A Florida referendum is putting Trump in a bind on abortion

Donald Trump still doesn’t have an answer on how he’ll vote on an abortion measure in his home state. And it’s about to become a lot harder for him to avoid it.

Four months ago, Trump announced he favored leaving the issue of abortion to the states. Now, state-level referendums on the lightning-rod issue are making ballots across the country — including, on Monday, in the battleground state of Arizona, and on Tuesday in Missouri.

And in Florida, where Trump is a registered voter, the former president has yet to say how he’ll cast his own vote on the measure known as Amendment 4, which would abolish the state’s newly-enacted ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

The looming referendum is threatening Trump’s efforts, as he put it in April, to “make both sides happy” with his position, and it’s giving Democrats an opening to continue hammering him.

“It is clearly a massive narrative advantage for the Harris campaign to continue to make his life hell on this issue,” said Chuck Coughlin, a political strategist in Arizona who left the Republican Party after Trump’s election.

Coughlin said if he were Trump facing the question, “I’d transition off this topic as quickly as I could.”

Trump appears cognizant of the ongoing liability. After declining to directly answer a question from POLITICO at a press conference last week about how he plans to vote on Florida’s initiative, Trump later announced that he would hold a separate news conference “sometime in the near future” to reveal his position. Trump’s aides, while surprised by Trump’s announcement of a forthcoming abortion-themed presser, have said they take him at his word that he’ll hold such an event.

But Trump’s refusal so far to commit to a position on the Florida measure is a signal that despite his efforts to neutralize the issue, he still faces enormous political risks with his leave-it-to-the-states abortion approach. If he opposes the abortion rights initiative, Trump will give the Democrats fuel in an election they’ve desperately sought to make about abortion rights. And if he embraces the measure to expand abortion access in Florida, Trump risks alienating socially conservative voters who gave him a pass this spring as he rejected their calls to endorse a 15-week federal limit.

Trump has promised answers on thorny political questions surrounding abortion before, only to never actually say where he stands. Earlier this year, he similarly said he would elaborate on how his administration would approach regulation of mifepristone, telling TIME in June that he would likely say more about it in a week. But he has yet to do so, including when asked Thursday about the abortion pill during the news conference.

“I don't think it's exactly a news flash that Trump sees the abortion issue as a liability,” said one national anti-abortion leader, granted anonymity to speak freely.

Trump, despite taking credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices necessary to overturn Roe v. Wade , has blamed the “ abortion issue ” for Republicans’ underwhelming performance in the midterms. He previously bashed six-week abortion laws in Florida and other states, calling them a “terrible mistake” — especially when he was campaigning against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the party’s presidential nomination. And he has repeatedly signaled that he believes abortion rights supporters will win on Florida’s ballot initiative. But Trump is coming under increasing pressure to say how, exactly, he will vote.

Since bucking anti-abortion groups’ wishes and announcing his state-level approach in April, Trump has kept any widespread conservative blowback at bay. He faced backlash from some prominent anti-abortion activists in early July as he worked to remove mention of federal abortion legislation from the GOP platform, though that anger quickly subsided after he survived an assassination attempt days before the convention began. But he could be on thin ice with some of those voters if he rejects their position on his home state’s abortion referendum.

Steve Deace, a conservative radio host based in Iowa, who is helping campaign against the Florida abortion initiative, has taken to social media in recent days to warn that Trump must turn out as many white evangelical voters this fall as he did in 2016, cautioning that he has played “fast and loose with pro-lifers .”

Deace said that Trump should announce he is voting against the Florida abortion measure — while emphasizing that elected Democrats support few, if any, restrictions on the procedure — to avoid losing up to a few percentage points of evangelical and traditional Catholic voters in November.

Deace told POLITICO “it would be a shame for us to lose this election because Trump didn’t speak out against a no abortion restrictions legislation 80 percent of Americans don’t agree with.”

On the other side, Trump’s role in facilitating the overturning of Roe will be a prominent feature of next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, according to a person involved with the event’s planning and granted anonymity to speak freely, who said it was “not rocket science” that they will use the issue against Trump.

Since the Dobbs decision, Vice President Kamala Harris has been a leading voice in criticizing Trump for the change in law, while her campaign and the Democratic National Committee have highlighted his refusal to state his position on the Florida initiative.

Whatever Trump decides on the Florida ballot measure could have enormous consequences not only for Trump’s campaign, but for the initiative’s fate in Florida. Trump’s immense popularity among voters and Republicans made him a GOP kingmaker, even shifting the winds to boost the sails for DeSantis when he first won the state’s top executive office in 2018.

The abortion amendment would undo the current six-week restriction signed into law by DeSantis, as well as other restrictions such as waiting periods. It would allow access to the procedure up to viability, with exceptions later in a pregnancy for health reasons. DeSantis, who has raised money to fight the abortion ballot initiative, has not yet talked publicly about Trump’s comments. But the two have clashed over abortion, and DeSantis spokesperson Jeremy Redfern said the governor will discuss the issue during a news conference soon.

Still, despite Trump suggesting on Thursday that Florida’s abortion referendum will go “a little more liberal way” at the ballot box, opponents of the initiative say the former president hasn’t yet said anything that would put a damper on their efforts.

“We would certainly welcome his endorsement to say no on Amendment 4 but he hasn’t said anything that hurt us,” said Mat Staver, who heads the anti-abortion Liberty Counsel group and argued against Amendment 4 in front of the Florida Supreme Court.

“We’re moving forward no matter what Donald Trump says,” Staver said.

Polling on the ballot measure shows that abortion rights proponents so far have the advantage, with 69 percent of likely voters saying they planned to vote “yes,” according to a July survey by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab. The initiative needs 60 percent support to pass. Privately, some national anti-abortion leaders say they hope Trump will stay quiet about his position on the state-level issue, while acknowledging it could be difficult for him to do so after publicly opposing abortion laws in Florida, Iowa and other states during his presidential primary run.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Trump could come out and oppose Florida’s abortion initiative, other allies have suggested, perhaps adopting critics’ argument about the breadth of the language included in the measure being overly broad.

“I think we will win,” state Sen. Joe Gruters, a longtime Trump ally in Florida who is opposed to the abortion initiative, told POLITICO.