion-rights advocates’ fight to expand access to reproductive health care in the Sunshine State. She counts herself as one of the movement’s “coffee ladies,” part of a bipartisan, grassroots group of women in Palm Beach that gets together — sometimes on their own, sometimes with organizers from the campaign — to discuss how to help pass Amendment 4. Her friends should expect to continue to hear from her about the issue.

Abortion-rights advocates in Florida face an uphill battle, and women like McNiff will be key to winning it. For Amendment 4 to pass, it will need to garner 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority. This means that the organizers seeking to shore up votes for the initiative cannot do so without winning over a significant number of conservatives and Republican voters like McNiff.

That makes the retired banker a window into not just how Amendment 4 might pass in Florida, but also into how widespread is the support for abortion rights in both parties — and how that might not actually end up helping Democrats in elections.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, six states have voted on constitutional amendments related to abortion access, and the pro-abortion rights side won in each case. Notably, voters in both blue and red states voted in favor of abortion access.

Democrats across the country argue that voter enthusiasm in support of abortion rights has helped Democratic candidates and will continue to do so this year. But at least in Florida, experts are wary that Democrats will see a big boost. Instead, a lot of voters like McNiff are likely to turn out — people who see the abortion amendment in Florida and similar ones in other states as a way to voice their support for abortion access while at the same time continuing to back candidates who oppose it.

“I think there'll be a lot of reaching out to women who maybe won't vote for the Democratic side at the top of the ticket, but really might vote for this one at the bottom of the ticket,” said Carol Weissert, an emerita professor of political science at Florida State University.

The Florida amendment vote may reveal just how many abortion rights-supporting Republicans like McNiff there are in Florida . McNiff hopes that the results could be a turning point for Republicans, a way to force them to reckon with the fact that their voters diverge from long-held party dogma on abortion.

“I hope the candidates will recognize that they don't have to impose their own personal view on others,” McNiff explained. “You think Republicans are all about getting government out of your life, and in this case they actually put government, in a very personal way, in your life.”

But just as likely, if McNiff is any indication, a successful outcome for Amendment 4 could further cement business as usual for Florida Republicans — an uncomfortable and slightly illogical coalition of hard-right conservatives who oppose abortion in all circumstances, coexisting with their more moderate party members who would never vote for Democrats but wouldn’t mind siding with them on occasional social issues.

As a young woman in the 1980s , McNiff didn’t think too much about abortion as a political issue because she knew that Roe v. Wade was there, like an insurance policy you forget about. She has friends who got abortions, a choice she respected. “I just can't imagine what their life would have been like if they had had a child at a very young age, or if there hadn’t been somebody to co-parent with them,” McNiff reflected. “The fact that my generation had a choice … it seems wrong to be going backwards.”

But even when her social views were out of step with the Republican consensus, other issues pulled her to the right. The Iran hostage crisis cemented her support for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

“I felt like these other issues had so much more gravitas to them … in terms of every single day life for the vast majority of people,” she said. “It's like, OK, the most important things that government can really do are deal with the international situation and deal with the economy. And all the other things, while they're important, they aren't quite as important as this.”

Over the years, McNiff has gotten to know some of the biggest names in Republican politics. Among her favorite political figures are former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, two politicians who were practically run out of politics by the ultra-conservative wing of Donald Trump’s Republican Party. She met George W. Bush through her work on his brother’s campaign in 2016, and thanked him “for making me feel safe” after 9/11 when she went back to work in downtown Manhattan. She had breakfast with Condoleezza Rice through her involvement with Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution. And Romney remains a close personal friend after she supported him in the 2012 presidential race.

“I'm literally just saddened by the fact that they are no longer leading our country or no longer about to lead our country,” McNiff said, referring to politicians like Bush and Portman. “But you have to deal with the cards you're dealt and make the most of a situation.”

You don’t become a partner at the country’s best-known investment bank by pining for what could have been. You have to be decisive, and that’s what McNiff has done in politics, too. After Jeb Bush’s defeat in the 2016 primary, she threw her support behind Trump (although she has not donated to his campaign). She plans to vote for him in 2024, too.

“If you want to look at it in the best of all possible worlds, would there be somebody else that other people might have preferred, myself included? Sure,” McNiff acknowledged. “With Trump, I think that I looked at his achievements, I looked at the potential for what he could accomplish, and that in my mind far outweighed what the Democratic ticket in both 2016 and 2020 could do.”

Trump has bragged about his role in overturning Roe by appointing the three conservative Supreme Court justices who struck down the landmark 1973 decision. But that doesn’t sway McNiff, because she thinks it’s impractical to be a single-issue voter.

“While abortion is important to me, I really do believe that this is something that will be determined by the states,” McNiff said. “I don't see abortion as being the number one issue that anyone should vote on for a presidential election.”

Rather than the candidates at the top of the ticket, she’s much more energized by the ballot amendment.

“I just think it's wonderful when you have an ability to get multiple things in an election, so you get some of the social issues you can separate out and vote on, and then you can also vote for a candidate that might represent your views more holistically across international and domestic issues,” said McNiff, who became a first-time donor to Planned Parenthood this year. How many women are there like McNiff, who are staunchly in favor of abortion rights, but who are willing to set reproductive rights aside for other issues and other candidates — especially when a ballot amendment lets them separate their support for abortion access from candidates’ stances on it? The answer could be important for the way both parties think about the issue.

Nationwide, mapping Republicans’ views on abortion is not a straightforward exercise. An April Pew poll found that 41 percent of Republicans and independents who lean to the right believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. Meanwhile, a Gallup survey conducted this year found that 64 percent of Republicans think abortion should be legal but “only under certain circumstances.” What’s clear, despite the ambiguity that results from slight rhetorical tweaks in polling language, is that strict anti-abortion attitudes do not represent a sizable chunk of Republicans.

Indeed, some even view those positions as politically detrimental. “The demand for anti-abortion legislation just cost Republicans another crucial race,” the conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted in 2023 after a liberal won a hotly contested state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin.

As a result, Democrats see voter excitement around reproductive rights as a boon for their chances in the 2024 election. As a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Florida in early May, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Jacksonville to cast the blame on Trump .

But in all likelihood, even if Amendment 4 passes, it won’t turn back the red wave that has swept Florida since 2016. Trump beat Joe Biden in Florida by more than 3 points in 2020, and two years later, Ron DeSantis beat Democrat Charlie Crist in the gubernatorial contest by nearly 20 percentage points — an astonishing margin, given that DeSantis only won his first statewide race in 2018 by less than half a percentage point. Trump remains far ahead of Biden in Florida. Polling averages compiled by 538 show Trump leading Biden by eight to 10 percentage points in Florida since April.

“This will bring out, I think, some more people who are likely to be Democratic voters. Whether that's going to make up the difference at the top of the ticket, I would be very surprised,” Florida State’s Weissert said of Amendment 4. “This is an issue [where] I think people have a pretty good sense of what they think. They don’t need to look to a political figure to say, ‘What should I do?’ I think particularly women are going to say, ‘I may be a Trump supporter, but I disagree with him on this issue.’”

Indeed, there is a natural appeal for Republicans on the ballot initiative that advocates are aiming to tap into. The organizers of the ballot initiative have formed a coalition under the banner Floridians Protecting Freedom. They are emphasizing the message that a woman’s right to choose is between her and her doctor, and Republican efforts to limit it amount to undue government interference.

The Floridians Protecting Freedom team is developing a campaign apparatus that includes devoted partnerships with groups trying to reach conservative voters.

“Women have lost the freedom to make decisions around their own healthcare decisions since the implementation of the six-week ban, so this amendment is about returning those freedoms back to women here in the state,” Taylor Aguilera, the organizing director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, explained.

A similar libertarian message worked in Kansas, which in August 2022 became the first state after the Supreme Court overturned Roe to weigh in on the matter: Fifty-nine percent of Kansas voters r ejected an amendment that would’ve explicitly said there is no right to abortion in the state. The main organization opposing it was called Kansans For Constitutional Freedom, similar to Florida’s organizers in both name and message.

The numbers seem to suggest there will be bipartisan support for Florida’s Amendment 4. A poll conducted in early May by CBS News found that 65 percent of registered Florida voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Fifty-six percent of voters also think that the ban on abortions after six weeks, passed by Florida lawmakers last year and recently approved by the state supreme court, is too strict.

National politicians, too, might benefit from observing the bipartisan support for abortion access; some appear to already be adjusting. In an April interview with TIME , Trump declined to say how he will vote on Amendment 4 or if he would sign a bill placing federal restrictions on abortion. The former president has said the six-week ban in Florida is too severe but that the matter should be left up to states, a position he touted during the first presidential debate in June — that he was glad to see Roe overturned because the issue is now left up to states, falsely claiming that “everybody wanted it brought back” to the states.

Trump’s dancing around the issue stands in contrast to other Florida Republicans: DeSantis called the abortion amendment “radical,” and said it is written “in a way that’s intentionally designed to deceive voters.” Republican officials in Florida have zeroed in on language in the amendment saying abortion cannot be restricted “before viability,” generally understood to be at 22-24 weeks in a pregnancy , arguing the language is imprecise . (Florida’s Supreme Court rejected this argument.)

McNiff, for her part, said in June that she views Trump’s recent comments on abortion — and his refusal, so far this year, to go as far to the right as other prominent Republican voices — as a positive step. “I do feel like Trump is getting closer to my view,” McNiff noted. “I'm not sure that he personally has a view on abortion, so I think he also is probably recognizing that the greatest good probably comes from where the majority of Americans are, which is some form of abortion, but not one which happens when a child is viable.”

“I really don't understand why the Republican Party has been so adamant on it,” McNiff said of the party’s opposition to abortion access.

Still, she plans to stick with Republicans. “I could hardly define myself by one issue. I just think that the world is so complicated that you can't just segment out one issue and say that if it doesn't fit your parameters, that you're going to abandon the party.”