They think they know how to end the state’s abortion ban. It involves Trump voters.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in October, Ana Perez stood under a tree dripping Spanish moss on the University of Florida campus and taught eight of her peers how to talk about abortion. The group listened quietly as Perez presented a set of best practices for discussing Florida’s current six-week abortion ban, and the plan to change it.

“We always say near-total ban or extreme ban, never the actual week mark,” Perez said of the abortion law. That’s because most voters don’t understand that six weeks into pregnancy is just two weeks after a missed period, before many people know they’re pregnant.

Talking about a specific number of weeks “will get you into the territory of ‘Oh, what amount of weeks is OK vs. not?’ Like a negotiation,” Perez continued. “That’s just a road you don’t want to go down.”

Perez, a 19-year-old sophomore from Boca Raton, is a paid organizer with Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group behind a ballot initiative to end the abortion restriction. If it passes this November, Amendment 4 would enshrine in the Florida Constitution the right to an abortion until fetal viability, with exceptions beyond that point for the patient’s health—standards that replicate the protections all Americans had under Roe v. Wade.

Since the beginning of August, Perez has been educating her fellow students about the amendment and recruiting volunteers on campus, part of an outreach effort that includes a dozen student organizers at 10 universities across the state. FPF is spending more than $1 million on college programs alone, going all in on the bet that young voters—strongly pro-choice, but with a lot of room for improvement in Election Day turnout—can swing the election in favor of abortion rights if they know that the issue is on the ballot.

Perez had recruited her eight volunteers that Saturday by individually texting every single person on the membership rolls of the College Democrats and a campus pro-choice group. Several had never engaged in any political activity before. The day was hot, the humidity had hit an ungodly 90 percent, and these eight college students were preparing to ask dozens of total strangers—in Florida!— their opinions on one of the most contentious issues in American politics.

“I will warn you guys, it’s a game day. I usually get more opposition on game days,” Perez said. The football game wouldn’t start for another seven hours, but the quads and side streets were already packed with the elaborate tailgating setups of students and alumni. Perez revved up the canvassers with a pep talk—“We can do hard things!”—and sent them off in pairs.

Perez feels as if she’s been building toward this campaign for almost half her life. The daughter of a woman she calls a “liberal lion,” she has a vivid memory of waking up the morning after the 2016 election and, at 11 years old, immediately checking the CNN homepage. “It’s just so visceral to me,” she said. “Seeing that big red Trump check mark, I just started crying. I was devastated.” Perez was in high school when Roe v. Wade was overturned. By the time she got to UF in 2023, the state had passed the six-week abortion ban, and FPF was already collecting the signatures it needed to get Amendment 4 on the ballot. As soon as she turned 18, Perez added her name to the petition—the first one she’d ever signed.

This school year, Perez said, the campaign has become her whole life. She even dyed the lower half of her long brown hair purple, the main color of the campaign’s branding. It was a symbolic choice for Floridians Protecting Freedom, representing the red and blue parts of the state coming together in a shared mission. “I’ve talked to people that were like, ‘OK, yeah, Amendment 4, that makes sense. But I’m also voting Trump 2024,’ ” Perez said. She has no love for Gov. Ron DeSantis or the other Republicans who criminalized abortion in her state—but she has still spent her semester making common cause with some of their supporters.

In fact, the bulk of the campaign’s messaging is designed to appeal to exactly those voters. “That’s why the amendment is named what it is,” Perez pointed out. “ ‘Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion.’ ”

By any estimation, the campaign for Amendment 4 is a long shot. Even though abortion rights have won every time they’ve been put to a popular vote since the overturning of Roe, including in right-leaning Ohio and Kansas, those ballot initiatives needed just a simple majority to pass. In Florida, a constitutional amendment needs 60 percent of the vote—a threshold abortion-rights advocates have hit only in the likes of California and Vermont.

And Florida has only gotten redder in recent years. Registered Republicans first outnumbered Democrats in the state in 2021; now they lead by more than 1 million voters. DeSantis was reelected by a margin of almost 20 points in 2022. To get to 60 percent, proponents of Amendment 4 will have to entice a sizable number of Republicans—and supporters of DeSantis, a top proponent of the abortion ban—to vote for it.

For Lauren Brenzel, the campaign director of Floridians Protecting Freedom, there’s good reason to believe they can pull it off. “Normal people, everyday people, just think of this as a personal decision. This idea that the government is so focused on this, that politicians are so focused on this, is foreign to people,” she said. In polling over the past two years, the campaign has seen support for legal abortion rise, and not just among Democrats. Fifty-two percent of Republicans oppose the current abortion ban, and about 15 percent of the signatures on petitions to get Amendment 4 on the ballot come from registered Republicans.

But Florida polls on the amendment have been all over the place. A few have shown the amendment clearing the 60 percent mark, and several have recorded support in the high 50s. A recent survey from the New York Times and Siena College—the top-rated pollster on FiveThirtyEight—found that just 46 percent of likely voters supported the amendment, while 38 percent were ready to vote against it. That means the proportion of undecided voters is in the double digits.

In other words, the race is still anyone’s game—and the result will depend heavily on who turns out to vote.

Young voters are highly supportive of abortion rights, and they care a lot about the issue. An April Pew survey found that three-quarters of adults under 30 believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. According to AP VoteCast, among Floridians under 30 who voted in the 2022 midterm elections, 3 in 10 said the overturning of Roe v. Wade was the single most important factor in their vote, compared with about 2 in 10 older voters.

There’s a term campaigns use for a category of voters that are friendly to one’s candidate or cause but don’t consistently vote: turnout universe. They’re on your side … if they make it to the polls. These people have to be targeted with more voting information and reminders, rather than persuasive messaging—and FPF knows exactly who they are. “Nearly our entire turnout universe are voters in the ages of 18 to 35,” said Gabriel Gomez, the campaign’s youth programs manager. “And we know that you can’t speak to youth in the same way that you speak to older, traditionally more engaged voters.”

Young people are more likely to listen to their peers, so FPF has been hiring them. Paid campus fellows like Perez are a major pillar of the campaign’s strategy to turn out the youth vote. When students moved into their dorms this semester, campaign representatives were there to greet them and recruit them to the cause. In the weeks since, FPF has hosted five student-organizing boot camps, and volunteers have worked 2,000 shifts across 22 campuses, doing things like tabling, door knocking, and putting on the kinds of crowd-canvassing sessions Perez led at the UF tailgate.

That afternoon, I tagged along with Kaylee Aleu, 19, and Chloe Wangensteen, 21, as they moseyed around a quad filled with students and alumni who had set up camp before the game. They eyed a compound with nine pop-up tents, a DJ booth, multiple television screens, a step-and-repeat, a ping-pong table, and a 7-foot-tall inflatable alligator. “I’m intimidated by interrupting people’s fun,” Aleu said.

Still, she pressed on, stopping two vaguely stoned-looking individuals walking across the quad. Aleu asked if they supported Amendment 4, which, she explained, would “put medical decisions back in the hands of women and their doctors, instead of extreme politicians.” (Perez had instructed the canvassers to avoid naming DeSantis or any other backers of the abortion ban, lest they turn off Republican supporters.) One of the young men, a student at Florida Gulf Coast University, said he’d seen a TikTok that taught him about Amendment 4 and also Amendment 3, which would legalize marijuana. “I’m supportive,” he said of the abortion-rights initiative. “I’m not a girl, so I don’t know how all that works. I’d rather just let them decide.”

The other guy, a UF student, didn’t know anything about Amendment 4 but said he was down with abortion rights. Nearby, another group of young people identified themselves as pro-choice and said they’d heard of the ballot initiative from TV commercials. “They want to ban abortion, right?” one asked, seemingly unaware that “they” already had.

When Perez got to campus this August and started campaigning, almost no one she talked to knew that abortion was on the ballot this year or that Florida even had an abortion ban in place. Two months in, she estimates that about half the campus now knows what’s going on. “The biggest challenge, honestly?” she said. “Getting the word out.”

The second-biggest challenge is getting people set up to vote. College students present an exasperating issue for campaigns: Many are not registered to vote, and if they are, they’re often registered in another state or county and need to be coached through the process of requesting a mail ballot or changing their registration. At the tailgate, a student in a UF muscle tee enthusiastically signed a card pledging to vote for Amendment 4. But, he said, he’s registered to vote in Miami-Dade County, which means he can’t show up at a polling place in Gainesville on Election Day. Wangensteen advised him that he had until Oct. 24 to request a mail ballot.

As the student walked away, I asked if he thought he’d actually make the effort to vote for the amendment he’d just promised to support. “It’s probably 50–50,” he said. “Depends on if I remember.” Turnout universe, indeed.

The day before the UF tailgate, I’d driven up to Tallahassee to visit Florida A&M University, where several hundred students gathered at a free outdoor concert in the middle of campus. At the edge of the crowd stood a purple tent with a “Yes on 4” sign and a Planned Parenthood banner.

Students saw the banner and started lining up. Campus chapters of Generation Action, a student pro-choice group associated with Planned Parenthood’s advocacy arm, have been giving out free Plan B—the morning-after pill—at events like this one across the state. Chapter president Taylor Bennett, 20, was one of a few young women staffing the booth. She said students approach the table just to pick up the medication, which would cost about $50 at a pharmacy—but once they’re there, “I have to get my little spiel in” about Amendment 4.

Wearing a button that read “More White Claw—Less Abortion Laws,” Bennett gave the students their brown paper baggies—and before they walked away, a few of them signed pledge cards for the amendment.

Another young woman under the purple tent, Florida State University student Michelle Gunn, was asking people in line if they were registered to vote. “I am, but in Pennsylvania,” one student said.

“Let’s get you registered in Florida,” Gunn said, handing the student a form. “All you need is the last four digits of your Social Security number.”

It is a measure of the nonpartisan commitment of the Amendment 4 campaign that Gunn didn’t think twice about how moving a Planned Parenthood–supporting voter from Pennsylvania to Florida might affect the presidential race. Organizers studiously refrain from assuming a voter’s general political bent based on their views on abortion, and they show no allegiance toward any candidate on the ballot, all the way to the presidential contenders. They all have their own personal wishes for the election—and are painfully aware that Trump got Roe overturned—but their goal is to restore abortion rights in Florida, something no one running for office would have the power to do.

Floridians Protecting Freedom isn’t authorized to register people to vote in Florida, and thanks to a law state Republicans passed last year, it’s much harder for any group to do so this cycle. So, to maximize its impact among college students, the campaign for Amendment 4 has partnered with voter-registration groups that are willing to abide by the strict new set of rules. Gunn is an organizer for one of them: Florida Future Leaders, a Democratic political action committee entirely comprising young people.

Jayden D’Onofrio, 19, a student at Tallahassee State College, co-founded the group in January in response to what he says is a strategic failure of the Florida Democratic Party. As a Democrat, he worried that his party was consigning the state to generations of Republican control by ignoring potential Gen Z voters, who’ve never known anything but GOP rule in Florida. “They could care less about politics because they’ve never been outreached to by a political party in this state,” D’Onofrio said. “They’ve never felt recognized. They’ve never felt seen. They’ve never felt like they’ve been heard on what issues matter to them.”

Since its founding, Florida Future Leaders has raised $800,000 to mobilize young Democratic and unaffiliated voters, specifically 18-to-23-year-olds. The organization has been running ads on Snapchat and Tinder, organizing massive text campaigns, and hiring dozens of college students to register voters on their campus quads every day until the election—sometimes up to 100 at one university in a single day. Its messaging focuses on specific political issues rather than candidates, an approach D’Onofrio says is in line with the way young people, who are easily disillusioned with leaders, usually come to political activism.

That’s one reason why he’s optimistic about this year’s election. “We have this beautiful thing on the ballot with Amendment 3 and Amendment 4,” D’Onofrio said. “You know, that alone is going to mobilize youth voters to the polls, because these are top issues for youth.”

Florida Future Leaders’ pitch to students leads with issues they care about, like legal abortion and weed. But unlike the main campaign for Amendment 4, the organization’s ultimate aim is partisan. D’Onofrio is confident that a rise in youth turnout driven by this year’s proposed amendments will have a beneficial trickle-down effect on the ballot for Democrats running for local office, the state Legislature—even the White House.

“Does that mean we’re going to flip the state? No, I don’t think so necessarily,” D’Onofrio said. “But it means we draw back the margins. And when you draw back the margins, you show that this is a state that you can still play in, that you can still win legislative seats in.”

In addition to flipping three state legislative districts from red to blue in areas where youth turnout was low in 2022, Amendments 3 and 4 are priority targets for Florida Future Leaders. On college campuses, the group has given out nearly 40,000 sets of rolling papers as part of a “Roll Up to the Polls” campaign, as well as nearly $70,000 worth of Plan B and tens of thousands of branded condoms that say, “Don’t get fucked by the GOP” on the wrapper. “We call it community organizing because that’s what it is. We’re giving out these necessities that students want and need, and oftentimes can’t afford,” D’Onofrio said. The hope is that students come away with both a reminder to vote for the amendments and a positive association with the party endorsing them.

Since the start of voting on Oct. 21, students hired by Florida Future Leaders have been driving golf carts across campuses to pick up willing riders and deposit them at the early-voting locations many schools have on-site. The group is also renting party buses to take fraternity members, sorority members, and Black and Latino student groups to the polls together.

“There is going to be a real youth mobilization and movement that happens in this state in this election that we’ve never seen before, and I don’t think people recognize it,” D’Onofrio said.

The leader of another new Florida organization, the progressive and nonpartisan Youth Action Fund, sees Amendment 4 as a chance to excite Gen Z–ers about politics after a dispiriting few years. This cohort has lived through DeSantis-led attacks on their school library books, college majors, and personal identities. When 19-year-old Cameron Driggers was in high school, for example, pride flags and “safe space” stickers were taken off the walls of his school, and the queer student group was disbanded. Driggers helped organized one of the many student walkouts that took place in Florida to protest DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” bill. As a young person in Florida today, “you actually get to understand and see in real time what a reactionary and far-right movement looks like,” he said.

“Following that, I wanted to be able to continue nurturing and building up a youth movement that was capable of taking back the state of Florida and resisting what I would consider a fascist government in our state,” he said. Now a student at the University of Florida, he started Youth Action Fund last year to harness the energy—and financially support the work—of young activists who want to do the same. In addition to registering voters in high schools and colleges, the organization has been providing voter files and pizza money to organizations like the College Democrats and Planned Parenthood Generation Action. It is also hosting block parties outside early voting locations to lure young people who might otherwise be too apathetic or disorganized to make the effort.

Working to pass Amendment 4 is part of the Youth Action Fund’s long game. “It represents a very practical way of activating and expanding the youth electorate,” Driggers said, because, in his experience, young people are far more motivated to vote for policies that excite them than against ones that don’t. His left-leaning peers have told him they’re turned off by Kamala Harris due to the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. Ballot initiatives like Amendment 4 provide a more appealing reason to get into politics—and if it passes, it’ll show young people they can make a lasting change. “It’s laying the groundwork for them to, later, place some value in voting,” Driggers said.

Though the vast majority of students who know about Amendment 4 fully support it, some anti-abortion voices are trying to make themselves heard on Florida campuses. Earlier this month, at Florida State University, a student leadership group held a nonpartisan election information session with a local attorney who explained all the amendments on the ballot. Of the roughly 60 students there, only one-third had ever voted before. When a microphone went around for questions from the audience, Olivia McLean, a sophomore and the public relations director of the group that produced the event, expressed concern about Amendment 4.

“It’s my understanding that it will remove the need for parental consent when it comes to minors also getting abortions,” she said. The lawyer onstage told her that it would not; a state Supreme Court decision already requires parental consent for a minor’s abortion, and the amendment would not undo it.

After the FSU event, McLean told me that the moderators—fellow directors of the student leadership club—had initially told her she couldn’t ask her question, because she’d wanted to phrase it in more graphic terms, saying that “babies that are kicking” would have their “little limbs ripped off” at nine months’ gestation.

Still, she got in her point about parental consent, which is one of the right’s primary talking points. Anti-abortion advocates say that the wording of Amendment 4 is so vague that it would let anyone—a massage therapist, a tattoo artist—qualify as a “health care provider” to perform abortions, and that it would let anyone get an abortion up until the moment of birth. (That isn’t true—the amendment only protects abortions after fetal viability “when necessary to protect the patient’s health,” and it is not the responsibility of constitutional amendments to define terms like health care provider—the state Legislature does that.)

McLean calls herself a “centrist” on abortion—which to her means that each state should be able to make its own laws regulating it. This past summer, she interned for Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a self-described “pro-life extremist” in Congress, and has also interned for Liberty Counsel, a Christian nonprofit that engages in anti-abortion litigation. McLean believes that Florida will reject Amendment 4 because DeSantis, who has done an “incredible job” as governor, has moved the state to the right. Until Election Day, she said, “it’s just going to be a lot of prayer and, you know, a lot of advocacy.”

But McLean isn’t involved in any campaign activities against Amendment 4. And she’s not the only anti-abortion diehard sitting out this fight. In contrast to those trying to pass the amendment, many conservative groups aren’t doing anything at all to oppose it.

I met Kylie Gillis, a sophomore at the University of Florida, at a campus event titled “Abortion Is Murder.” As a member of the UF chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, Gillis had helped bring right-wing media personality Liz Wheeler to speak to an audience of about 40 on how to convince Americans that abortion is wrong. Club members passed out stickers modeled after the Gadsden flag, with a silhouette of a fetus over the words “Don’t Tread On Me.”

In the Q&A session after Wheeler’s speech, which made a single mention of Amendment 4, Gillis asked her for help making the case against abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest. “Morally, you need to be very kind to people who have been raped,” Gillis told me after the event—but as far as exceptions to abortion bans go, “personally, I would love it if there was never an abortion, ever.” Still, Gillis said she hadn’t joined any campaign actions to save Florida’s abortion ban—Students for Life might be doing something about it, she said.

Students for Life, a prominent anti-abortion organization with 1,400 chapters across the country, did a bus tour around Florida colleges this spring. “We believe this is a ballot we can actually defeat,” said Mary-Logan Miske, Students for Life’s coordinator for campuses in the Southeast. The organization is putting “a lot of effort and emphasis” on Florida in hopes that the state will be the first in the country to reject abortion rights by popular vote. But when I asked her what the group had planned in the month before the election, she pointed to a single weekend in October, when volunteers would be door knocking in a suburb of Orlando.

The anti-abortion side is the incumbent in Florida. They already have their abortion ban, and since some voters will probably skip the Amendment 4 section of the ballot, they’ll need less than 40 percent of the vote to keep it. Young voters do not need to turn out in massive numbers for them to win. It speaks to the anti-abortion movement’s confidence in the strength of DeSantis’ Florida—and the steep odds facing Amendment 4—that individuals and groups who claim abortion is literally murder have not built an operation to rival the tightly networked coalition that’s staging multiple daily campaign events for the other side.

As part of that effort, Ana Perez, the UF campus organizer, has recruited a team of 30 student volunteers, almost all of them as new to politics as her, to help her turn out the 60,000-student campus. It’s been energizing for them to campaign for an issue that engenders such moral clarity and will have a definite impact, as opposed to a shortcomings-riddled political candidate who may or may not be able to make the change they seek. Though they’re largely dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, the abortion ban feels like a big enough crisis that they’re happy to put aside their partisan loyalties to get Republicans on board. And in Florida, where state politics have been dominated by a Republican trifecta for 25 years, a nonpartisan campaign for a popular cause may be a necessary first crack in the foundation, even if the young voters who turn out for the amendment don’t care enough to vote for the Democrats on the ballot, too.

At the UF tailgate, Perez set a goal for her eight volunteers to collect 100 cards from voters pledging to support the amendment. They got 40 before discouragement, exhaustion, and, eventually, a torrential downpour forced the group to disband.

Perez chose to focus on the positive—that was 40 new people who got a personal reminder that they can end Florida’s abortion ban in November. “To know that the stuff that I’m doing is what will swing the election is crazy,” she said. “But amazing.”