TAMPA — President Joe Biden on Tuesday blamed Donald Trump for Florida’s looming six-week abortion ban and other restrictions across the country that have limited or eliminated access to abortion, arguing Trump has created a “health care crisis for women all over this country.”
Biden’s campaign events at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa placed the president in the epicenter of the latest battle over abortion restrictions. The state’s six-week abortion ban is poised to go into effect on May 1 at the same time that Florida voters are gearing up for a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
Biden said that millions of women are facing “pain and cruelty. … But it’s not inevitable. We can stop it. When you vote, we can stop it.”
The president hopes to capitalize on the momentum against abortion restrictions nationwide to not only buoy his reelection bid in battleground states he won in 2020 but also to go on the offensive against Trump in states that the presumptive Republican nominee won four years ago. Biden lost to Trump by 3.3 percentage points in Florida.
Biden chronicled increasing medical concerns for women 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’s acknowledged it and he brags about it — Donald Trump.”
Trump, who has publicly waffled on his abortion views and of late has said abortion is a matter for states to decide, is concerned voters will turn against him, Biden said.
“Folks, the bad news for Trump is that we are going to hold him accountable,” Biden said.
In a statement, Florida Republican Party chair Evan Power downplayed abortion, saying Biden had come to Florida to talk about “manufactured issues.”
He said Floridians’ “top issues are immigration, the economy, and inflation, in all three areas Joe Biden has failed.”
Republican Sen. Rick Scott, who is up for reelection in November, called his likely Democratic opponent, former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, and Biden “socialists” on a mobile billboard outside of the Biden event, where Mucarsel-Powell also spoke.
But those ads also didn’t discuss abortion. Instead, they focused on immigration.
Florida advocates say support for abortion rights cut across parties. They’re intent on making the issue as nonpartisan as possible as they work to earn the 60% of the vote needed for the ballot initiative to pass.
That could mean in some cases, Florida voters would split their tickets, backing GOP candidates while supporting the abortion measure.
“I think that 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 question known as Amendment 4 on the ballot. “You can vote for your preferred candidate of any political party and still not agree with them on every single issue.”
Organizers of the abortion ballot measure say they collected nearly 1.5 million signatures to put the issue before voters. Of the total number of signatures, about 35% were from registered Republican voters or those not affiliated with a party, organizers said.
On the same day the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the ballot measure could go before voters, it also upheld the state’s 15-week abortion ban. That subsequently cleared the way for the new ban on the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, which is often before women know they are pregnant, to go into effect next week.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a question about how the former president, a Florida voter, would cast his ballot on Amendment 4. In an NBC interview last September, Trump called Florida’s six-week ban “terrible.” But he has repeatedly highlighted the three conservative-leaning justices he chose for the high court who cleared the way to overturn Roe.
After his 15-minute speech, Biden and Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried met for several minutes with grass-roots Democrats, including union officials, campaign volunteers and youth leaders. In a casual address, Biden focused much less on abortion than he did at the rally.
“We’ve got a lot more work to do. We’ve built the strongest economy in the world,” Biden said. “We’ve got to get inflation even further down.”
Biden reiterated his campaign’s talking point that “Florida’s in play nationally,” adding, “the momentum is clearly in our favor.”
The Tampa Bay Times contributed to this report.
