Joe Biden brings his reelection campaign to Tampa next week, perhaps because, in his nostalgic mind, it's still 1996 and the other Bay area is gettable, or perhaps it's just because he can. Air Force 1 goes where he directs. And, after all, Biden is not the major-party presidential candidate lashed to a courtroom by brashly creative lawfare. Yet, anyway.
In an announcement bereft of details released Thursday, the campaign declared Biden is scheduled to visit Tampa Tuesday. (Hope it’s not for the Heir Apparent's 25th birthday; there’s barely enough cake to go around as it is, and my budget won’t support Biden levels of ice cream consumption.)
The campaign followed up Friday with its exquisitely precious and predictable rationale: Joe Biden, whose regard for inconvenient offspring is obvious — he has at least one grandchild he long failed to acknowledge and whose existence he still occasionally ignores — will come to Tampa brandishing the torch of abortion on demand.
TALLAHASSEE — When President Joe Biden comes to Tampa on Tuesday, he’ll be talking about the issue that has reinvigorated his campaign’s presence in Florida: abortion.
Biden is coming to Florida just a week before the state’s six-week abortion ban will take effect. In an email, his campaign highlighted concerns about how the new law will affect access to abortion for women across the southeastern United States.
It said Biden will make remarks in Tampa “on the stakes of this election for reproductive freedom across the entire country.”
Florida voters in November will get to decide on a proposed constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights. The Biden campaign has seized on that ballot issue, releasing a memo earlier this month calling Florida “winnable.” …
“While Donald Trump continues to brag about unleashing these extreme and dangerous bans, President Joe Biden is running to restore reproductive freedom,” Morgan Mohr, the Biden-Harris campaign senior adviser for reproductive rights, said in an email Friday. “Since the overturning of Roe, whenever reproductive rights have been on the ballot, they have won, and this November will be no different.”
Well. They can believe that if they want to.
Meanwhile, I blame Taylor Swift. Actually, I blame the billionaire performer’s passionate Swifties, most of whom are documented to be progressive white suburban millennial women with dubious financial sense (Swifties, many on tight budgets, spent $1,300 to attend the Eras Tour).
Whoa. Hang on a second. Be right back.
OK, and this is completely weird and over-the-line creepy: While this was being typed in the hacker’s upstairs garret in complete silence — your correspondent is not one to read aloud while he composes — downstairs, the family room Sonos speaker just launched “Fortnight,” from Swift’s evidently new The Tortured Poets Department.
That’s fine. That’s totally fine. Nothing at all to be concerned about. Besides, this not-at-all creepy episode provides the handy segue we were searching for in the first place. To wit: We suspect the Biden administration positively teems with Swifties. Why wouldn’t it?
Moreover, it’s well-established by his repeated admission that Biden doesn’t do or mumble anything contrary to his staffers’ instructions, so maybe this explains his dive into my backyard: Midnight Friday, Swift dropped — I think that’s the term the kids use — the aforementioned album, which includes a track called Florida!!!, in collaboration with Florence Welch (of + the Machine fame).
Taylor Swift’s new song “Florida!!!” paints "a portrait of an alluring state built on contradictions, incorporating both the beautiful and the brutal. She leans into the weirdness of our crime and lore." https://t.co/GAWf1M5InK via @gabriellecalise
— Craig Pittman (@craigtimes) April 19, 2024
We’ll leave it to Swifties and pop culture writers to sort what all’s going on with the song. What we will say in this column that is vaguely about politics is this: Swift did three sold-out nights in Tampa last year. Not so coincidentally, we suspect, the Swifties who help schedule days around Uncle Joe’s retreats to Rehoboth Beach have a sudden rush of Bayshore Boulevard envy.
We find no fault with that.
But, Swifties' titterings notwithstanding, campaigns for federal office usually are decided over larger issues than those cited in the pop star’s lyrics. (And here we resist the idea of Hunter Biden’s ear pricking at Swift’s reference to Florida as “one hell of a drug” because there is no humor in making sport of recovering addicts.)
Whether Biden and Democrats can build winning momentum on the dismembered corpses of unborn humans remains to be seen. (It’s reprehensible that they even try and ghoulish whenever they succeed.) They will have an ally in Ms. Swift, evidently, especially because fanatics who want to believe she’s on their side will interpret and amplify the songwriter’s vague references:
Happy #TTPD Day; I knew Taylor Swift's song Florida!!! was going to be an Easter egg endorsing abortion rights and marijuana legalization ballot measures in the state where she'll perform less than a month before the election and I was...clearly right. pic.twitter.com/YbhVxhw8Kz
— Amy Littlefield (@amylittlefield) April 19, 2024
So that’s what that’s about. Good to know.
Anyway, Florida’s Best Newspaper™ also describes why, for all their proclaimed optimism, Biden + Company may come to disappointment. The Tampa Bay area, once the swingy anchor of the unpredictable and election-deciding I-4 corridor, is trending so very much crimson.
[E]arlier this month, Gov. Ron DeSantis made a bold pronouncement.
The Tampa Bay region, which for decades has been a swing region within a swing state, is a toss-up no longer. Now, DeSantis says, it can be penciled into the Republican column.
“Hillsborough (Tampa) is about to flip from D to R, which will mean every county in the Tampa Bay market has a R advantage in this previously ‘swing’ region of the state,” DeSantis wrote on the social platform X … on April 4, citing local voter registration numbers.
Small wonder, then, that, early on in the races at the top of the ballot, Donald Trump and Sen. Rick Scott enjoy poll leads that put their races firmly in beyond-doubt territory. As for revving up voters over legalizing recreational pot and (let’s be clear) abortion on demand, well, it’s early days, sure, but both issues — rightly opposed by DeSantis — are, as they should be, in deep trouble.
The two high-profile referendums on the 2024 Florida ballot — on abortion rights and recreational marijuana — are polling short of what they need to pass.
A statewide public opinion poll released Thursday by Florida Atlantic University found less than 50% support for each. Passage requires 60% of the vote.
- Abortion: The measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution, Amendment 4, has support of 49% of those surveyed and opposition from 19%. About one-third of voters, 32%, said they didn’t know.
That shows a lot of potential undecided voters that abortion rights supporters — and opponents — can attempt to convert to their positions.
- Marijuana: The measure that would allow recreational marijuana, Amendment 3, is supported by 47% of voters. The opposition, 35%, is much higher than for the abortion question.
The poll found 18% didn’t know. To get to the 60% required for passage, supporters of recreational marijuana would have to convince seven out of every 10 undecided voters to vote “yes.”
And so we welcome President Biden to Tampa come Tuesday. Time spent fruitlessly here is time missed in Wisconsin and Michigan.
At the risk of speaking out of turn, I’m certain the Heir Apparent won’t mind sharing a slice of cake. He has some thoughts on tax policy to share.
