TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — By overwhelming margins, Florida voters want to decide important issues like whether marijuana should be legalized or abortion rights protected and don’t want elected officials making the call, according to a new survey by a prominent Republican pollster who worked for President Donald Trump.

The results are a repudiation of the DeSantis administration’s current and past efforts to block a constitutional amendment to legalize marijuana, the pollster said. Those efforts included using state tax dollars and money from a Medicaid settlement to defeat such a measure in 2024 and this year employing administrative maneuvers to keep the issue off the ballot next November.

“Voters want their voice to be heard. They do not want elected officials to impede their right to participate in the decision making,” Tony Fabrizio, one of the polling firm’s two partners, said in a memo to Smart & Safe Florida, which commissioned the survey to gauge voter sentiment on the issue.

Smart & Safe Florida is the organization that campaigned to legalize marijuana last year and, after that failure, is trying to get the measure on the 2026 ballot for another vote. Fabrizio is a pollster and strategist for the Republican Party and was the chief pollster for Trump’s 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns.

Smart & Safe Florida fears the DeSantis administration “is aggressively attempting to not only thwart the will of the people but deny them the chance to even vote on this measure and wanted to see if the voting public agreed — which they clearly do,” it said in a statement released Tuesday.

The results show that “voters across all parties are clearly and overwhelmingly upset by government’s attempts to stifle their voice,” the campaign said.

Those efforts include delaying a review of the amendment language by the Florida Supreme Court, which is needed to get on the 2026 ballot, and a new state law DeSantis signed in May that imposes new regulations, tighter deadlines, and potential penalties and fines on the citizen petition process used to get proposed constitutional amendments before voters.

The Fabrizo Lee and Associates survey shows 92% of all Floridians — regardless of political affiliation — agree they should make the primary call on important issues. Only 5% say elected officials should have the final word and the rest are undecided.

And 89% of those surveyed said they should have the right to vote on legalizing marijuana for adults, compared to 10% who disagreed and 1% who were undecided.

On both questions, Democrats slightly edged out independents and Republicans in demanding their voices be heard.

“Elected officials trying to move the goalposts on this amendment are acting contrary to the will of the electorate,” Fabrizio said. “Florida voters want to be the final voice in deciding whether to legalize adult personal use of marijuana.”

Smart and Safe Florida spent more than $100 million to get the marijuana amendment passed in 2024. The campaign was financed mainly by Trulieve, the state’s largest medical marijuana provider.

The DeSantis administration spent an estimated $35 to $45 million — much of it from taxpayer dollars and other state resources — in a successful bid to kill the amendment. A $10 million payment from a state Medicaid settlement, originally given to the Hope Florida charity connected to First Lady Casey DeSantis, was later diverted to the anti-marijuana campaign, prompting a legislative inquiry that has led to a Florida grand jury investigation.

The measure won approval from 56% of Florida voters, shy of the 60% threshold required to pass the amendment.

The Safe & Smart organization is involved in several lawsuits against the DeSantis administration over tactics that it employed to keep the issue off the ballot in 2026.

The group filed a lawsuit in October stating it collected three times the number of signatures needed to trigger a Florida Supreme Court review, but Secretary of State Cord Byrd has refused to forward the measure to the court.

The group needed 220,000 signatures for a review and has collected more than 675,000, it says.

Byrd, in a directive to county election supervisors, claimed that 200,000 of the group’s signatures – though on a form approved by state officials – should be rejected as invalid because some petitions sent by mail didn’t include the full text of the proposed amendment.

The suit claims Byrd’s directive is baseless, and that state law doesn’t require the full text to be printed with every petition.

A second lawsuit by the group asks the Supreme Court to force Byrd and state Elections Division Director Maria Matthews to perform their “ministerial duty” under state law and notify the Supreme Court that they met the threshold for review.

Smart & Safe Florida has also joined other groups in a lawsuit that challenges the changes made by the Legislature in the spring, saying the new state law creates an unconstitutional barrier to getting citizen-driven amendments on the ballot.

_____

©2025 Orlando Sentinel. Visit at orlandosentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.