Florida Republicans have long been extremists on the abortion issue. Even in the 1990’s as the GOP had several pro-choice legislators in and around leadership, the party’s grassroots began pushing the party harder and harder to the right.

Ron DeSantis after being one of the nation’s most popular Governor’s and winning reelection by a landslide (especially by Florida standards) is now underwater per the latest ISPOS/USA Today poll.

While I think the methodology of the poll can be questioned slightly and still believe Donald Trump will win Florida handily (the registration shift since 2020 is ominous no matter how Democrats try and spin it and as someone who travels up and down this state often, it’s more conservative than its ever been IMO, once you get outside urban areas) I do think DeSantis is underwater primarily because of one issue – Abortion.

I’d love to think the cost of living crisis, failure to reign in the insurance industry, lack of climate mitigation and DeSantis angry rants against public transportation and bikes are contributing factors to why he’s now becoming more unpopular. But the reality is its, one thing he did – sign a six week abortion ban (which is pretty much a total ban if we’re honest about it).

The GOP’s obsession with banning abortion is similar to the obsession southern Democrats had with expanding slavery in the 1850’s. I’d argue most Northerners didn’t care about slavery one way or another in the 1840’s and believed abolitionists were crazed religious lunatics. It was once southerners forced northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law (part of the Compromise of 1850) and tried to steal Kansas that previously neutral northerners woke up and said enough is enough. “You can keep slavery down there but don’t bring it here through violence and electoral theft and don’t make me a deputy searching for wandering fugitive blacks. “

The irony being the GOP, the party now so obsessed with pushing women to sidelines and countering the cultural winds GLOBALLY (I’d argue the GOP is now more repressive on reproductive rights than most developing nations with right-wing dictatorships are – with the obvious exceptions of places Iran and Saudi Arabia) was born out of the northern awakening on slavery. Now they might reduce themselves to a party that only competes in certain parts of the country because of a single issue.

I firmly believe the reaction to the Dobbs decision may track the same way historically as slavery did, where women who were disinterested in the issue of reproductive rights and may have eschewed traditional feminism have woken up.

Does that put Florida in play in 2024? Probably not, but it does shake up the landscape for years to come and perhaps permanently move the suburbs away from the GOP nationally – that matters less in heavily exurban and mid-sized town Florida but could flip Texas and North Carolina among other places.