DeSantis Is Showing Strength. He’s Also Vulnerable on His Right Flank.

In April, when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, he staked out a position as an unapologetic opponent of abortion rights.

But now, as polls show DeSantis gaining strength in a hypothetical Republican presidential primary in 2024, he’s under pressure from conservatives to do more. More than perhaps any other issue, abortion is a potential point of vulnerability for the Florida governor — and a rare subject on which he has faced criticism from his right flank.

“So far, we’ve actually been quite disappointed with Governor DeSantis,” said Andrew Shirvell, the founder and executive director of Florida Voice for the Unborn, a grass-roots anti-abortion group.

And should DeSantis run for president, Shirvell said, “if there’s a big pro-life champion to contrast their record with Governor DeSantis’s record, there’s no doubt that he will be hit. That is his weak point.”

It isn’t just DeSantis’s position that makes him a potential target for a future conservative rival; it’s also the state he represents.

Florida is a paradox. It’s firmly in Republican hands now. But it also has one of the highest rates of abortion in the country — nearly twice the national average. And as surrounding states have tightened their laws, the number of women seeking abortion care in Florida clinics has roughly doubled, according to Planned Parenthood.

“From my perspective, it’s terrible, but for those who would completely ban abortion, it’s not enough,” Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state lawmaker, said of the 15-week ban. “If he thought it was popular, DeSantis would have campaigned on that, and he didn’t. He wouldn’t even say ‘abortion.’”

Polls show that somewhere between roughly half and two-thirds of the state’s residents would prefer that abortion remain legal in all or most cases. In battleground states this year, voters punished Republicans they deemed too extreme on abortion. All that might be giving DeSantis pause, even though he cruised to re-election by nearly 20 percentage points and would seem to have little to fear from Florida’s demoralized Democrats.

“There’s always going to be a need for abortion care,” said Laura Goodhue, the executive director of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates. “Ron DeSantis is fond of saying he’s in favor of freedom, yet he’s perfectly happy taking away people’s bodily autonomy.”

Shifting post-Roe politics

Anti-abortion groups, however, sense a shifting political landscape after the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade. In red states like Florida, where Republicans now hold supermajorities in both chambers of the State Legislature, they see a chance to push a maximalist agenda.

At the time DeSantis signed the 15-week ban, the Supreme Court had yet to rule on whether a similar law in Mississippi was constitutional, and it was not yet clear whether Florida’s new law would be legal. (It still isn’t clear: A lawsuit challenging the legislation is making its way through the state courts.)

“This will represent the most significant protections for life that we have seen in a generation,” DeSantis said during the signing ceremony, which he held at Nación de Fe, an evangelical church in Osceola County, one the most heavily Hispanic areas in the country.

Then he avoided the subject for much of his re-election campaign. During a debate against Charlie Crist, his Democratic opponent, DeSantis said he was “proud of the 15 weeks that we did,” but declined to say whether he would support a full ban.

Which is not to say the subject of abortion never came up: In August, DeSantis suspended Andrew Warren, the state attorney in Hillsborough County, in part for signing a statement opposing the criminalization of abortion.

Warren, an elected Democrat, is now suing DeSantis, arguing that the governor violated his First Amendment rights. DeSantis personally edited language concerning abortion in the executive order suspending Warren, documents emerging from that lawsuit showed.

A governor’s elusive position

On Tuesday, DeSantis called on the Florida Supreme Court to set up a grand jury to investigate pharmaceutical companies over claims that they misled the public about the side effects of vaccines, a position at odds with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public health experts denounced his comments as dangerous, while Trump allies saw the move as a ploy to move to the former president’s right on the pandemic.

“The vax thing shows you his raw narcissism and arrogance,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who served with DeSantis in Congress and has since left the party, becoming one of the governor’s sharpest critics. “He really believes that he’s smarter than the public health officials around the world.”

Shirvell, however, read the maneuver as a stalling tactic — a sign that the normally sure-footed culture warrior was still uncertain where to stand on abortion and would prefer to talk about Covid instead.

Conservative activists in Florida have pushed for a more restrictive abortion law all year, and they’re growing impatient. To their irritation, instead of holding a special legislative session on abortion this winter, the Florida Legislature is tackling soaring prices for home insurance instead.

In November, Florida Voice for the Unborn held a rally at the rotunda in the Florida Capitol building to demand that lawmakers pass a full ban, and the group has flooded legislative offices with postcards; other groups are urging lawmakers to pass a fetal heartbeat bill, which would ban abortion at roughly six weeks. Taking up the issue would require calling another special session or waiting until March.

DeSantis, whose office did not respond to a request for comment, has not indicated where he stands, promising only to “work to expand pro-life protections.” And there is no sign, activists say, that he feels the same sense of urgency that they do.

Republicans in Tallahassee are discussing a range of options. Kathleen Passidomo, the incoming president of the State Senate, has said that she would like to add exceptions for rape and incest, and would support a 12-week ban in exchange for those concessions. She has voted against some abortion restrictions in the past, and abortion rights advocates see her as their best hope, albeit a faint one.

Many rank-and-file Republicans, particularly in the Florida State House, would like to go further, but most are taking their cues from DeSantis.

Democrats are watching all this play out with trepidation, mindful that they have little power to influence what Republicans will ultimately do. They have been monitoring the discussion on the right closely, and are contemplating “guerrilla-type” political tactics to highlight what further curtailment of abortion rights would mean for women’s health in Florida.

That could be difficult. The DeSantis administration has proposed new rules that would make it harder to hold public protests in and around the Capitol complex in Tallahassee, and that would allow the authorities to charge demonstrators with trespassing for vague reasons. The American Civil Liberties Union has blasted the potential changes as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

“Planned Parenthood activists felt targeted,” Goodhue said, noting that one of group’s organizing directors was briefly held in county jail after a protest this year.

Another option for abortion rights supporters might be promoting a ballot initiative for an amendment to the State Constitution, but that would be a grueling and expensive process. Republicans have made it harder to pass ballot measures in Florida — the number of statewide signatures required to get a proposal on the ballot is nearly 900,000, with complex rules that require those signatures to be distributed across the state.

As for DeSantis, Democrats in Florida fully expect him to yield to the conservative pressure and sign a stricter ban. They’re just not sure how strict.

“He’s typically pretty loud,” said Lauren Book, the Democratic leader in the State Senate, “so his silence on this topic is troubling and scary.”

What will Trump do?

Donald Trump has been curiously quiet on the subject, despite arguably being the man most responsible for building the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. He made no mention of abortion during his speech on Nov. 15 announcing a third presidential campaign.

Few would say that Trump, who once described himself as “very pro-choice,” has deep convictions on the issue. At least one prominent evangelical leader, Bob Vander Plaats of Iowa, has said it’s time to move on from the former president. But if Trump continues to bleed conservative support, abortion could become a useful political cudgel against DeSantis.

John Fredericks, a conservative radio host in Virginia who backs Trump, said he was somewhat skeptical that abortion would play a major role in the presidential primary.

“Two years down the road, most states will have fleshed this out,” Fredericks said. But if a debate breaks out over who has done more on abortion, particularly on appointing conservative judges to the federal bench, he added, “Trump’s going to win that argument every day. We have a track record; he doesn’t.”

What to read

• The Federal Reserve raised interest rates half a percentage point, smaller than recent increases, but said that rates would continue to rise.

• The House scheduled action on a weeklong spending bill to avert a government shutdown this weekend, Emily Cochrane reports.

• Our longtime Washington correspondent Carl Hulse examines Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s uncertain future as an independent.

• Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children. A team of Times journalists examines how we’re now living in the era of the gun.

Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — Blake

Read past editions of the newsletter here.

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.

Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.