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........

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