TALLAHASSEE, Fla. \u2014 By overwhelming margins, Florida voters want to decide important issues like whether marijuana should be legalized or abortion rights protected and don\u2019t want elected officials making the call, according to a new survey by a prominent Republican pollster who worked for President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
The results are a repudiation of the DeSantis administration\u2019s current and past efforts to block a constitutional amendment to legalize marijuana, the pollster said. Those efforts included using state tax dollars and money from a Medicaid settlement to defeat such a measure in 2024 and this year employing administrative maneuvers to keep the issue off the ballot next November.<\/p>\n
\u201cVoters want their voice to be heard. They do not want elected officials to impede their right to participate in the decision making,\u201d Tony Fabrizio, one of the polling firm\u2019s two partners, said in a memo to Smart & Safe Florida, which commissioned the survey to gauge voter sentiment on the issue.<\/p>\n
Smart & Safe Florida is the organization that campaigned to legalize marijuana last year and, after that failure, is trying to get the measure on the 2026 ballot for another vote. Fabrizio is a pollster and strategist for the Republican Party and was the chief pollster for Trump\u2019s 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns.<\/p>\n
Smart & Safe Florida fears the DeSantis administration \u201cis aggressively attempting to not only thwart the will of the people but deny them the chance to even vote on this measure and wanted to see if the voting public agreed \u2014 which they clearly do,\u201d it said in a statement released Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The results show that \u201cvoters across all parties are clearly and overwhelmingly upset by government\u2019s attempts to stifle their voice,\u201d the campaign said.<\/p>\n
Those efforts include delaying a review of the amendment language by the Florida Supreme Court, which is needed to get on the 2026 ballot, and a new state law DeSantis signed in May that imposes new regulations, tighter deadlines, and potential penalties and fines on the citizen petition process used to get proposed constitutional amendments before voters.<\/p>\n
The Fabrizo Lee and Associates survey shows 92% of all Floridians \u2014 regardless of political affiliation \u2014 agree they should make the primary call on important issues. Only 5% say elected officials should have the final word and the rest are undecided.<\/p>\n
And 89% of those surveyed said they should have the right to vote on legalizing marijuana for adults, compared to 10% who disagreed and 1% who were undecided.<\/p>\n
On both questions, Democrats slightly edged out independents and Republicans in demanding their voices be heard.<\/p>\n
\u201cElected officials trying to move the goalposts on this amendment are acting contrary to the will of the electorate,\u201d Fabrizio said. \u201cFlorida voters want to be the final voice in deciding whether to legalize adult personal use of marijuana.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smart and Safe Florida spent more than $100 million to get the marijuana amendment passed in 2024. The campaign was financed mainly by Trulieve, the state\u2019s largest medical marijuana provider.<\/p>\n
The DeSantis administration spent an estimated $35 to $45 million \u2014 much of it from taxpayer dollars and other state resources \u2014 in a successful bid to kill the amendment. A $10 million payment from a state Medicaid settlement, originally given to the Hope Florida charity connected to First Lady Casey DeSantis, was later diverted to the anti-marijuana campaign, prompting a legislative inquiry that has led to a Florida grand jury investigation.<\/p>\n
The measure won approval from 56% of Florida voters, shy of the 60% threshold required to pass the amendment.<\/p>\n
The Safe & Smart organization is involved in several lawsuits against the DeSantis administration over tactics that it employed to keep the issue off the ballot in 2026.<\/p>\n
The group filed a lawsuit in October stating it collected three times the number of signatures needed to trigger a Florida Supreme Court review, but Secretary of State Cord Byrd has refused to forward the measure to the court.<\/p>\n
The group needed 220,000 signatures for a review and has collected more than 675,000, it says.<\/p>\n
Byrd, in a directive to county election supervisors, claimed that 200,000 of the group\u2019s signatures \u2013 though on a form approved by state officials \u2013 should be rejected as invalid because some petitions sent by mail didn\u2019t include the full text of the proposed amendment.<\/p>\n
The suit claims Byrd\u2019s directive is baseless, and that state law doesn\u2019t require the full text to be printed with every petition.<\/p>\n
A second lawsuit by the group asks the Supreme Court to force Byrd and state Elections Division Director Maria Matthews to perform their \u201cministerial duty\u201d under state law and notify the Supreme Court that they met the threshold for review.<\/p>\n
Smart & Safe Florida has also joined other groups in a lawsuit that challenges the changes made by the Legislature in the spring, saying the new state law creates an unconstitutional barrier to getting citizen-driven amendments on the ballot.<\/p>\n
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