make campaign speeches crossword clue

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• Penny Dell - Medium
• March 26, 2021

Make campaign speeches

Last appearing in the Penny Dell - Medium puzzle on March 26, 21 this clue has a 5 letters answer. Make campaign speeches has also appeared in 3 other occasions according to our records.

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Clue: Make a speech

Referring crossword puzzle answers, likely related crossword puzzle clues.

• Give a speech
• Pontificate

Recent usage in crossword puzzles:

• WSJ Daily - Aug. 28, 2023
• WSJ Daily - June 12, 2023
• Newsday - Sept. 6, 2022
• USA Today - June 18, 2022
• Penny Dell - April 27, 2022
• Penny Dell - Jan. 6, 2022
• Penny Dell - Oct. 30, 2021
• Penny Dell - May 15, 2021
• Universal Crossword - May 9, 2021
• USA Today - May 5, 2021
• Universal Crossword - Feb. 20, 2021
• Penny Dell - Oct. 12, 2020
• Newsday - Sept. 1, 2020
• WSJ Daily - June 29, 2020
• Penny Dell - May 25, 2020
• USA Today - May 20, 2020
• Newsday - Feb. 11, 2020
• Penny Dell - Nov. 20, 2019
• Penny Dell - Nov. 3, 2019
• Universal Crossword - Sept. 16, 2018

Crossword Nexus

Potential answers for "make speeches", need help with another clue try your search in the crossword dictionary, from the blog, puzzle #117: vital discrimination (coded acrostic).

Read More “Puzzle #117: Vital Discrimination (coded acrostic!)” »

• Crossword Clues
• Make a speech

Make a speech (Crossword clue)

We found one answer for “make a speech” ..

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MAKE A SPEECH Crossword clue

Crossword answers for make a speech, top answers for: make a speech, top answer for make a speech crossword clue from newspapers, make a speech crossword puzzle solutions.

We have 1 solution for the frequently searched for crossword lexicon term MAKE A SPEECH. Our best crossword lexicon answer is: ORATE.

For the puzzel question MAKE A SPEECH we have solutions for the following word lenghts 5.

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Solution ORATE is 5 letters long. So far we haven´t got a solution of the same word length.

How many solutions do we have for the crossword puzzle MAKE A SPEECH?

We have 1 solutions to the crossword puzzle MAKE A SPEECH. The longest solution is ORATE with 5 letters and the shortest solution is ORATE with 5 letters.

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With help from our search you can look for words of a certain length. Our intelligent search sorts between the most frequent solutions and the most searched for questions. You can completely free of charge search through several million solutions to hundreds of thousands of crossword puzzle questions.

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The length of the solution word is 5 letters. Most of the solutions have 5 letters. In total we have solutions for 1 word lengths.

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Make a speech (5)

I believe the answer is:

' make a speech ' is the definition. (oratory is public speaking) This is all the clue.

(Other definitions for orate that I've seen before include "Give a formal address" , "Pontificate" , "Speak pompously and at length" , "Make a flowery speech" , "Speak publicly" .)

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Made It to the Big Leagues

Brandon Koppy predicts our futures.

By Deb Amlen

Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky Clues

THURSDAY PUZZLE — Constructors’ brains are fascinating to me. They tend to notice things about language that most other people don’t see. Some constructors make excellent puzzles that are all about playing with words, but others take it a step further: They add a visual element to the solving fun.

I tend to admire the visual puzzles because I have never had much luck making them. My brain just doesn’t work that way.

But Brandon Koppy’s brain does. He has made 16 crosswords for The New York Times, and a few have had interesting visual elements. Today’s puzzle does too, though they may not be there for long.

There might be a bit of confusion about how to fill in this grid, so I will explain the mechanics in the Theme Section.

Today’s Theme

I enjoyed Mr. Koppy’s puzzle immensely, but I also had questions about how solvers who use different platforms would fill it out and be marked as having completed it. As a public service, I will relay what the puzzle editors told me when I asked them about the mechanics of solving this grid. No, don’t thank me. This is why I make the medium-size bucks.

So you may be asking yourself this: How do I, a user of ___ platform, fill in this puzzle and get credit for being correct?

Excellent query. That sort of curiosity is why you are such a good solver. In Mr. Koppy’s puzzle, working with the shaded T squares is not the same on web and iOS devices as it is on Androids.

If you are solving on the web or iOS : Please do not type anything inside the T squares, even though you can.

If you are solving in an Android environment : There is a note in this version that says “This puzzle contains several pre-filled squares. For a correct solution, tap into each and enter a blank rebus.” Here is the way that works:

1. Click into the blank cells. 2. Open the rebus. 3. Hit “Done” on the keyboard to close the rebus.

If you are still having trouble getting a correct solution, you can try the following: Enter any of the following in each pre-filled square (they just won’t be very visible):

T BLANK EMPTY NOTHING — (dash) _ (underscore)

Mr. Koppy’s theme is a pun on TEA LEAVES (56A), which are used to predict someone’s future. (I mainly just compost them, but if you like to read TEA LEAVES, you do you.) The TEA is represented by shaded squares that contain pre-filled Ts. When the puzzle is completed, the Ts should “leave,” or disappear.

When the Ts are visible, the entries are legitimate words and phrases, but those answers don’t work with the clues we’ve been given. If we ignore the Ts, or mentally make them leave, the entries make much more sense.

For example, at 15A, the clue is “Regal figure on a tarot card.” The answer including the Ts, T EMP T RESS, might work if a temptress card were a thing, but that entry doesn’t address the word “regal” in the clue. If we drop the Ts, the answer becomes EMPRESS. The Down answers work the same way: The answer to the clue “Fix” is T RIG, which does not make much sense. But if the T leaves, we wind up with RIG, a synonym for “fix.”

Tricky Clues

1A. The “Zin” in “Zin alternative” is short for Zinfandel wine, and an alternative to that may be CAB, or Cabernet.

4A. In case the emoji does not come through on some of the solving platforms, the American Sign Language (or ASL) sign in “In which 🤟means ‘I love you,’ for short” is a fist with the thumb, index finger and pinkie extended.

17A. The phrase “big part” in “What has a big part in ‘The Ten Commandments’?” is a pun. According to the Old Testament, the RED SEA parted in a big way.

37A. I thought that “Mobile home?” might have something to do with where you put your cellphone to charge, but this home is the kind of SHELL that underwater creatures wear on their backs.

60A. OK, I laughed. A mullet is a kind of fish, and its “resting place” might be in some coral, but that’s not where this clue was going. This mullet is a hair style, known for being “business in the front” (short), and “party in the back” (long). Mullets rest on the NAPES of their wearers’ necks.

42D. The “Martian who wears a green helmet and skirt” is MARVIN , the “Looney Tunes” character.

44D. The “Sticks on a table, maybe” are not chopsticks. They are pool CUES.

53D. I love clues asking you to think about parts of speech. The answer to “Last but not least?” is VERB; think about the definition of “last” as “to persist.”

Constructor Notes

My original submission actually omitted the shaded squares — I was worried it would be too hand-holdy or something. But I think the presentation tweaks the puzzle editors added are pretty cool and do a good job of illustrating the theme. This was a fun one to stitch together, and I hope you enjoy solving it! For any constructors interested in this type of grid, I have a tutorial on my website .

Join Our Other Game Discussions

Want to be part of the conversation about New York Times Games, or maybe get some help with a particularly thorny puzzle? Here are the:

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Connections Companion

Improve Your Crossword Solving

Work your way through our guide, “ How to Solve the New York Times Crossword .” It contains an explanation of most of the types of clues you will see in the puzzles and a practice Mini at the end of each section.

Want to Submit Crosswords to The New York Times?

The New York Times Crossword has an open submission system, and you can submit your puzzles online . For tips on how to get started, read our series “ How to Make a Crossword Puzzle .”

The Tipping Point

Almost finished solving but need a bit more help? We’ve got you covered.

Spoiler alert: Subscribers can take a peek at the answer key .

Trying to get back to the main Gameplay page? You can find it here .

Deb Amlen is a games columnist for The Times. She helps readers learn to solve the Times Crossword, and writes about games, puzzles and language. More about Deb Amlen

It’s Game Time!

Take your puzzling skills in new directions..

WordleBot , our daily Wordle companion that tells you how skillful or lucky you are, is getting an upgrade. Here’s what to know .

The editor of Connections , our new game about finding common threads between words, talks about how she makes this daily puzzle feel fun .

We asked some of the best Sudoku  solvers in the world for their tips and tricks. Try them to  tackle even the most challenging puzzles.

Read today’s Wordle Review , and get insights on the game from our columnists.

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Ready to play? Try Wordle , Spelling Bee  or The Crossword .

America’s Colleges Are Reaping What They Sowed

Universities spent years saying that activism is not just welcome but encouraged on their campuses. Students took them at their word.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

N ick Wilson, a sophomore at Cornell University, came to Ithaca, New York, to refine his skills as an activist. Attracted by both Cornell’s labor-relations school and the university’s history of campus radicalism, he wrote his application essay about his involvement with a Democratic Socialists of America campaign to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act . When he arrived on campus, he witnessed any number of signs that Cornell shared his commitment to not just activism but also militant protest, taking note of a plaque commemorating the armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall in 1969.

Cornell positively romanticizes that event: The university library has published a “ Willard Straight Hall Occupation Study Guide ,” and the office of the dean of students once co-sponsored a panel on the protest. The school has repeatedly screened a documentary about the occupation, Agents of Change . The school’s official newspaper, published by the university media-relations office, ran a series of articles honoring the 40th anniversary, in 2009, and in 2019, Cornell held a yearlong celebration for the 50th, complete with a commemorative walk, a dedication ceremony, and a public conversation with some of the occupiers. “ Occupation Anniversary Inspires Continued Progress ,” the Cornell Chronicle headline read.

As Wilson has discovered firsthand, however, the school’s hagiographical odes to prior protests has not prevented it from cracking down on pro-Palestine protests in the present. Now that he has been suspended for the very thing he told Cornell he came there to learn how to do—radical political organizing—he is left reflecting on the school’s hypocrisies. That the theme of this school year at Cornell is “Freedom of Expression” adds a layer of grim humor to the affair.

Evan Mandery: University of hypocrisy

University leaders are in a bind. “These protests are really dynamic situations that can change from minute to minute,” Stephen Solomon, who teaches First Amendment law and is the director of NYU’s First Amendment Watch—an organization devoted to free speech—told me. “But the obligation of universities is to make the distinction between speech protected by the First Amendment and speech that is not.” Some of the speech and tactics protesters are employing may not be protected under the First Amendment, while much of it plainly is. The challenge universities are confronting is not just the law but also their own rhetoric. Many universities at the center of the ongoing police crackdowns have long sought to portray themselves as bastions of activism and free thought. Cornell is one of many universities that champion their legacy of student activism when convenient, only to bring the hammer down on present-day activists when it’s not. The same colleges that appeal to students such as Wilson by promoting opportunities for engagement and activism are now suspending them. And they’re calling the cops.

The police activity we are seeing universities level against their own students does not just scuff the carefully cultivated progressive reputations of elite private universities such as Columbia, Emory University, and NYU, or the equally manicured free-speech bona fides of red-state public schools such as Indiana University and the University of Texas at Austin. It also exposes what these universities have become in the 21st century. Administrators have spent much of the recent past recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged. Now the leaders of those universities are shocked to find that their charges and employees believed them. And rather than try to understand their role in cultivating this morass, the Ivory Tower’s bigwigs have decided to apply their boot heels to the throats of those under their care.

I spoke with 30 students, professors, and administrators from eight schools—a mix of public and private institutions across the United States—to get a sense of the disconnect between these institutions’ marketing of activism and their treatment of protesters. A number of people asked to remain anonymous. Some were untenured faculty or administrators concerned about repercussions from, or for, their institutions. Others were directly involved in organizing protests and were wary of being harassed. Several incoming students I spoke with were worried about being punished by their school before they even arrived. Despite a variety of ideological commitments and often conflicting views on the protests, many of those I interviewed were “shocked but not surprised”—a phrase that came up time and again—by the hypocrisy exhibited by the universities with which they were affiliated. (I reached out to Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Emory for comment on the disconnect between their championing of past protests and their crackdowns on the current protesters. Representatives from Columbia, Cornell, and Emory pointed me to previous public statements. NYU did not respond.)

The sense that Columbia trades on the legacy of the Vietnam protests that rocked campus in 1968 was widespread among the students I spoke with. Indeed, the university honors its activist past both directly and indirectly, through library archives , an online exhibit , an official “Columbia 1968” X account , no shortage of anniversary articles in Columbia Magazine, and a current course titled simply “Columbia 1968.” The university is sometimes referred to by alumni and aspirants as the “Protest Ivy.” One incoming student told me that he applied to the school in part because of an admissions page that prominently listed community organizers and activists among its “distinguished alumni.”

Joseph Slaughter, an English professor and the executive director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, talked with his class about the 1968 protests after the recent arrests at the school. He said his students felt that the university had actively marketed its history to them. “Many, many, many of them said they were sold the story of 1968 as part of coming to Columbia,” he told me. “They talked about it as what the university presents to them as the long history and tradition of student activism. They described it as part of the brand.”

This message reaches students before they take their first college class. As pro-Palestine demonstrations began to raise tensions on campus last month, administrators were keen to cast these protests as part of Columbia’s proud culture of student activism. The aforementioned high-school senior who had been impressed by Columbia’s activist alumni attended the university’s admitted-students weekend just days before the April 18 NYPD roundup. During the event, the student said, an admissions official warned attendees that they may experience “disruptions” during their visit, but boasted that these were simply part of the school’s “long and robust history of student protest.”

Remarkably, after more than 100 students were arrested on the order of Columbia President Minouche Shafik—in which she overruled a unanimous vote by the university senate’s executive committee not to bring the NYPD to campus —university administrators were still pushing this message to new students and parents. An email sent on April 19 informed incoming students that “demonstration, political activism, and deep respect for freedom of expression have long been part of the fabric of our campus.” Another email sent on April 20 again promoted Columbia’s tradition of activism, protest, and support of free speech. “This can sometimes create moments of tension,” the email read, “but the rich dialogue and debate that accompany this tradition is central to our educational experience.”

Evelyn Douek and Genevieve Lakier: The hypocrisy underlying the campus-speech controversy

Another student who attended a different event for admitted students, this one on April 21, said that every administrator she heard speak paid lip service to the school’s long history of protest. Her own feelings about the pro-Palestine protests were mixed—she said she believes that a genocide is happening in Gaza and also that some elements of the protest are plainly anti-Semitic—but her feelings about Columbia’s decision to involve the police were unambiguous. “It’s reprehensible but exactly what an Ivy League institution would do in this situation. I don’t know why everyone is shocked,” she said, adding: “It makes me terrified to go there.”

Beth Massey, a veteran activist who participated in the 1968 protests, told me with a laugh, “They might want to tell us they’re progressive, but they’re doing the business of the ruling class.” She was not surprised by the harsh response to the current student encampment or by the fact that it lit the fuse on a nationwide protest movement. Massey had been drawn to the radical reputation of Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College, as an open-minded teenager from the segregated South: “I actually wanted to go to Barnard because they had a history of progressive struggle that had happened going all the way back into the ’40s.” And the barn-burning history that appealed to Massey in the late 1960s has continued to attract contemporary students, albeit with one key difference: Today, that radical history has become part of the way that Barnard and Columbia sell their $60,000-plus annual tuition.

Of course, Columbia is not alone. The same trends have also prevailed at NYU, which likes to crow about its own radical history and promises contemporary students “ a world of activism opportunities .” An article published on the university’s website in March—titled “Make a Difference Through Activism at NYU”—promises students “myriad chances to put your activism into action.” The article points to campus institutions that “provide students with resources and opportunities to spark activism and change both on campus and beyond.” The six years I spent as a graduate student at NYU gave me plenty of reasons to be cynical about the university and taught me to view all of this empty activism prattle as white noise. But even I was astounded to see a video of students and faculty set upon by the NYPD, arrested at the behest of President Linda Mills.

“Across the board, there is a heightened awareness of hypocrisy,” Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor at NYU, told me, noting that faculty were acutely conscious of the gap between the institution’s intensive commitment to DEI and the police crackdown. The university has recently made several “cluster hires”—centered on activism-oriented themes such as anti-racism, social justice, and indigeneity—that helped diversify the faculty. Some of those recent hires were among the people who spent a night zip-tied in a jail cell, arrested for the exact kind of activism that had made them attractive to NYU in the first place. And it wasn’t just faculty. The law students I spoke with were especially acerbic. After honing her activism skills at her undergraduate institution—another university that recently saw a violent police response to pro-Palestine protests—one law student said she came to NYU because she was drawn to its progressive reputation and its high percentage of prison-abolitionist faculty. This irony was not lost on her as the police descended on the encampment.

After Columbia students were arrested on April 18, students at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study decided to cancel a planned art festival and instead use the time to make sandwiches as jail support for their detained uptown peers. The school took photos of the students layering cold cuts on bread and posted it to Gallatin’s official Instagram. These posts not only failed to mention that the students were working in support of the pro-Palestine protesters; the caption—“making sandwiches for those in need”—implied that the undergrads might be preparing meals for, say, the homeless.

The contradictions on display at Cornell, Columbia, and NYU are not limited to the state of New York. The police response at Emory, another university that brags about its tradition of student protest, was among the most disturbing I have seen. Faculty members I spoke with at the Atlanta school, including two who had been arrested—the philosophy professor Noëlle McAfee and the English and Indigenous-studies professor Emil’ Keme—recounted harrowing scenes: a student being knocked down, an elderly woman struggling to breathe after tear-gas exposure, a colleague with welts from rubber bullets. These images sharply contrast with the university’s progressive mythmaking, a process that was in place even before 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning” sent universities scrambling to shore up their activist credentials.

In 2018, Emory’s Campus Life office partnered with students and a design studio to begin work on an exhibit celebrating the university’s history of identity-based activism. Then, not long after George Floyd’s murder, the university’s library released a series of blog posts focusing on topics including “Black Student Activism at Emory,” “Protests and Movements,” “Voting Rights and Public Policy,” and “Authors and Artists as Activists.” That same year, the university announced its new Arts and Social Justice Fellows initiative, a program that “brings Atlanta artists into Emory classrooms to help students translate their learning into creative activism in the name of social justice.” In 2021, the university put on an exhibit celebrating its 1969 protests , in which “Black students marched, demonstrated, picketed, and ‘rapped’ on those institutions affecting the lives of workers and students at Emory.” Like Cornell’s and Columbia’s, Emory’s protests seem to age like fine wine: It takes half a century before the institution begins enjoying them.

N early every person I talked with believed that their universities’ responses were driven by donors, alumni, politicians, or some combination thereof. They did not believe that they were grounded in serious or reasonable concerns about the physical safety of students; in fact, most felt strongly that introducing police into the equation had made things far more dangerous for both pro-Palestine protesters and pro-Israel counterprotesters. Jeremi Suri, a historian at UT Austin—who told me he is not politically aligned with the protesters—recalls pleading with both the dean of students and the mounted state troopers to call off the charge. “It was like the Russian army had come onto campus,” Suri mused. “I was out there for 45 minutes to an hour. I’m very sensitive to anti-Semitism. Nothing anti-Semitic was said.” He added: “There was no reason not to let them shout until their voices went out.”

From the May 1930 issue: Hypocrisy–a defense

As one experienced senior administrator at a major research university told me, the conflagration we are witnessing shows how little many university presidents understand either their campus communities or the young people who populate them. “When I saw what Columbia was doing, my immediate thought was: They have not thought about day two ,” he said, laughing. “If you confront an 18-year-old activist, they don’t back down. They double down.” That’s what happened in 1968, and it’s happening again now. Early Tuesday morning, Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall—the site of the 1968 occupation, which they rechristened Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza—in response to the university’s draconian handling of the protests. They explicitly tied these events to the university’s past, calling out its hypocrisy on Instagram: “This escalation is in line with the historical student movements of 1968 … which Columbia repressed then and celebrates today.” The university, for its part, responded now as it did then: Late on Tuesday, the NYPD swarmed the campus in an overnight raid that led to the arrest of dozens of students.

The students, professors, and administrators I’ve spoken with in recent days have made clear that this hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed and that the crackdown isn’t working, but making things worse. The campus resistance has expanded to include faculty and students who were originally more ambivalent about the protests and, in a number of cases, who support Israel. They are disturbed by what they rightly see as violations of free expression, the erosion of faculty governance, and the overreach of administrators. Above all, they’re fed up with the incandescent hypocrisy of institutions, hoisted with their own progressive petards, as the unstoppable force of years’ worth of self-righteous rhetoric and pseudo-radical posturing meets the immovable object of students who took them at their word.

In another video published by The Cornell Daily Sun , recorded only hours after he was suspended, Nick Wilson explained to a crowd of student protesters what had brought him to the school. “In high school, I discovered my passion, which was community organizing for a better world. I told Cornell University that’s why I wanted to be here,” he said, referencing his college essay. Then he paused for emphasis, looking around as his peers began to cheer. “And those fuckers admitted me.”

VP Kamala Harris denounces Florida's 6-week abortion ban in Jacksonville campaign speech

Hours after Florida enacted a strict six-week abortion ban , Vice President Kamala Harris spoke in Jacksonville against it — and against similar efforts across the country to restrict the procedure. 

Harris tied the bans to former President Donald Trump who she said has “bragged” about ending national abortion protections through his appointments of three conservative Supreme Court justices.

“Here's what a second Trump term looks like: more bans, more suffering, less freedom,” Harris said during her campaign speech in Jacksonville Wednesday. “But we are not going to let that happen.”

Harris in Jacksonville: Here's what to know about the vice president's visit

'Cruelty and chaos': On eve of new Florida abortion law, Democrats rally for change

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Her speech against what she called “Trump abortion bans” came as the Southeast grapples with how to provide abortion care not just to Florida residents, but to the surrounding region that had come to rely on the state’s access. 

Democrats nationally and at the state level have pushed the issue as a defining difference between Biden and Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and have repeatedly blamed Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

Trump has changed his public opinion on abortion throughout the years, but he recently said he was the “person proudly responsible” for ending the constitutional right to abortion. In a n April interview with Time Magazine , Trump said he would leave abortion policies up to the states, including if they were to monitor pregnancies or prosecute the people having procedures past when the law permits.

“It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not," Trump said in the Time article. "It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.”

Harris countered that Trump would sign a national ban if in office and pointed to Biden as the president who would reinstate the protections of Roe v. Wade.

“Donald Trump was the president who took away the protections of Roe,” Harris said. “Joe Biden will be the president who puts the protections of Roe back in place.”

Harris, Florida leaders look to November 

Harris flew at midday into Jacksonville International Airport where Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan, who also opposes the new state law, greeted her. They spoke for several minutes on the tarmac before they headed toward the Prime Osborn Convention Center where Harris delivered her speech.

Deegan, state Rep. Fentrice Driskell, D-Tampa, and state Sen. Tracie Davis, D-Jacksonville, spoke ahead of Harris and rallied voters to prepare for November — for the presidential election and the voter amendment that could reinstate abortion access in the state. 

Deegan, who has publicly stated she is pro-choice, spoke primarily on the need for privacy. She likened the new law to that of her own medical history with breast cancer and asked the crowd to imagine a reality in which the government dictated to doctors the kind of treatment that would have been available for her. 

“Imagine if the government took away the freedom to determine my own treatment,” Deegan said. “Politicians prescribing what medicine, for how long and at what physical and mental cost.  Think of how much closer we are to that today than we were yesterday because if the government can reach its way into the OB office or a fertility clinic, where I ask you will it stop?”

Davis also referred to her own experience having an ectopic pregnancy that required a medical abortion. She, her husband and her doctor made the decision, she said, and the government should not be involved.

She said women should not feel ashamed for their choices.

"We will not stand here and accept anyone legislating when women do with our bodies," Davis said. "We will not stand here and let them continue to try and control us. I said 'try' because November will change all of it."

Harris said under the Biden administration, the government would “never come between a woman and her doctor.”

“Starting this morning, women in Florida became subject to an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they're pregnant, which by the way, tells us the extremists who wrote this ban either don't know how a woman's body works or they simply don't care,” Harris said.

In contrast, the head of the Duval County Republican Party, Dean Black, released a statement calling the Biden position “extreme.” 

“Democrats know that the past four years of the Biden Administration have been a failure for Floridians and the American people,” Black said in a statement. “This desperate attempt to rally their base through far-left issues will fail at the ballot box. Now is the time to get involved.”

State of abortion in Florida, greater Southeast region

Florida has acted as an abortion access point in the Southeast since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 as surrounding states quickly limited or outright banned the procedure. 

Over 7,000 people traveled from out-of-state to have an abortion in Florida last year, according to data from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration . 

Maintaining that access became uncertain when the Florida Legislature enacted a 15-week ban in 2022. A lawsuit from Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics throughout the state halted the measure until the Florida Supreme Court deemed it legal on April 1 of this year. 

The ruling started the clock for an even more restrictive six-week ban the Legislature passed in 2023. But, the court also approved a ballot amendment going before voters in November that could protect abortion access in the state. 

If passed, the amendment would allow abortions up to fetal viability, usually considered about 24 weeks. The amendment reads: 

“No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

Seven other states — California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio and Vermont — have approved ballot amendments in support of abortion, but Florida has a higher hurdle for clearance and needs 60% of the vote to pass. 

Abortion has become a key election point this cycle, and Democrats have emphasized efforts to overturn strict bans and enshrine rights to the procedure in Republican-leaning states.  

Democratic Party chairs from Florida, Georgia and North Carolina rallied in Tallahassee against the bans Tuesday ahead of Harris’ trip. Nikki Fried, the Florida chair, blamed Trump for the state of abortion care in the country and encouraged voters to head to the polls.

“Florida voters are our last line of defense for millions of women across the South,” Nikki Fried said. “Voters can reverse the extreme ban and restore reproductive freedom in November.” 

Group protests Harris’ visit

Conservatives and abortion opponents have applauded Florida’s effort to restrict abortion, some even calling for a complete ban. At least one anti-abortion group protested Harris’ visit.

The Students for Life of America rallied outside a Jacksonville Planned Parenthood Wednesday morning before the speech. 

The two organizers, both 2023 college graduates, said they supported a complete national ban on abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest. 

They moved their protest to the convention center in order to show the “pro-life movement isn’t just drowned out by the Biden administration.” 

“We definitely need to make a stand and speak up for those that can’t speak up for themselves,” Kristen Wayne, a 2023 University of South Florida graduate, said. 

A larger pro-Palestine group also protested Harris' visit, standing outside the convention center. Harris and the Biden administration have faced strong opposition for the handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict from within the Democratic Party.

Sara Mahmoud with the Jacksonville Palestine Solidarity Network attended the protest and has organized rallies outside Jacksonville City Hall calling for City Council to sign a ceasefire resolution.

"We know that reproductive justice cannot happen without justice for Palestine," Mahmoud said, pointing to the rise of miscarriages in Gaza since the conflict. "...We will not allow the fight for reproductive justice to be coopted."

Times-Union staff writer David Bauerlein and USA TODAY Network-Florida Capital Bureau reporter John Kennedy contributed to this report .