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Legal pot could come to Florida this fall. But the internal conservative battle over the drug foreshadows something much bigger.

Three states — South Dakota, North Dakota, and Florida — are set to vote on cannabis legalization referenda this November. Passage in just two of them would bring legal marijuana to a majority of states, a watershed moment just twelve years after Colorado and Washington became the first to take the step. But the fight over Amendment 3, the proposed constitutional amendment that would legalize cannabis in Florida, indicates a brewing Republican conflict over who has claim to Trump’s MAGA mantle, and what comes after him.

Led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican brass has gone to war against Amendment 3. That includes the official state Republican Party, the incoming state House and Senate leaders, and even members of Congress who previously backed federal reform efforts.

But the most famous Floridian in the world is an outlier: Donald Trump endorsed the proposed amendment in September, posting on Truth Social that “it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana.” The announcement was significant coming from the Republican Party’s de facto leader, marking a shift after decades of conservative law-and-order messaging and making the 2024 election the first in history to pit two pro-legalization candidates against each other.

Trump’s path to this point was complicated. He was outspoken against legalization efforts during his 2016 campaign and his Justice Department rescinded the Obama-era Cole memorandum, which had directed the federal government to avoid enforcing federal prohibition in states with legal cannabis. But his evolution tracks with the GOP electorate’s: A majority of both Republicans and conservatives now support legalization, according to Gallup, which has been tracking the question for decades (overall, a record 70% of Americans back legalization).

Those who have lobbied Republicans on the issue are eager to tout a shift in the landscape. “It has been a sea change of difference in the types of conversations that we are having on the Hill,” said Jeremiah Mosteller, a policy director at Americans for Prosperity and Executive Director of the Cannabis Freedom Alliance. “Conservatives more broadly have really begun to think about this issue, less [with] a knee-jerk response and more in an intentional manner.”

But there remains a disconnect between Republican voters and their representatives. In 2022, just three House Republicans voted in favor of the MORE Act, which would have fully ended the federal prohibition on cannabis. And among the traditional pillars of conservative thought, legalization largely remains a non-starter. “I can't say we should give up an effort to protect the public health against a dangerous drug just because we might not win,” said Paul Larkin, a Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Some longtime reform advocates are low on patience. “This has been a winning issue with voters for quite some time now,” said Paul Armentano, Deputy Director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “Despite that reality, Republican politicians, in general, continue to take an adversarial position.”

The split between Trump and his party on marijuana represents a larger dynamic: Even as Republicans have come to embrace Trump’s style of politics — abandoning staid, country-club branding, and warming to the use of state power to advance their agenda — they have not followed him in projecting a more moderate image on social issues.

DeSantis himself illustrates the paradox: His well-publicized crusade against Disney was downstream from a Trump-induced change in how the party conceives of the role of government. Calling its opposition to the state’s “parental rights” law (dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law) a “provocation,” he signed legislation revoking the company’s special tax status — which he explicitly framed as an effort to “fight back” against the corporation. It was was vintage Trumpism, deploying government power and the bully pulpit against a perceived hostile culture. It helped to earn the governor the moniker of “mini Trump.”

But when it comes to broader questions of social policy, the Florida governor is largely aligned with the party’s pre-Trump past — he signed a 6-week abortion ban and, in his campaign against Amendment 3, has taken to calling marijuana “pungent” and “putrid.”

The Disney episode underscored just how far the party has traveled from the 2010s, when a strain of libertarianism was coursing through the party. (Punctuating the journey, Sen. Rand Paul, once the harbinger of the “libertarian moment” and the most outspoken Republican advocate of cannabis reform, has pointedly refused to officially endorse Trump this year). And yet, despite Trump’s decided lack of libertarian tendencies, he has now positioned himself as a Republican vanguard on marijuana. It’s part of a pattern.

Since he entered the political scene, Trump’s frequent cursing and much-publicized licentious tendencies signaled a cultural break with the traditionally straight-laced GOP. Even after his administration made virtually no breaks from GOP orthodoxy on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights, few on either side “take […] seriously” that he harbors genuine personal objections to either, as one social-conservative leader privately acknowledged. During his 2024 campaign, he has taken pains — sometimes dishonestly and ham-handedly — to position himself as more culturally moderate, welcoming rappers and reality stars to the RNC stage, watering down language in the official GOP platform, and announcing this month he would veto national abortion restrictions.

It underscores the degree to which Trump may have unique appeal to so-called “Barstool conservatives.” The term, named after the popular media company Barstool Sports, has emerged in recent years to describe a strain of conservative thought largely premised on libertine cultural values and opposition to woke liberalism. It’s found a foothold in part because of changes among Republican voters: a majority no longer attend church weekly and do not consider belief in God to be necessary for morality, according to studies from Pew Research Center. Half or more of self-described “conservatives” consider gambling, sex outside of marriage, and having a child outside of marriage to be morally acceptable, according to Gallup.

Few other Republicans have demonstrated the same feel for the social values of the median voter, as demonstrated by Trump’s own running mate and presumed heir apparent. JD Vance is significantly to Trump’s right on cultural issues, from marijuana policy to abortion to broader issues of sexual morality. His outspoken social conservatism has even invited vocal pushback from the exemplar of Barstool conservatism, Barstool president Dave Portnoy, who has made a habit of denouncing Vance’s rhetoric on family and social policy.

But Vance isn’t unique among the party’s next generation: Nearly every other potential contender for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination — including Josh Hawley, Brian Kemp, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Tim Scott, Glenn Youngkin, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — backs traditional conservative positions on abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and cannabis legalization, even though it means being on the wrong side of supermajority public opinion. Given some sort of Republican succession battle is likely to begin almost immediately after Election Day, it’s significant that, despite the former president’s unique political vulnerabilities and anti-democratic tendencies, he has positioned himself markedly closer to mainstream public opinion than those likely to come after him.

That cultural disconnect may be part of why many who have sought to emulate Trump’s political brand — from Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano to Arizona’s Kari Lake — have struggled to replicate his electoral success. As he first demonstrated back in 2015, when he launched a campaign explicitly rejecting the prescriptions of the vaunted “GOP autopsy,” Trump has sometimes indicated a shrewder understanding of the electorate than many purported experts in his party. After his final election, Republicans will have to decide if his insights are worth preserving. 

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