The GOP’s Tipping Point on Weed
6 min read
One Sunday earlier this month, Dave Portnoy ordered a pizza, plopped down on his couch to watch football, and lit a blunt. He was angry. The Barstool Sports founder, who is beloved by many right-leaning young men, was in his mansion in Massachusetts, where he could legally smoke weed “like a human,” as he said in a video posted on X. But he can’t do that at his home in Miami. “Freedom. It’s about freedom,” Portnoy said, encouraging viewers to vote yes on an amendment that would legalize recreational cannabis in Florida, before blowing smoke into the camera.
If Florida passes the amendment, the state would become something of an aberration. Although 24 other states already have legal pot on the books, just four of them voted for Donald Trump in 2020: Alaska, Missouri, Ohio, and Montana. Many top Republicans remain vehemently against legal weed, warning that the drug brings disorder and health risks, especially as marijuana has become more potent. Earlier this year, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed a bill allowing the sale of weed, making a claim that recreational marijuana is linked to “increased gang activity and violent crime”—a link that researchers are still divided over. Senator J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has also repeatedly expressed that he is against legalization.
But the measure in Florida has the support of the state’s most famous Republican. Trump posted on Truth Social earlier this month that he will be voting for the initiative. “I believe it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use,” he wrote. Polls suggest that the referendum is hovering just a tick above the 60 percent threshold it needs to pass and therefore enshrine in Florida’s constitution the right to possess, purchase, and use marijuana. It’s not a sure thing, but if it does indeed go through, the decision would be “an incredibly important concession for American conservatism,” Allan Lichtman, a historian at American University, told me. Florida could end up becoming a tipping point for the rest of the Republican Party.
When Florida acts, other conservative states listen. Under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has positioned itself as an antidote to blue America. One week after New York announced its COVID “vaccine passport” in 2021, DeSantis issued an order banning local businesses from requiring proof of immunization. Other red states, including Texas, Georgia, and Alabama, followed suit. And after Florida enacted its “Don’t Say Gay” law in March 2022, more than a dozen states introduced similar bills governing the teaching of sexual orientation in schools. “Florida has been right at the epicenter of the culture war that’s been so important for Republicans in recent years,” Lichtman said.
With legal weed, Florida has not escaped the culture wars. DeSantis has remained vehemently against the measure, even after Trump’s endorsement, as has the state Republican Party, which has said that legalization would “INSTANTLY make Florida more blue.” The state approved medical marijuana in 2016, and Florida’s largest medical-marijuana dispensary has spent tens of millions of dollars to wrangle the nearly 900,000 signatures required to get the referendum on the ballot in November. The DeSantis administration appealed to the state’s supreme court in an unsuccessful attempt to get the initiative struck from the ballot.
DeSantis’s position is aligned with the GOP’s overall message on marijuana, which has stayed fairly consistent even as the party has flipped on many other issues. After all, Richard Nixon led the War on Drugs, Ronald Reagan declared marijuana “probably the most dangerous drug in the United States,” and both Presidents Bush conducted massive enforcement sweeps to signal that the federal government would not loosen its prohibitionist stance. For his part, Trump said in 2015 that recreational marijuana is “bad, and I feel strongly about that.” He has bragged that he’s never touched the stuff. As president, he also claimed to have donated one of his paychecks to fund a public-health campaign against the drug. At times, however, he has also said that states should decide whether or not to legalize.
But Republican voters are gradually breaking away from the party’s hard-line stance. A slim majority are now in favor of legalization, according to Gallup, which has tracked Americans’ views on marijuana every year since 1969. Republicans’ newfound support is as much a matter of age as of politics. Unlike the main state party, the Florida Young Republicans group called legalization “the obvious choice.”
If Florida ends up becoming a weed trendsetter for Republicans, it wouldn’t be the first time. Something similar happened with medical marijuana: By the time legalization came to Florida, many blue states had already green-lit their own medical-marijuana programs. But Florida was the first state in the South to dispense medical marijuana. In the next few years, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana followed. If Florida passes the new measure, it would present “a notable marker in this pattern that we have seen,” Joanne Spetz, the director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UC San Francisco, told me.
Part of that diffusion of medical marijuana was influenced by more conservative states learning from the experience of more liberal ones, and designing their programs to be more palatable to a population that doesn’t want to see beachfront pot docs selling medical cards to every tourist with a headache. In red states, medical-marijuana programs “tend to be more restrictive” than in blue states, Daniel Mallinson, a public-policy professor at Penn State Harrisburg, told me. The same may hold for recreational marijuana. Whether states follow Florida’s lead might come down to whether the state can implement legalization in a way that simultaneously fulfills the will of the electorate and doesn’t make retirees in the Villages lament that they’ve suddenly been transported to Denver. Put simply: It might come down to the smell.
“I don’t want every hotel to really smell,” DeSantis warned at a press conference in early March. It’s a concern shared by Trump himself, who last month posted that Florida must ensure that “we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat run Cities.” New York Republicans have introduced legislation to ban marijuana smoking in public in response to New Yorkers being “regularly assailed with the pungent odor of marijuana on public sidewalks, in parking lots and other public spaces”—which even Democratic Mayor Eric Adams acknowledged is pervasive. And Vance opposed his own state’s legalization efforts, because “I want to be able to do normal things without being slammed in the face with the smell of weed.”
Of course, most states with legal marijuana also restrict public consumption of the drug, but enforcement is often spotty. Florida is not exactly known for effectively preventing public disorder. It is the state that has made headlines for Disney World patrons attempting to steal a golf cart, annual spring-break riots, and men who risk danger with alligators (whether it’s throwing a gator through a drive-thru window or stealing one from a mini-golf course).
Even if Florida enters a new era of reefer madness and manages to somehow keep the Disney World tourists, spring breakers, and “Florida men” calm, not every red state will quickly follow suit; voters in Oklahoma and Arkansas voted against legalization in recent years. Still, Florida’s measure could be a win for conservatives—even the ones who are anti-weed. They are right: Marijuana can be addictive, and pot smoke stinks. But the status quo—one in which marijuana is banned on the federal level—keeps the drug in a gray area that prevents it from being studied on university campuses and regulated by the FDA. Yes, legalization might mean Republicans smell weed on street corners, but it could also allow for more research into the effects of marijuana, and more regulation of where and when the drug can be used.
Until a critical mass of red states embraces recreational weed, it’s hard to see anything changing. Florida cannot bring the entire Republican Party along overnight, but perhaps sometime soon, Dave Portnoy and his “stoolies” in Florida can legally order pizza, watch football, and smoke a joint on the couch.
