When former Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is out campaigning for Florida’s Senate seat, she meets voters of all partisan persuasions who want to protect abortion access in the state.
“It hasn’t been just Democrats. This is not a partisan issue for people living here in the state of Florida,” Mucarsel-Powell told Daily Kos in an exclusive interview.
“I’ve been talking to so many independents and Republicans who have come to me and said, ‘This is an important issue for our family, and I wanted to come and meet you and hear what you had to say. And I want you to know there’s no way my family is doing anything to support Rick Scott,’” Mucarsel-Powell said, referring to the Republican senator she aims to unseat in November.
Senate Democrats view Scott, who has never won a general election by more than 1.2 percentage points, as a uniquely vulnerable candidate, even in a red state like Florida. Now they can add the turbo booster of an abortion-rights ballot measure following a Monday ruling from the state Supreme Court allowing Floridians to vote on the issue in November. At the same time, Florida’s high court allowed a six-week ban on abortion to go into effect, overturning decades of legal precedent regarding privacy protections provided by the state’s constitution.
The successive rulings landed like a one-two electoral punch that could upend the political landscape to Democrats’ benefit.
Floridians strongly support both abortion access and the ballot measure. A 2022 Florida Atlantic University poll found that 67% of Sunshine State residents think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And last November a University of North Florida poll showed 62% of voters said they would vote for a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to an abortion before fetal viability, which is at roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Mucarsel-Powell called the amendment an “incredible opportunity” for abortion-access supporters “to exercise their rights to vote and to choose what is best for our bodies and for our own lives.”
She also drew a direct connection between voting for the ballot measure and voting Scott out of office.
“Not only should we make this the law here in Florida, but we need to make sure that we do not reelect Rick Scott, who, in the Senate, would be pushing a national abortion ban,” she said. “It would mean nothing if we pass this ballot initiative in Florida and then we have a Republican Senate majority pushing for that.”
The candidate’s comments reflect the fact that since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, abortion-rights activists have scored victories in all six states that have voted on abortion-related measures, including in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio. Mucarsel-Powell not only hopes to drive more voters to the polls to approve the amendment, she also needs to convince those voters about the necessity of unseating Scott and supporting her campaign.
“It’s clear that Rick Scott is not going to stop,” she said, noting that he cheered the overturning of Roe v. Wade, supports the state’s six-week ban, and co-sponsored a 20-week national abortion ban bill in 2021. Regarding the anti-abortion movement’s new foray into blocking access to fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization, Mucarsel-Powell charged that Scott is also siding with “IVF extremists.”
In 2022, Scott penned an op-ed espousing his support for the idea that life begins at conception—the foundational assertion in last month’s Alabama Supreme Court decision that frozen embryos created through IVF treatments qualify as unborn children and that anyone who discards the embryos can be held liable for wrongful death.
But Scott is now keen to have it both ways. Earlier this month, he filed a resolution reaffirming the Senate’s support for the “growth of families” and encouraging states to provide legal protections for IVF treatments. A Senate resolution is merely a statement of opinion, and is not legally binding.
What Scott wouldn’t do was sign on to a bill recently introduced by Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth that would federally protect IVF treatments. Mucarsel-Powell has slammed Scott for refusing to support the measure while introducing a symbolic resolution.
“He knows he’s vulnerable,” she recently told The Palm Beach Post.
Speaking with Daily Kos, Mucarsel-Powell recalled talking to a woman on the campaign trail with a 1-month-old baby—a pregnancy made possible with the help of IVF treatments. She had frozen additional embryos while deciding whether to have more children, but according to Mucarsel-Powell, the woman was now “extremely concerned” about whether disposing of those embryos would put her in legal jeopardy.
“These are the most extreme and callous laws that these extremists like Rick Scott are proposing, and it does nothing to protect families, but it does everything to put a woman’s life in danger,” Mucarsel-Powell said of Republican efforts to impose government regulations on Americans’ choices regarding when and how to start a family.
Mucarsel-Powell said that if she were elected, she would “absolutely” vote to codify Roe v. Wade into law and restore abortion access nationally. Asked if she envisions introducing other measures to protect reproductive rights, the candidate turned to a more global argument about gender equity and empowering women to have greater control over their decisions and their futures.
“We have to go back to a time where we actually protect the civil rights of women as a whole,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “I think that’s part of the problem here.”
She stressed that an equal pay act should be passed so that women “can earn the same as men for doing the same job.” She also said she wants to make sure women have access to contraception and to child care. Passing laws like this, Mucarsel-Powell said, isn’t just good for women, it’s good for democracy because women have always been on the front lines of “protecting freedom, of protecting democracy.”
“When women organize, when we create a movement, we win,” she said.
“We are the bread-and-butter winners, many of us, in many of our households, and we need to have those protections and also those supports so that we can continue to work and to contribute to the economy,” Mucarsel-Powell said.
“It’s so important,” she added, “because if we have economic empowerment for women—believe me—it will be much more difficult for these extremists, like Rick Scott, to attack women’s rights.”
Another special election just delivered still more bad news for the GOP, but Democrat Marilyn Lands’, well, landslide should really have Republicans quaking. As we explain on this week’s episode of The Downballot, this was the first test of in vitro fertilization at the ballot box since the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that imperiled the procedure, and Republicans failed spectacularly—with dire implications for November.