Why Florida’s Marijuana Legalization Ballot Initiative Failed Despite Trump Endorsement, Historic Funding And Majority Voter Support

Despite historic levels of funding, a rigorous advertising campaign and an endorsement from former President Donald Trump—along with clear majority voter support at the ballot box—a Florida marijuana legalization initiative was defeated at the polls on Tuesday, leaving industry stakeholders scratching their heads as they’ve tried to assess what exactly went wrong.

Amendment 3 got about 57 percent of the vote, but it came up short of the 60 percent threshold required to pass a constitutional amendment at the ballot under state law. Several polls predicted a different outcome, but the final vote wasn’t entirely a surprise looking at the full breadth of surveys and taking into account margins of error.

That gives little solace to the Smart & Safe Florida campaign, or the cannabis companies and individual donors who collectively contributed more than $150 million to get legalization enacted into law in the Sunshine State. The multi-state cannabis operator Trulieve provided the lion’s share of financing for the campaign.

The defeat was felt strongly among industry investors in the election aftermath, too.

 So what happened?

Trump, who is now the president-elect after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, amped up hopes that the initiative would pass after he gave his own endorsement and predicted voters would follow his lead. In making the endorsement, he made this the first U.S. presidential election where both major party candidates voiced support for ending prohibition at some level, though Trump focused on state-level reform while Harris backed federal legalization.

Whatever Trump bump that might have made proved insufficient, however. Even with Amendment 3 getting more votes on Election Day than either the GOP or Democratic presidential nominees got, the campaign failed.

On the other side of the issue, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) aggressively campaigned against Amendment 3, telling voters the measure was written by self-interested marijuana companies in an effort to corner the market. Part of his rationale was the fact that there was not an explicit home grow option for adults, even though he has not personally advocated for the legislature to enact that reform.

Some advocates for cannabis reform shared the governor’s stated concerns about the structure of the legal market.

“Florida’s rejection of Amendment 3 echoes a similar message sent by Ohio voters in 2015, when they struck down a measure that would have granted exclusive growing rights to just 10 producers,” Shaleen Title, founder of the Parabola Center for Law and Policy, told Marijuana Moment. “In both cases, voters rejected proposals that would have created highly concentrated markets favoring a small number of entities funding the effort.”

“Amendment 3’s near-total funding by Trulieve raised legitimate concerns about market fairness and consumer choice. The measure’s failure to include provisions for social equity, home cultivation, or limits on industry consolidation suggests voters are thinking critically about not just whether to legalize, but how to do it in a way that benefits consumers and communities, not just large corporations,” she said. “This is consistent with our research on American beliefs and values around legalization.”

Under the initiative, there was no mandate to approve additional cannabis business licenses.. And to that point, without legislative action, the reform would presumably give the state’s existing medical marijuana businesses—including those that funded the campaign—an advantage out of the gate. But nothing about the measure restricted lawmakers and regulators from expanding the market, either.

While there is no data on what share of voters who opposed the initiative would have otherwise supported a legalization measure that did include home cultivation or mandated an expanded licensing structure, conversation about those issues did happen among some members of the cannabis community on social media.

DeSantis also repeatedly made the case that, as written, the measure would have upended Florida’s culture and turned it into something closer to California, Colorado or New York. The smell of cannabis smoke would pollute Florida’s air, he suggested on multiple occasions.

“Just naming blue, liberal-leaning states—people in Florida take pride in identifying that they’re not those. I think that messaging was really effective,” Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML, told Marijuana Moment.

“I think his claim about the smell being everywhere and ‘we don’t want to turn into California’—I think those probably were more persuasive because that’s identity politics,” he said.

Don Murphy, a cannabis lobbyist and former GOP Maryland legislator, told Marijuana Moment that he laid partial blame on the campaign itself, which displayed a “certain amount of arrogance” by signaling in the lead-up to Election Day that “they thought they were going to win, and they acted like they were going to win, and they didn’t want to hear from anybody who suggested otherwise.”

Marijuana Moment reached out to Smart & Safe Florida for comment, but a representative deferred to an official campaign statement that emphasized the fact that Amendment 3, while unsuccessful, still saw strong majority support from voters.

“While the results of Amendment 3 did not clear the 60 percent threshold, we are eager to work with the governor and legislative leaders who agree with us on decriminalizing recreational marijuana for adults, addressing public consumption, continuing our focus on child safety, and expanding access to safe marijuana through home grow,” the campaign said.

What’s not clear is to what extent Trulieve and the other companies that funded the unsuccessful campaign to enact Amendment 3 will invest in lobbying efforts to convince Florida lawmakers to enact those kinds of cannabis reforms in 2025 and subsequent legislative sessions.

Marijuana Moment reached out to Kim Rivers, CEO of Trulieve, for comment. She did not respond.

Even with a big push, convincing the conservative legislature under a governor who has made clear he opposes adult-use legalization to enact the reform is a tall task. DeSantis put significant energy into his anti-Amendment 3 messaging in the run-up to Election Day.

“I’d like to say [Florida lawmakers] would enact the will of the voters,” Murphy said. “But they’re going to have 100 other things to deal with that are more important than this. Insurance reform and all the hurricanes, building codes—all that stuff. This is way down the list.”

“The problem is, if you look at the crosstabs, Republicans will probably see that their primary voters—the people that actually put them in office, because they’ve got to win a primary and they don’t really have to win the general because it’s a foregone conclusion—those people probably voted no” on Amendment 3, he said.

The governor also faced allegations of weaponizing state departments to push anti-legalization narratives through various PSAs in recent weeks—prompting one Democratic state senator to sue over what he claimed was an unconstitutional appropriation of tax dollars. A Florida judge later dismissed that lawsuit due to what he claimed to be a lack of standing and claim of injury.

Bipartisan Florida senators hit back at DeSantis over the use of those taxpayer dollars ahead of the vote. And one Republican member argued that state agencies “owe an explanation” if reports are true that millions were diverted from an opioid-related settlement account to promote the cannabis “propaganda.”

DeSantis’s campaign to defeat the marijuana initiative also reportedly benefitted from a pledge from hemp executives to donate $5 million to the state Republican Party as it worked to oppose the effort following the governor’s veto of legislation that would have banned many hemp products. And one particular cannabis-affiliated company came under the spotlight after contributing a $100,000 boost to the governor’s so-called “Florida Freedom Fund” after its initially tepid fundraising start.

Opponents of Amendment 3 also hired a number of right-wing influencers—including former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, actor Kevin Sorbo and affiliates of the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA—to post critically on social media about the policy proposal, claiming, for example, that it would hand control of the cannabis market to “greedy” corporate actors and that the smell of marijuana would be “EVERYWHERE.”

Former U.S. Rep. Donnna Shalala (D-FL), who also served as head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under then-President Bill Clinton had also urged Florida voters to reject the marijuana legalization initiative, arguing that it would create a “new addiction-for-profit industry” in the state.

A political committee opposing the legalization measure received a half-million-dollar contribution from an organization that Elon Musk reportedly used to quietly support DeSantis before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. At the same time, the pro-legalization campaign has officially exceeded $100 million in total contributions.

A GOP congressman who was previously arrested over marijuana said last month that he would be voting against the measure. While Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) said in September that he was undecided on marijuana legalization, the congressman later affirmed he will be a “no” vote on the initiative.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), for his part, has said he intended to vote against it, strictly because he feels the reform should be enacted statutorily, rather than as a constitutional amendment that would prove more challenging to amend.

On the other hand, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, predicted earlier this year that the measure would pass.

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