Florida abortion politics after Trump’s latest policy flip-flop
Florida abortion politics after Trump’s latest policy flip-flop
A Q&A with Florida state Sen. Shevrin Jones. Plus: the latest on the ceasefire talks following the weekend death of an American hostage and recap of the Harris campaign’s Labor Day politicking.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. The general election is in 63 days—nine weeks, to be exact. Buckle up: It will feel like a sprint in the mad dash to November 5. Prepare to be barraged with political ads galore too. This is especially true for swing-state dwellers and folks who live on apps like TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube.
The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is one week from today in Philadelphia. In non-related but just-as-important news, the Dallas Cowboys open the season against the Browns in Cleveland in five days. And today is my nephew Micah’s birthday. He’s my favorite person on the planet and I’m deeply grateful for the grace he extends to me when I miss special days like today IRL to do this work.
Congress is back in Washington next week after a roughly six-week break. Its most urgent task is to approve an extension to keep the government open beyond the September 30 deadline. Lawmakers will have five calendar weeks to make it happen. I’ll have a more fulsome preview of political dynamics later this week.
Today is also the first day of the Harris campaign’s 50-plus-stop bus tour across red and blue communities in battleground states today to warn voters between now and Election Day that Trump is a threat to Americans’ rights to make decisions about their reproductive health. The tour kicks off with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in Trump’s backyard—Palm Beach, Florida—and comes as Trump has twisted himself into all sorts of contradictory positions on abortion and fertility treatments, which are like manna from heaven for Democrats who want to paint Trump as a flip-flopper who can’t be trusted and the reason one in three women of reproductive age in American live in a state with an abortion ban.
I talked to state Sen. Shevrin Jones (D-FL, no relation) this morning about the significance of the tour launching in the Sunshine State, the ballot initiative that could enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution and why Democrats are skeptical about Republicans’ pledge to let states decide the issue. I’ve also got the latest on the ceasefire talks following the death of an American hostage over the weekend and everything you need to know about the Harris campaign’s Labor Day politicking and its response to Trump being MIA.
But first things first:
— 📱 Women for Harris answer Michelle’s call: Women leaders from across the advocacy community will hold a call tonight to organize volunteers as part of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Do Something” call to action at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago two weeks ago.
Callers will be directed to a national phone bank tomorrow night, which will launch a twice-weekly phone bank organized by the group between now and Election Day.
The organizing call and phone bank are part of a week of action that included a phone bank with Boise Mayor Lauren McLean on Sunday night and a volunteer training last night to help women organize house parties for their friends and family in the run-up to the election. Women for Harris will hold another virtual volunteer training on Thursday evening for women looking to engage their networks and communities in the campaign.
— 🏀 Hoopers to unite for Harris too: A group of basketball icons—including current Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban and Hall of Fame head coach George Karl—will hold a Hoops for Harris organizing call tomorrow at 8 p.m. Eastern to grow support for the president’s campaign.
— 📺 Harris up with another economic ad: The Harris campaign released its fourth economic ad since the DNC this morning, highlighting how the vice president’s plan would lower everyday costs and take on corporate price gouging. At the same time, she says Trump’s plan would raise taxes on working families by $3,900 a year and give tax cuts to big companies and wealthy donors. The ad is part of the $370 million digital and TV reservations the campaign placed last month to run from Labor Day to Election Day.
— 📻 Senate Dems blast Sheehy as an out-of-touch out-of-towner: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—the Hill committee responsible for electing Democrats to the Senate—released a radio ad in the Montana Senate race attacking Republican nominee Tim Sheehy as a wealthy carpetbagger who would threaten access to public land if elected to office.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) is in the fight of his political life as one of two Democrats running for reelection in states former President Trump won in 2016 and 2020. With Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) retiring in January and the state expected to flip red, Democrats must hold Montana (or pick up a seat in Texas or Florida) to hold the Senate.
Sheehy is one of several Senate GOP candidates Democrats view as weak due to their loose ties to the states they’re running in, a storyline I documented in my latest COURIER column.
The ad is part of the DSCC’s $79 million paid-media program.
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Former President Trump made a mess of Republican abortion politics last week when he flip-flopped on his support for Amendment 4—a ballot initiative Florida voters will consider in November to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution—and expressed support for IVF despite his own party’s platform proposing a law to establish so-called fetal personhood and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) voting against federal protections for IVF before Trump made Vance his running mate.
Democrats immediately seized on the contradictions. And within hours, the Harris campaign announced a battleground states bus tour that would crisscross more than 50 communities to remind voters of the former president’s anti-abortion record.
Shevrin Jones, a state senator in Florida representing parts of Miami-Dade County, has seen the impact of the state’s six-week abortion ban up close. He took a few minutes after an all-hands staff meeting to discuss the Harris campaign’s bus tour, Amendment 4 and more with me this morning. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your immediate reaction last week after Trump flip-flopped on his support for Amendment 4 and expressed support for IVF before buckling to pressure from the anti-abortion movement?
It’s unfortunate that the nominee for a major party and someone who’s running to be leader of the free world again is playing games and cannot even give a consistent answer on how he would take into account the lives of women. What the former president has shown is exactly what we already know: He’s unstable, he’s unfit and he’s even unsure himself of what leadership looks like.
The Harris-Walz campaign is launching a reproductive freedom bus tour in Trump’s backyard. Besides trolling Trump, what’s the significance of launching the tour in a state like Florida?
When you look at the six-week abortion ban that happened here in Florida where [Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis] signed the law in the dark hours of the night so it would turn the attention away from the rights they were ripping away from women, I think it began this snowball effect of women and people being absolutely upset with the constant underhandedness of the Republican Party here in Florida.
I also would invite anyone to look at the poll numbers when it comes to people who support reproductive rights. We’re seeing that women want autonomy over their bodies. Men want to ensure that their wives and daughters have the rights they absolutely deserve.
The bus tour is also a statement to Republicans in Florida that we will no longer sit around for them to take us back 50-plus years.
What’s the state of play in Florida ahead a the big Amendment 4 proposal in November?
Don’t think I’m just riding the Harris bandwagon when I tell you what people are saying. They tell me they’re really not going back. I’m serious.
Not only are they talking about Donald Trump’s leadership but also a woman’s right to choose. It’s crazy that my niece will have less rights than my mother had when she was her age.
People are saying we want to go forward and we’re fighting like hell to ensure that we don’t go back.
Vice President Harris was the administration’s face and voice on this issue before she rose to the top of the ticket. Why is she such a strong messenger for Dems on the issue of reproductive freedom?
Well, she’s a woman and she’s speaking out on an issue where she has credibility because she supported reproductive freedom before she was vice president.
She’s also made it a priority to listen to and uplift stories from women all across the country. She knew someone like Gov. [Tim] Walz could tell his story about he and his wife’s struggles with infertility.
She also built a coalition of allies to help her make the case and now she and Gov. Walz are both making that case on the trail. And it’s a bipartisan case that’s being made across America.
Keep it real with me, Shev: Is Florida actually in play in the Senate and presidential elections this year?
Here’s what I’ll tell you: All of the pundits, all of the naysayers, all pollsters who are saying Florida is not in play and we’re not a battleground state, we hear you. But we also see what’s happening on the ground. We see the work that’s happening. We see the organizing that’s been happening. We see the phone calls being made. It’s why [Democratic National Committee] Chair Jaime Harrison is coming down this month because he understands that Florida is in play. And so while outsiders don’t have faith in us—don’t believe us, just watch what will happen in November.
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Among the most memorable moments at the DNC was the emotional plea from Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin delivered on Day 3 of the convention for Hamas to release all of the hostages held in Gaza, including their Hersh Goldberg-Polin, their 23-year-old Israeli-American son who was wounded and abducted during the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.
So I was personally devastated when news broke over the weekend that Hersh was one of six hostages whose bodies were recovered by Israeli Defense Forces in a tunnel under the city of Rafah in Gaza. Hamas claimed the hostages died in an Israeli airstrike but did not address the execution-style gunshot wounds Israel said each hostage suffered before they were discovered.
Biden had high praise for Rachel and Jon, whom he spoke with on Sunday.
“I have worked tirelessly to bring their beloved Hersh safely to them and am heartbroken by the news of his death. It is as tragic as it is reprehensible,” he said. “Make no mistake: Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.”
Vice President Harris said in a statement that she and Biden wouldn’t waver in their commitment to free the Americans and all hostages held by Hamas, which she called an evil terrorist organization with more blood on its hands.
“The threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel—and American citizens in Israel—must be eliminated and Hamas cannot control Gaza,” she said. “The Palestinian people too have suffered under Hamas’ rule for nearly two decades.”
Rep. Greg Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement that he also mourned with Jon and Rachel.
“Jon and Rachel’s tireless advocacy on behalf of Hersh, and all the other hostages, demonstrates extraordinary strength and character under the most excruciating circumstances,” Meeks added.
President Biden returned to the White House from Delaware on Monday morning to meet with Vice President Harris and his hostage negotiation team in the Situation Room. It’s worth noting Harris was the only woman and person of color at the meeting.
Before the meeting, Biden was asked why he thinks current talks toward a deal would be successful when others have broken down at the 11th hour.
“Hope springs eternal,” he said.
A White House readout of the meeting said Biden and Harris received an update on the status of the bridging proposal the US, Qatar and Egypt said it would put forward if Israel and Hamas couldn’t reconcile their differences.
“We’re very close to that,” the president said of the proposal before the meeting.
Biden told reporters that the US is still negotiating a deal.
“Not with [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel],” Biden said. “But with my colleagues from Qatar and Egypt.”
He also said Netanyahu wasn’t doing enough to secure a deal.
The hostage deaths sparked widespread protests and a temporary labor strike in Israel on Monday as Netanyahu critics demanded he reach a ceasefire agreement with Hamas that would free Israeli hostages held by the militant group in Gaza for nearly 11 months.
But Netanyahu doubled down on his refusal to agree to a ceasefire in a press conference on Monday because it would send Hamas the wrong message: “Slay hostages and you’ll get concessions?”
When Biden returned to the White House on Monday night after a campaign event in Pittsburgh, he told reporters he planned to speak to Netanyahu.
“Eventually,” the president said. He had the same response when asked if the conversation would happen this week or next.
The United Kingdom announced on Monday that it would suspend some weapons exports after a legal review concluded there was a clear risk the weapons could be used in a way that would breach international law. The Biden administration and most members of Congress have resisted calls to impose restrictions on weapons exports.
There are seven American hostages still held in Gaza.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan held a virtual meeting with their families on Sunday to discuss the ongoing high-level US diplomacy at work to bring their loved ones home.
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President Biden and Vice President Harris returned to the campaign trail following the Situation Room meeting.
They held their first joint campaign event in Pittsburgh with the vice president at the top of the ticket. (Biden and Harris appeared together last month at a community college in Maryland to announce the White House reached agreements with all of the participating manufacturers on newly negotiated lower prices on ten of the most prescribed and expensive drugs.)
Harris announced her support for US Steel remaining domestically owned in a show of solidarity with American steelworkers after Nippon Steel Corporation—Japan’s largest steelmaker—announced an agreement with Pittsburgh-based US Steel last December to purchase the company for $14.1 billion.
Despite Nippon agreeing to maintain a headquarters for US Steel and honor all steelworker union contracts, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) opposed the deal. He cited national security concerns at the time and said he would work with Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and other members of the state’s congressional delegation to take all possible actions to block the sale.
President Biden announced his opposition to the deal in March ahead of a trip to Michigan and said he would use US regulators to block the planned acquisition. United Steel Workers union members opposed the deal, and its president said Biden’s opposition should end the debate. But Nippon said it would proceed with the acquisition despite Biden’s position and promised the union to invest an additional $1.4 billion. It also said there would be no layoffs or plant closures until September 2025, subject to several conditions.
Before the Pittsburgh event, Harris traveled to Detroit to celebrate Labor Day with labor leaders and workers.
The vice president was greeted by Reps. Shri Thanedar (D-MI), Debbie Dingell (D-MI) and Haley Stevens (D-MI). Stevens said she thanked Harris at the airport for speaking out about Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s murder in Gaza and everything she is doing to bring the hostages home.
Harris spoke inside a gym at Northwestern High School to a crowd of 445 supporters about the workplace benefits union workers have secured, including fair pay, the five-day workweek and safer working conditions.
“Every person in our nation has benefited from that work,” she said. “You may not be a union member but you better thank a union member.”
Gov. Walz greeted local labor leaders in St. Paul before traveling to Milwaukee to promote his and Harris’s labor track record and warn voters that Trump and Vance would enact Project 2025 policies that would undermine unions and increase the tax burden on working families by thousands of dollars.
While in Milwaukee, several cars in Walz’s motorcade crashed, and a staff member in the press van who appeared to have broken an arm was treated by medics. Vice President Harris called Walz before takeoff from Detroit to check on him and the staff. President Biden called the governor from his cabin on Air Force One before departing for Pittsburgh.
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff attended Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA)’s annual Labor Day Cookout, a major campaign stop for statewide and federal candidates. Emhoff spoke at a campaign fundraiser over the weekend in Ketchum, ID. (Every Labor Day weekend, the town hosts the Wagon Days festival, a themed carnival featuring Old West wagon trains, narrow ore wagons and a parade. And fun facts: Tom Hanks owns a retreat in the town. Ernest Hemingway spent his final two years in Ketchum before his life in 1961. Ketchum is also the site of his grave.) The second gentleman also spoke over the weekend at fundraisers in San Francisco and Aspen, CO.
Former President Trump and Sen. Vance puzzlingly did not hold any Labor Day campaign events—an unforced error national Democrats were too eager to call out.
“Donald Trump and JD Vance have been absent from the campaign trail this Labor Day weekend because they know their anti-worker agenda is extreme, unpopular, and would devastate America’s working class,” DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd said in a statement. “The Trump-Vance Project 2025 playbook would make it harder for workers to form unions and gut overtime pay—all while raising taxes on the middle class and rigging the economy for billionaires and big corporations.”
Harris spokesperson Joseph Costello didn’t mince words either: “Donald Trump is ditching workers on Labor Day because he is an anti-worker, anti-union extremist who will sell out working families for his billionaire donors if he takes power.“
And if that’s not enough, the DNC launched new bilingual ads in high-traffic locations in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with a simple message: “Trump’s an anti-union scab.”
The three states represent the Blue Wall Trump won in 2016, Biden flipped in 2020 and will loom large in determining the outcome of the 2024 race. The ads attack Trump for what they describe as an anti-labor record that gypped union members into performing unpaid work as a real-estate magnate while giving tax breaks to billionaires at the expense of working families and snarling the enforcement of collective bargaining agreements.
Coming off a two-week vacation in California and at his beach home in Delaware, the White House said President Biden would continue what Communications Director Ben LaBolt describes as an aggressive fall travel schedule with trips to Wisconsin and Michigan later this week to promote his record and hear from local leaders and communities across the country who have benefitted from the administration’s investments in infrastructure, technology and emerging industries. The president will speak virtually with four of those individuals this afternoon.
Harris will campaign in New Hampshire on Wednesday before returning to Pittsburgh on Thursday. Walz will host a series of campaign events across Pennsylvania on Wednesday and Thursday in his first solo visit to the battleground state since joining the ticket.
In the Know
A few final bulletins from my notebook:
— FL lawmakers take on student debt interest rates: Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) and Anna Paulina Luna introduced a bill to establish a three-percent federal student interest rate cap.
The bill’s introduction came days after the Supreme Court declined a request from the Biden administration to lift an order from a lower court preventing the Education Department from implementing elements of the SAVE plan, its latest student loan repayment plan. (A second order rejected a request from a separate group of states asking the Supreme Court to ban the administration from implementing the program because emergency relief is unnecessary as long as the lower court’s hold is in place.)
The Education Department announced borrowers enrolled in SAVE will be moved to forbearance, delaying their payments and stopping interest from accruing on their loans.
Moskowitz said it’s unfair for people to continue making payments yet owe more than their initial loan amounts and that student debt is a significant obstacle for Americans looking to start families, purchase homes, and save for retirement. Luna criticized universities for consistently increasing tuition costs and said capping these interest rates to help students manage their loans responsibly and avoid becoming indebted to financial institutions.
The average federal loan interest rate is almost double the lawmakers’ proposed cap and the average balance is $37,088. The nation’s outstanding balance is more than $1.6 trillion and accounts for 92.8 percent of all student debt.
— House Dems seek answers on hair-relaxer chemical ban: Three House Democratic women of color sent a letter to the FDA last Tuesday to request an update on the two delays in the implementation of a rule to ban formaldehyde, a carcinogen widely used in hair relaxers and other chemical hair straighteners and linked to serious health conditions such as myeloid leukemia, breast cancer, uterine cancer and ovarian cancer.
In the letter, Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Shontel Brown (D-OH) and Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) asked the agency to explain the reasons for the delay and the timeline for finalization of the ban.
Pressley is a lead sponsor and Brown and Velázquez are cosponsors of the CROWN Act. which would ban hair discrimination at the federal level. Pressley has also led a bill to declare structural racism a public health crisis.
— CHC heads west to talk chip manufacturing: The Congressional Hispanic Caucus held a Latino workforce roundtable discussion last Wednesday in Oregon to discuss the local and state economic progress and job growth generated by the CHIPS and Science Act, a 2022 law that authorized $280 billion in new funding to invest in domestic research and US semiconductor manufacturing.
The discussion, which was led by CHC Chair Nanette Barragán (D-CA), CHC Freshman Representative Andrea Salinas (D-OR) and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) in collaboration with UnidosUS and the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, also touched on the role Hispanic-serving institutions play in ensuring Latino students go from the classroom to good-paying chip-manufacturing careers.
The roundtable was the latest event in a series focused on the CHC’s ongoing work to uplift Latino communities nationwide.
— Team Harris launches BTS campaign: The Harris campaign launched a back-to-school initiative with campus visits from Planned Parenthood Action Fund President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson at the University of Pittsburgh and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bennett College in Greensboro.
Frost’s visit was notable because he’s the first Gen Z member of Congress and North Carolina Democratic chair Anderson Clayton, the youngest chair of a state political party in the country. As I reported a couple of weeks ago, the Tar Heel State is essential to Trump’s path to victory. The Harris campaign has invested significant resources to flip the state, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic nominee since Barack Obama. They believe young voters are a critical constituency that can help them do so.
The back-to-school initiative, which will target 150 campuses in battleground states, includes a national Snapchat takeover, targeted social ads and on-campus advertising in student newspapers and college websites. It also features a new ad with Harris speaking directly to students about the election's stakes, a letter that will be published in college newspapers and a microsite to help students volunteer and register to vote.
The Harris campaign says it began its student outreach in March. Since then, it has doubled its youth and campus engagement staff to 150 organizers who travel to all the key battleground states, focusing on state schools, community colleges and minority-serving institutions, including the University of Michigan and Morehouse College.
Read All About It
“Has the spread of tipping reached its limit? Don’t count on it.” by Ben Casselman: “Both major presidential candidates propose exempting tips from taxes. That could encourage more reliance on tipping and leave workers vulnerable.”
“Donald Trump courts the manoverse” by John Branch: “A constellation of YouTubers, pranksters and streamers who influence young men is helping Mr. Trump with the bro vote.”
“Majoring in video games? A new wave of degrees underscores the pressures on colleges” by Zachary Schermele: “From video game design to AI, colleges are adapting to economic changes that underscore the return-on-investment debate.
“Happy birthday, dear frozen eggs, happy birthday to you” by Jessica Roy: “Egg showers have become common on social media, but a Brooklyn woman has gone a step further by throwing her eggs a birthday party every year.”
“Chasing the perfect abs, men flock to plastic surgery” by Terrence McCoy: “Men are turning to ultra-high-definition liposuction, a plastic surgery procedure pioneered in Brazil, to sculpt six-packs and perfect abs.”
That’s all I’ve got for you.
Until Friday,
Michael
Do you have questions about the election? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch and I’ll find the answers.