As Debbie Mucarsel-Powell revved up the Democratic faithful in a restaurant named for Thomas Edison, she was looking for a little electricity in her campaign to unseat Senator Rick Scott of Florida.
So she turned the attention of the crowd at Edison’s Lab Restaurant and Bar in Fort Myers, where the inventor had a winter estate and laboratory, to the abortion referendum in Florida that could decide the fate of her bid.
“The man has never run in a presidential election when our voters turn out,” she said of Mr. Scott. Perhaps more important, she added to the boisterous crowd, “he has never run against the millions of women and men that are ready to come out to the ballot box to protect reproductive freedom.”
Ms. Mucarsel-Powell, a former medical school dean who was swept into the U.S. House by the 2018 blue wave, and then swept right back out two years later, is an underdog. Mr. Scott, a wealthy fixture of Florida politics who served for eight years as governor, has the high ground in the red-tinted state as he seeks his second term in the Senate.
But she has one thing on her side: Floridians will be deciding by referendum whether to overturn the state’s unpopular six-week abortion ban.
Beyond Florida, Senate candidates from across the political spectrum in Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Nebraska, Maryland and Arizona will appear on the ballot alongside measures to protect abortion rights. The track record of such measures, which have passed everywhere they have been introduced since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, would seem to bode well for candidates who support them.
Yet on a brutal Senate map for Democrats, their candidates in conservative states, like Ms. Mucarsel-Powell and Lucas Kunce in Missouri, remain long shots. Even incumbent Democrats like Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Jacky Rosen of Nevada have not been able to establish clear leads on the back of their states’ abortion referendums.
In a presidential election, there is just so much else diluting the impact.
“We know these ballot amendments do motivate a lot of voters,” cautioned Angela Kuefler, a longtime Democratic pollster who has worked on abortion initiatives. “We don’t know what that looks like in a presidential year — 2024 will be the great experiment.”
Mike Berg, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that Democrats’ latching of their candidacies to abortion referendums would not work because other issues were more important. “Groceries are unaffordable, violent crime is out of control, and Democrats encourage a full-blown invasion of our southern border,” he said, using hyperbole on immigration politics that is typical of the Trump era.
Ms. Mucarsel-Powell readily concedes that some Floridians will vote for Mr. Scott on the same ballot that they support Amendment Four, the legalization of abortion up to the point of fetal viability, as well as Amendment Three, a referendum to legalize marijuana. (Mr. Scott opposes both.) Former President Donald J. Trump has been inconsistent, suggesting recently that he might vote against Florida’s six-week abortion ban, and then saying that he would oppose the referendum to overturn it.
“We have to make sure that they don’t go out and just put the yes on Three and yes on Four,” Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said in an interview. “They need to make sure that they also fill out the candidates that are going to support it, and that’s been a problem before. I do realize that.”
But Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Scott campaign, argued that many Florida Republicans had a small-government, libertarian streak. They will feel more than free to vote to keep government out of reproductive issues and drug control, he said, but that will not make them Democrats.
The same could be said in other Republican states like Montana, Missouri and Nebraska.
Democrats involved in the campaigns say that, at most, the referendums could increase their vote share by two to three percentage points. That would potentially be enough to put some candidates over the top — think Mr. Tester — but not enough for Democrats in deeper holes, like Mr. Kunce, a Marine veteran who is challenging Senator Josh Hawley in solidly red Missouri.
Like the abortion rights referendums in other Republican states, Missouri’s measure has a good chance of passing. But Mr. Hawley, who opposes abortion rights, is heavily favored to beat Mr. Kunce, who supports them.
To keep their majority, Democrats must prevail in every race in which they are defending seats, in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Montana, Arizona and Nevada — and must also win the presidency to keep the tiebreaking vote in a 50-50 Senate.
If they could defeat at least one Republican incumbent, they would gain some wiggle room, but their targets are in states expected to vote for Mr. Trump: Florida, Texas, Missouri and Nebraska. (In Nebraska, Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican, is facing a surprisingly tough challenge from an independent union organizer, Dan Osborn.)
Ms. Mucarsel-Powell, like Mr. Kunce, has argued that the Republican she hopes to knock out of office is vulnerable — awkward, unpopular and yoked to the state’s abortion ban. Mr. Scott won his two terms as governor and his Senate seat by extremely narrow margins — never more than 1.2 percentage points — and only after he spent about $160 million of his own money over 14 years.
That personal wallet remains large. Mr. Scott, whose health care empire was found liable for the largest Medicare fraud in history (he was not criminally charged), remains among the richest members of Congress, and Democratic leaders in Washington expect him to dip into his pocket again.
Democrats in Washington see the abortion referendum less as an issue that can put Ms. Mucarsel-Powell over the top and more as a rallying cry to draw national money from abortion rights groups into the state to counter Mr. Scott’s wealth.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee are taking notice. On Tuesday, the Harris campaign began a bus tour for abortion rights in Palm Beach County, not far from Mr. Trump’s seaside mansion, Mar-a-Lago. The party chairman, Jaime Harrison, and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota joined for the kickoff, as did Ms. Mucarsel-Powell.
“He calls it the winter White House,” Ms. Klobuchar said of Mar-a-Lago. “I call it his retirement home. He is the one who got us in this mess.”
Day 2 on Wednesday was in Jacksonville, but Ms. Mucarsel-Powell and Mr. Harrison peeled off to Fort Myers.
“The fact they they’re here, in Lee County, means they aren’t counting anybody out,” said Jim Rosinus, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Lee County, a heavily Republican area that includes Fort Myers. “Florida is in play.”
Yet seasoned Democratic strategists are leery of putting too much hope in the Florida referendums to help the party’s candidates. For one thing, because referendums in the state need 60 percent of the vote to pass, their proponents have tried to steer away from partisan politics, knowing that the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents will be required.
For another, “it’s that tribalism thing, my team right or wrong,” said Kari Lerner, a former state legislator in New Hampshire who returned to her native Fort Myers and is now running against Representative Byron Donalds, the Republican who represents the area.
In Montana, Mr. Tester’s campaign pointed to a past statement by his Republican opponent, Tim Sheehy, that he wanted abortion “all to end tomorrow” and Mr. Sheehy’s opposition to the state’s referendum to protect abortion rights. But Mr. Tester has not made the referendum, which he supports, the centerpiece of his campaign.
Other Democratic candidates for Senate, like Representative Ruben Gallego in Arizona, have made their states’ abortion referendums one of many top issues and have generally emphasized that Democratic control of the chamber would stave off a federal abortion ban.
In Nebraska, where two competing abortion referendums have muddied the issue, Mr. Osborn is trying hard not to affiliate with either major party as he challenges Ms. Fischer. He has declined to endorse either referendum, one of which would protect legal abortion to the point of fetal viability, while the other would limit abortion to the first trimester.
“Everywhere I go, I hear from Nebraskans who agree that it’s not the job of a politician to promote or ban abortion,” Mr. Osborn said in a statement. His aides said he would vote for the referendum protecting abortion up to fetal viability.
Underdog Democrats are all in. In Missouri, Mr. Kunce’s campaign pointed to Kentucky, a Republican state where 52 percent of voters rejected an anti-abortion referendum in 2022 and where a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, won re-election in 2023. In Michigan that year, an abortion measure helped Democrats as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won re-election and her party took complete control of the Statehouse.
Roy Temple, a former Democratic Party chairman in Missouri, declared that the abortion referendum “fundamentally alters the political landscape in Missouri.”
But Democrats in Washington are looking elsewhere for long-shot Senate pickups, especially the Texas contest between Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, and Representative Colin Allred, a Democrat.
In Florida, Ms. Mucarsel-Powell’s pitch goes far beyond her support for the abortion referendum. A native of Ecuador, she is the only Latina Democrat running for the Senate this cycle. She hails from Dade County, in South Florida, where the erosion of Democratic support in 2016 helped give Mr. Trump his victory and ushered in the idea that Florida is no longer a swing state.
And this is the first election cycle for Mr. Scott since he wrote his own conservative policy manifesto, renounced by his own Republican leadership, that included a proposal to sunset Medicare and Social Security, which many older Floridians depend on.
Yet Ms. Mucarsel-Powell’s pitch always seems to circle back to the referendums, especially the abortion one, and the hope that Mr. Scott will finally face his Waterloo.
“People are really motivated to change Florida,” she said. “With women coming out to vote, with these two amendments bringing them out, with independents being really engaged, that’s going to cross the line.”
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