Over half of Miami-Dade voters opposed recreational marijuana. What happened?
Miami-Dade may have a reputation as a party destination, but across the county on Tuesday, a majority of voters rejected allowing recreational marijuana to become part of the attraction.
While almost 56% of Florida voters supported Amendment 3, only 49% of Miami-Dade voters were in favor of the proposal to legalize the sale of marijuana over the counter, making the state’s most populous region one of its most conservative on cannabis.
Miami-Dade was one of just three counties where the number of votes cast on Amendment 3 topped 100,000 and support fell below 50%. The two other counties on that list are Collier County, home to Naples, and Sumter County, home to The Villages — predominately white areas known as destinations for retirees.
The amendment, which failed, needed 60% support to pass.
See how your city voted on Amendment 3
Officials and pollsters have differing opinions on why Miami-Dade County rejected Amendment 3: Republicans and Hispanic voters were against it; a state-sponsored campaign against it was effective; voters didn’t want to smell weed; or a medical marijuana market made it unnecessary.
A Miami Herald analysis of results from each of Miami-Dade’s 757 voter precincts shows that Hispanic-majority neighborhoods overwhelmingly voted against legalizing recreational marijuana. Most voters in each of the county’s majority-Black neighborhoods, meanwhile, supported Amendment 3, as was the case in 38 of the county’s 45 majority-white neighborhoods.
“What I think you saw is the same way that President Trump won independents, which are primarily Hispanics down here in Miami-Dade, those same folks were not necessarily in favor of” marijuana, said County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera. “It just think it doesn’t jibe with our values and with our beliefs.”
Not even Donald Trump’s support for Amendment 3 swayed voters in cities like Hialeah, where 75% of voters cast a ballot for the former president, and only 35% voted for recreational marijuana. Similarly, in Hialeah Gardens, only 34% of voters supported Amendment 3. In nearby Miami Lakes, the number was only slightly higher, at 40%.
Hialeah Mayor Esteban “Steve” Bovo Jr. thinks the city’s opposition to recreational marijuana is “simple”: They and most other Floridians were worried about how it would affect their lives.
“Whether you’re Hispanic, whether you’re Black, whether you’re white, there’s one common thing amongst all of us: you want quality of life. You want your kids out of harm’s way,” he said. “I don’t know how legalizing marijuana, somehow or another, provides a better situation for families.”
If it had passed, Amendment 3 would have legalized recreational marijuana use for individuals 21 or older. The campaign for Amendment 3, led by Smart & Safe Florida, was backed by over $140 million in donations from Trulieve, the largest medical marijuana company in the state.
On the other hand, DeSantis’ administration used millions of taxpayer dollars to run advertising campaigns against the amendment, and aligned with the hemp industry to defeat the measure. In ads, websites, and press conferences, the administration argued that it would alter quality of life, solely benefit corporations, and make Florida “more liberal.”
Part of the debate between the two sides fixated on the text of the amendment — how much control it gave corporations, how it would be regulated and what would be its impact.
In West Miami, where only 45% of voters supported Amendment 3, Mayor Eric Diaz-Padron said he thinks flaws in the text made for a compelling reason to vote against it. He believes that opposition would have been higher if DeSantis’ administration had spent more and “more people had known what was in the actual text.”
“I think some people took their cue from the governor and lieutenant governor on this, which was the liability protection, just how far the amendment went that I think people were worried about,” he said, referring to a line in the amendment that says use of marijuana won’t be subject to “criminal or civil liability or sanctions.”
Sentiments toward marijuana in Miami-Dade County have softened in recent years, with county commissioners giving police the ability to write citations instead of making arrests for small-time possession. Nearly five years ago, State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said her prosecutors would stop pursuing low-level possession cases altogether after the state legalized the use of hemp, which looks and smells like marijuana.
Even so, Amendment 3 performed worse at the ballot box than the movement to expand access to abortion. Though it also failed, that proposal, Amendment 4, was more popular, gaining 58% of votes in the county. In neighboring Broward County, where Vice President Kamala Harris was favored, and Palm Beach County, where the two presidential candidates just about tied, recreational marijuana support was about 60% but there was a similar gap between support for the two amendments.
Nikki Fried, chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Florida and a former marijuana lobbyist, said the messaging against Amendment 3 was bolstered by an overall lack of motivation.
“People are just not motivated to turn out for that issue,” she said.
Miami-based consultant Ben Pollara, who ran the 2016 medical marijuana campaign in Florida, said he came up against an “instinctual cultural conservatism” in Miami in 2016 — but that he thinks state campaigns against Amendment 3 had a large impact.
He said the first medical marijuana campaign he ran in 2014 — a losing effort — came up against a similar argument from officials about the text: that “medical marijuana is great” but not this bill. A “version of that messaging,” he said, that “this is for the corporations,” affected this amendment.
“Marijuana is an issue that the country and the state has evolved on substantially over the last 10 years,” he said. “But the support that has grown for legalization is still, I think, relatively soft and subject to nuance.”
Miami Herald staff writer Douglas Hanks and McClatchy investigative reporter Shirsho Dasgupta contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 8, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
