John Morgan, the personal injury lawyer heading up Florida's medical marijuana ballot initiative only had about 135,000 of the 683,149 required voter signatures in early December (2013). The latest I checked, according to the State of Florida the ballot initiative had 747,748 signatures. That meets the minimum threshold in 14 congressional districts to get on the ballot. Here's the breakdown by County. Please note the number of signatures in Lake County that has a demographic that skews white, old and GOP.
That left one more hurdle which happened today. The Florida Supremes just put Medical Marijuana on November 2014 ballot. The Florida Supreme Court was a tad testy during the hearing for the approval process last December and the approval wasn't a sure thing. In short, the language in the summary must be accurate and deal with a single issue. Here is the summary of the ballot initiative:
Allows the medical use of marijuana for individuals with debilitating diseases as determined by a licensed Florida physician. Allows caregivers to assist patients’ medical use of marijuana. The Department of Health shall register and regulate centers that produce and distribute marijuana for medical purposes and shall issue identification cards to patients and caregivers. Applies only to Florida law. Does not authorize violations of federal law or any non-medical use, possession or production of marijuana.
The full 2 page pdf is also available.
Predictably Florida's AG, Pam Bondi, Governor, Rick Scott and just about every other top Florida Republican was and is scared of this ballot initiative bringing out the "wrong" kind of people to vote in this November's election.
The coverage, however, is surprisingly less hostile than you would think for a purple state. Even the conservative regions are attempting to give some semblance of evenness. There are dog whistles in the coverage, but it's not as blatant as it could be. Pointing out John Morgan, the "very wealthy""personal injury""lawyer""bank rolled" getting the signatures to the tune of spending "$4 million" on the project is as bad as it gets.
The GOP is not altogether against medical marijuana. The issue is about perceptions. Medical marijuana is far more popular than all out legalization. You'd think marijuana in general and medical marijuana in particular is a made to order state's rights issue the GOP can promote, but after years of the drug war and hard on crime initiatives; it's impossible for those who signed up for these initiatives to sign up for ending prohibition.
The Florida medical marijuana ballot initiative is a wild card that complicates the voter turnout message. How do you promote being against medical marijuana and still get the 40+% of your base that disagrees with you? It's easier for the Democratic side to sell medical marijuana, just point out medical marijuana dove tails with the rest of the Democratic message: disparate consequences, prohibition wastes money that could be spent on SNAP or whatever, compassionate health care treatment, tax revenue. The GOP could do the same thing by pointing out the state's rights attraction, "sin" tax revenue and how much money would be saved by reducing the number of people in prison and jail, but a lot of Republicans like lots of people in jail and they don't like taxes at all. So, you can see the problem, the best thing to do is keep it off the ballot, which was not successful.
The problem is in the analysis.