President Joe Biden on Tuesday scorched Florida's impending six-week abortion ban and said Donald Trump was responsible, casting the former president as a danger to women's freedoms.
"This extreme Florida law is going to impact 4 million women in the state," Biden said during a speech in Tampa. "Let's be real clear. There's one person responsible for this nightmare. And he's acknowledged and he brags about it – Donald Trump."
In territory that has been increasingly out of reach for Democrats, Biden ticked off a list of states from Ohio to Kentucky where troves of voters have supported abortion rights measures at the ballot box since the 2022 fall of Roe v. Wade.
"This November," the president said, "you can add Florida to that list."
Biden visited Trump's home state as the presumptive Republican nominee for president spent much of the day in a Manhattan courtroom for his hush money trial. The Biden campaign has attempted to build a narrative that it has a potential path to victory in Florida, despite Trump's decisive victories there in 2016 and 2020.
“The idea that Donald Trump has the state in the bag could not be further from the truth,” Biden campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told reporters in a call previewing the Florida trip. “He owns not only the state of abortion rights across the country, but he owns the restriction that we’re seeing play out in Florida.”
In his remarks, Biden referenced the Arizona Supreme Court ruling this month that found a near-total ban on abortion that dates to 1864 is enforceable, and painted Trump as responsible for that decision.
"Trump was literally taking us back 160 years. He says it's up to the states – this is all about states' rights. But he's wrong," Biden said. "The [U.S.] Supreme Court was wrong. There should be a constitutional right in the federal Constitution, a federal right, and it shouldn't matter where in America you live. This isn't about states' rights, it's about women's rights."
Biden is visiting Florida days before a six-week abortion ban that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last year takes effect following an April 1 state Supreme Court ruling.
Biden's campaign has sought to tie Trump to the state’s post-Roe law and indicated that a proposed amendment on the ballot in November that would enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution could help its chances of flipping the state.
In an NBC News 2022 midterm exit poll, 56% of Florida voters said abortion should be legal. Among the voters polled, 24% said abortion mattered most in deciding how they voted.
Trump won Florida in 2020, with 51.2% of the vote to Biden's 47.9%.
The former president has voiced support for various positions on abortion over the years, though he regularly talks on the campaign trail about how he appointed conservative justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. After having floated the possibility of a federal abortion ban, he recently said that abortion laws should be decided by states but also that the Arizona Supreme Court went too far in its ruling.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, abortion has appeared on the ballot in several states and consistently delivered wins for abortion-rights groups. It’s expected to remain a key issue in November, but it’s not yet clear whether it will galvanize voters with the same force as it did in the midterm elections.
