2 years ago
HIALEAH, Fla. — The clinic is neither conspicuous nor subtle — it’s just another storefront in a strip mall on a busy street in South Florida, next to a Dominican hair-design place and near a Western Union advertising remittances to Cuba. It was doing a pretty good business on a recent sticky weekday; by 9:15 the waiting room was filling up with women chatting in Spanish or staring at their phones until, one by one, each patient was buzzed through a white door and into the back, down a hallway painted pink, where one bed sat with two metal stirrups sticking off the front edge. The procedure usually only takes a few minutes, and the clinic offers both surgical and medication options. By a little after 10, seats in the waiting room — also painted pink — were opening up again; a poster advertised birth control for all stages of life and advised deep breathing for stress relief. The administrator, a woman who gave her name only as Rosita, said the clinic performs anywhere between five and 20 abortions per day. Last year, according to figures from Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, this added up to 2,285 abortions.
By Rosita’s estimation, A Hialeah Woman’s Care Center could be the busiest abortion clinic in Miami-Dade County, which as Florida’s most populous county has by far the highest number of abortions in the state, which in turn has the nation’s third-highest abortion rate among states, according to the CDC’s most recent figures from 2019, behind only New York and Illinois. With close to 19 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 that year, Florida’s rate is nearly twice the national average of around 11. Which is odd, because its government is altogether dominated by Republicans.
In Hialeah, the mayor’s a Republican, the state senator is a Republican, and the state rep is a Republican; the city went for Donald Trump in 2016 and he improved his margins there in 2020; and the city’s largely Republican and largely Cuban population has been no small factor in Florida’s shift from crucial swing state to predictably red. Yet this is also a majority Hispanic and largely Catholic city with five licensed abortion clinics out of 14 in the county, one of them a short walk under the Palmetto Expressway overpass from a shop called the 2nd Amendment Gun Store. It is not a city where people’s lives conform neatly to the dominant politics.
“I don’t knock on the patient’s door” to promote abortions, Rosita said. Women seek out those services on their own, for reasons strong enough to overcome whatever may be their political or religious objections to ending a pregnancy. “You come to me with your mind made up.” Patients, she said, don’t typically bring partisanship into the waiting room, but they do complain about policies such as the requirement (recently allowed to go into effect after about seven years held up in court) that any woman seeking an abortion first receive a consultation and then wait 24 hours before going through with it. Patients almost never change their minds after this “reflection period,” she said, though one woman keeping her adult daughter company in the waiting room said her husband’s ex-wife did so after the ultrasound revealed twins. More often, according to Rosita, it’s a massive inconvenience, especially for the rapidly growing numbers of patients traveling to Florida from states with tighter abortion restrictions. Rosita makes sure they know the clinic did not come up with this policy, and who did: The Republicans who run Florida. After all, she pointed out, “this is an election year.”
But if places like this are at the front lines of a battle over abortion in Florida — where a law banning most abortions after 15 weeks is set to go into effect July 1 (depending on litigation), where some lawmakers are pushing for a full ban, and where thousands of people recently demonstrated in support of abortion access in Miami-Dade alone — that day in Hialeah there was no real evidence of the conflict sweeping the state and the nation. No protesters in the cramped parking lot, no political slogans on the T-shirts inside. Just a bunch of women, looking bored or sad or grim or resigned, who had come there with family members or friends or the occasional male companion, or alone, politics seemingly the least of the weight on their minds.
“At the end of the day, when money is involved … it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat if you can’t afford a baby,” said Shayla, a patient I met outside the clinic who declined to give her last name. She was pregnant, she told me, and the father didn’t want the baby, so here she was, getting a snack from the Comida Cubana to have something in her stomach before she went back to the clinic to take a pill that would end her pregnancy within about a week. She described herself as a former Democrat who has stopped paying attention to politics because it became “too much of a shitshow.”
Still, politicians are paying attention to her, or at least the thousands of women in her situation. This is especially so since POLITICO in early May published a draft Supreme Court opinion, concerning a post-15 week abortion ban in Mississippi that inspired Florida’s, showing a majority of justices inclined to overturn the famous 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. That precedent has for decades prevented states from restricting access to most abortions, and if the final ruling resembles the published draft, state legislatures will be free to regulate abortions as they see fit. In that event, said State Sen. Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples), who is slated to become the president of the Florida Senate next year, her chamber might consider a complete abortion ban.
“There’s always a chance; right now we have a Republican majority,” Passidomo said. “We give the opportunity for a bill to be heard in committees and then see what happens.”
But she wouldn’t say whether she herself would push for such a measure, and her cautious tone was characteristic of what POLITICO heard in several recent conversations with members of the future Republican legislative leadership in Tallahassee. Following the disclosure of the Supreme Court opinion, Republican policy preferences on abortion seem to be ascendant — and Republican voters certainly are in Florida, with registered Republicans having surpassed the number of registered Democrats in the state for the first time last year. Yet no Republican legislator POLITICO spoke to seemed eager to spike the football over the likely Roe decision. Even Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — who in April triumphantly signed the 15-week law, calling it the “most significant protections for life enacted in this state for a generation” — has made only brief comments about the news from the Supreme Court. He said the disclosure of the draft was “weird,” without addressing its substance.
His and other prominent Republicans’ reticence reflects an awareness that they are at odds with public opinion: Florida remains the only state in the southeastern United States where a majority say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. And they act on those beliefs. While the number of abortions has dropped nationally, in Florida over the past three years the number has risen some 14 percent, according to reports provided by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, from about 70,000 in 2019 to early 80,000 last year. Samantha Deans, a doctor who performs abortions at a Planned Parenthood clinic off a tangle of highways a bit northeast of Hialeah, said her patients now are bringing up politics more than she’s ever seen in her career. “It is on the news every day in people’s faces,” she said. “I think people are finally recognizing the dichotomy between, maybe, their votes previously and what’s actually happening in health care and reproductive health.”
Perhaps nowhere else in the country is the disconnect between a state’s abortion politics and its citizens’ personal behavior so profound. This makes Florida an especially vivid laboratory to study the limits of the GOP’s push to restrict abortion. At what point does the Republican-dominated legislature in Tallahassee, unaccustomed recently to negative consequences at the polls, discover it has awakened a constituency that had come to rely on abortion as an important option in navigating their lives?
“I think there's only so much testing of the ‘Florida is a red state’ hypothesis that Republicans in Florida want to do,” said Mary Ziegler, a Florida State University College of Law professor specializing in the legal history of reproduction, the family, sexuality and the Constitution. “I think they’re seeing abortion right now…is a bridge too far.”
Raul Martinez remembers when Miami-area Cubans leaned Democrat, and when they moved into the Republican column — helping bring the rest of Florida, and in some presidential elections, the whole country, along with them. Abortion had very little to do with the shift. It wasn’t a big issue when Martinez, a Democrat, served for decades as the first Cuban mayor of Hialeah, from 1981-2005 with a brief hiatus in the 1990s. The city has a street named after him, and he’s spending his retirement there, in a very nice house flanked by oak trees. But he says he doesn’t recognize the city anymore. “Things are very strange,” he said of Hialeah’s political transformation, sipping an Italian red in his bright sunroom. “Most of the elected officials that are there now, I helped them start.” Florida Senator Marco Rubio, for instance, had long ago paid homage at the Martinez home and complimented the oaks while seeking the Florida House speakership in the early 2000s, according to Martinez (Rubio’s office did not respond to a request to confirm this anecdote). “They’ve all become such hardline Republicans.”
To a large extent, Martinez blames local Spanish-language media, which regularly warns about the dangers of socialism — not that emigres from Cuba or Venezuela need to be reminded. Even now, said Martinez, abortion isn’t the top headline: “What they talk about is communism and Cubans and communism and socialism.” In any case, he calls it hypocrisy for Republican Cubans to oppose the practice, which is currently legal in Cuba. “You know where … wealthy American girls used to go to get an abortion?” (The answer is Cuba.)
Julio Martinez, the Republican who was Hialeah’s interim mayor while Raul Martinez was temporarily out of office in the 1990s, claims some credit for shifting the city’s politics — though Raul Martinez went on to win another decade-plus worth of elections there. The two live near one another in Hialeah, and are no relation, not even friends. Standing outside the Versailles restaurant, a political-hangout-cum-tourist-trap in Miami’s Little Havana, Julio Martinez said he opposes abortion, and remarked of the several clinics in Hialeah that “one is too many.” But the conversation soon turned to his record of anti-communism, his military service in Vietnam, his status as the only one of Hialeah’s mayors “with the guts to go fight the communists” himself. He’s been an ally to Trump in Miami-Dade County, as well: He campaigned for Trump there in 2016 and 2020, a period that saw Trump flip several Hialeah precincts and improve his Miami-Dade margins by 22 points over 2016, though Joe Biden still won the county overall. The result was nevertheless a key demonstration of the GOP’s growing strength among Hispanic voters, nowhere stronger than among the Cubans.
Yet abortion wasn’t quite so politically salient then as it is now, with the Supreme Court expected to dramatically change American abortion law a few months ahead of midterm elections and with both Rubio and DeSantis on the ballot. The issue is not a slam dunk for the GOP in Florida, mostly because few people know how one of the state’s most politically important demographic groups will respond. Nationwide, Hispanic Americans are the most divided of America’s racial and ethnic groups over abortion policy, according to a 2019 report from the Public Religion Research Institute, with a slight plurality opposed to legal abortion in most or all cases, where majorities of every other group support it. But the numbers change depending on the generation (younger Hispanic Americans tend to be more supportive) and the country of origin (a majority of U.S.-born Hispanics support legal abortion, and a majority of Hispanic immigrants do not).
This isn’t just an aggregate conflict — it can play out in the minds of individual women themselves. Rita Noda grew up in a mostly Cuban family in Miami-Dade, and 20 years ago she was in that pink waiting room in Hialeah, because she had a one-year-old daughter and didn’t want any more children with the father. “I was being irresponsible,” she said in May. She’s now 41, with one biological daughter and an adopted 46-year-old daughter with Down syndrome; she’s preparing to adopt a baby from a relative. When I visited her house, she showed the preparations for her new daughter’s arrival — the little rompers, the tiny shoes — and pulled up a picture of the sleeping infant on her phone. “This,” she said, “is a product of not abortion."
She now considers herself “pro-life,” and especially pro-adoption, but it’s complicated: She’s also very pro-women’s rights and doesn’t believe abortion should be illegal. She had an abortion, but in addition to her music career she also serves as a doula. She leans Republican, especially on spiritual values and gun rights — “I don’t want the government to take away my guns and this turns into another little Cuba” — but hasn’t voted for a president since she supported Barrack Obama. She was excited about Biden, but now she likes Trump more, and she worries about bills and gas prices. In general, though, she doesn’t follow politics closely. “I think it’s all a sham. That’s just me.”
None of the half-dozen or so Florida women I spoke to who have chosen abortion celebrated the fact; all of them are living with anguish, if not regret, even though almost all still believe it was the right choice. Linda Fernandez does not. She was 24 and in college when she ended her pregnancy at seven weeks in 2015; she expected just to visit a Miami-Dade clinic, get the procedure done, and head back to class. She wound up bleeding and in “excruciating pain,” and crawling her way from her car to her door where she had to confess to her mother what she’d done. Afterward, she rededicated herself to her Catholic faith, went to confession and religious counseling, and became active in advocating for women find alternatives to abortion. Last year, she helped start Miami-Dade’s Sidewalk Advocates for Life along with the local archdiocese, which involves standing outside county abortion clinics to offer prayers and information.
“You can’t save the baby if you can’t help the mother,” Fernandez said, and much of her work involves helping find financial resources for those who feel they can’t afford a child. “I’ve gone through an abortion. I know what it feels like to walk into an abortion provider. I know that if there’s someone in front of me shoving signs in my face or telling me that I’m a murderer … I know that I’d go running inside that abortion facility,” she said. “But I know on the other hand, if there’s someone that’s there willing to be compassionate and smile and offer resources … my heart would be open.”
Others have gone through similar experiences and come to different conclusions. Lauren Routt is a 30-year-old social-media manager with a master’s degree in fine arts from the New School, who grew up in a Colombian family in Hialeah, reading the Bible in Spanish with her great-grandmother. During the pandemic, she met a man, she broke up with the man, she found out she was pregnant. “I was always the person that said I would keep the kid if I ever found out I was pregnant, because abortion wasn’t for me, but I support it,” she said. “This took me a lot deeper into myself. I was like, ‘S---, what do I do? … Do I keep it? Do I not keep it? I have my whole life ahead of me’ … If I wanted to leave this person already, why would I have a kid and subject them to that?”
She set up an appointment at the Planned Parenthood clinic northeast of Hialeah, without knowing if she would really go through with it, and without realizing until afterward that it was on the Friday before Mother’s Day. She no longer considers herself religious, but after her abortion she carried a rosary around with her for months, for reasons she can’t really explain. When protesters poured out into North Miami bearing “bans off our bodies” signs after the Supreme Court news broke in May, she was there, and so was Nikki Fried, Florida’s Democrat agriculture commissioner who is challenging DeSantis for the governorship. Fried vowed to protect abortion access if elected. Routt was there to “stand up and do something, and not let it just be like, it happened in vain.” She went on: “I did it. And I never thought I would do it. And I want to make sure other people who have a uterus can do it too, because I don’t care what the story is. If you want an abortion … you shouldn’t be forced to have a kid that you don’t want."
Florida’s reddening notwithstanding, the state remains an outlier in abortion politics in the southeast. In part, this is because of Article 1, Section 23 of the state’s constitution, which spells out a right to privacy far more explicit than anything in the text of the U.S. constitution. “Every natural person,” the Florida clause reads, “has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein.” Until recently, at least, the Florida Supreme Court has interpreted this to prevent many restrictions on abortion.
Nearly 5,000 of the 80,000 abortions performed in the state were for women who live outside of Florida, according to a report by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. This places the state in the odd position of being a destination for abortions even while it’s becoming more restrictive. Its neighboring states of Georgia and Alabama, for instance, had mandated waiting periods before Florida’s went into effect this spring. Texas last year banned most abortions after six weeks. Oklahoma in May passed a law banning most abortions after fertilization. Florida’s new post-15-week ban is liberal by comparison, even though it has no exceptions for rape or incest — only to save the mother from death or severe injury, or in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities. It would not affect the overwhelming majority of abortions in Florida, about 94 percent of which last year took place before the 15th week of pregnancy.
That still leaves close to 5,000 pregnancies ended in Florida after that cutoff last year alone. Valerie, who lives in the panhandle and declined to give her last name, nearly had one of them, though she ultimately went to Georgia for her procedure since there aren't many clinics in her part of the state.
A 35-year-old mother of twin girls, she was already 16 weeks pregnant before she learned her next daughter would have Down syndrome, and there was no way to tell how severe it would be. “There might be heart defects. There might be lots of surgeries. They might die early. They might live a long life … and there’s absolutely no way to know any of it,” she said. She opted for an abortion, which she called “the most awful, heart-wrenching decision” she’d ever had to make, but she said she couldn’t live with the idea of telling her twins their needs would become secondary to those of a child requiring much more support. “Ultimately,” she says, “I chose my daughters. I chose my living daughters.” Dana Sloope, 32, thought her pregnancy would be fine once she made it past the first trimester, but learned nearly 20 weeks in that her boy had a spinal condition that would leave him paralyzed; she got an abortion in Tampa in 2017, an experience she described as “horrible—just that, hits-you-out-of-nowhere, drop-to-your-knees type of grief,” that snatched away a family life she had pictured for herself with her new husband. Danielle Tallafuss, 35, who lives in central Florida, made the same choice in 2020, at 22 weeks, after scans revealed her son had a heart condition he might not survive.
All of these women wanted their pregnancies. All named the children: Rebecca, James, Nathaniel. All are mothers to other children. And all oppose the new law that would have prevented them from ending their pregnancies in Florida.
But that law might be only the beginning. Just as Trump shaped the conservative Supreme Court that appears poised to overturn Roe, DeSantis has appointed three of the seven justices now serving on the Florida Supreme Court and will have another seat to fill with the coming retirement of conservative Justice Alan Lawson this summer. It’s unclear whether this court will read additional abortion restrictions as unconstitutional “governmental intrusion into the person’s private life.” Meanwhile, in April, a state circuit court judge allowed Florida’s 2015 waiting-period law to go into effect after legal challenges had stopped it for seven years, finding that it wasn’t a “significant intrusion” into the privacy right. The post-15-week ban got DeSantis’s signature two days later. (Florida’s ACLU, on behalf of two regional Planned Parenthood offices and six abortion providers, has already filed suit to block it.)
The question is what comes next. Last September, state Rep. Webster Barnaby (R-Deltona) filed a post-six-week abortion ban modeled on Texas’s, including a “bounty” provision allowing residents to sue providers for performing abortions. Republican leadership objected to this provision, including incoming senate president Passidomo, who said at the time that it reminded her of the people who betrayed Anne Frank during the Holocaust. “Why did she die? Because she was turned in by a neighbor,” Passidomo said then. “So, I think when we talk about these vigilante types of provisions … I’m uncomfortable with them. I don’t think that’s the American way.” Barnaby told POLITICO this month after an anti-abortion rally in Tallahassee that he’s fixed flaws in his earlier bill and hopes to sponsor what he called a “comprehensive” ban next year.
“The temperature is different,” Barnaby said. “I believe that we now have [more] political will to get things done than nine months ago.”
Yet there are signs that even Republicans who cheered the post-15-week ban now worry about the optics of pushing restrictions that might go too far for the public. Both Passidomo and incoming House Speaker Paul Renner (R-Palm Coast) hedged about the prospects for more restrictions, saying the outcome of any such bill was up to the votes of each individual legislator. “The 120 people [in the Florida House] that represent the 22 million Floridians will have their voices heard, and the people’s elected representatives will represent them on that issue,” Renner said in an interview. “And we will hopefully be able to reach a consensus on that issue that best reflects where most Floridians are.” Neither lawmaker would say whether they’d use their powerful positions to push for a full ban.
Most Florida swing voters oppose the idea of an all-out abortion ban, said Steve Vancore, who owns the Tallahassee-based Clearview Research. (The more than 3.8 million voters in Florida with no political affiliation constitute more than a fourth of some 14 million registered voters in the state.) And when it comes to some of the House and Senate seats up for grabs in November, those swing voters could decide an election. “The comfortable middle for a lot of voters is some restrictions, whether it’s parental notification or other things, you see swing voters on those issues are split,” Vancore said. “But when it comes to a complete and total ban, swing voters are not split on that issue.”
Florida may look just as red as states such as Oklahoma, Louisiana or Tennessee on a presidential electoral map, but the politics are different, including when it comes to abortion. Sara Rosenbaum, a health law professor at George Washington University, said those other states have long traditions of restricting abortion, and large bases of voters that support those efforts. But Florida is the most cosmopolitan state in the Southeast, Rosenbaum said. “They tipped the hat with a 15-week ban, but nobody’s willing to go any further,” she said. “You know, they’re just not that kind of place.”
Besides, Republicans have plenty of other issues to run on — not least skyrocketing prices for gas and other essentials such as milk and eggs — and even voters who don’t agree with them on abortion may prioritize other issues and vote GOP anyway. Among Hispanic American voters, for instance, the Pew Research Center found in 2020 that the economy was overwhelmingly the top issue respondents chose as “very important to their vote,” and this was even more the case for Cubans specifically. Abortion was at the bottom of the list of issues surveyed, well below health care and violent crime. This was before average Florida gasoline prices flirted with $5 a gallon.
Mayte Canino, who grew up in a Cuban Republican family in the Miami area and now does communications for Planned Parenthood, told me that her community’s Republican leanings don’t come from social issues but fiscal ones, and noted the many Cuban-owned small businesses crammed into the streets of Hialeah. She doubts that abortion restrictions will turn off this constituency. “They’re more focused on the fact that gas is expensive,” she said. “They’re looking at the fact that their small business is struggling. … They don’t see how the government has an impact on social issues.”
This could all add up to gains for Republicans in the state, which could mean that even if Republicans are reluctant to push for more abortion restrictions now, they’d be on safer ground to do so after the midterms. For instance, state Rep. Erin Grall (R-Vero Beach) who sponsored the post-15-week abortion ban, is running for a state Senate seat. The prospect of an even stronger Republican legislative majority in Florida alarms Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book (D-Plantation). “We are looking at an all-out assault on women and their right to have access to health care,” Book said. “Right now, if any of this were to come to be, there’s just not enough of us to stop it.”
If Florida’s anti-abortion movement is feeling emboldened by new laws and the Supreme Court’s likely decision on Roe, this isn’t so visible around Miami. The city has in the past seen passionate demonstrations over issues of import to the Cuban community there — the fate of Elian Gonzalez, for example, and the death of Fidel Castro brought thousands of people into the streets. I saw no triumphant demonstrators at the clinics I visited in Hialeah; by the time I got to the Planned Parenthood in Coral Gables around noon, the Catholics who gather there to pray and hand out literature on the sidewalk for about two hours on Saturday mornings had already dispersed. A few Planned Parenthood volunteers in pink shirts stood near the doorway of the open clinic, along with a dog (also in a pink shirt). They’d been instructed not to speak to the press.
There were no demonstrators outside the abortion clinic in Miami’s Little Havana, either, and the ladies at a salon next door called Get Nailed declined to share their opinions on abortion. About half a mile down Calle Ocho, the cultural spine of Little Havana, outside the Versailles restaurant, however, a different kind of demonstration was starting up. Miguel Saavedra was standing with friends by a Dodge Ram from which Cuban, American, and Trump 2020 flags flew, and others were starting to gather. Saavedra said he’s against abortion except in emergencies, but that wasn’t what this demonstration was about: It was about protesting Joe Biden, whom he believes is bringing socialism to America.
Relative to broad impact of rising prices for gas or groceries, the number of people directly affected by abortion is comparatively small. But the fear, among some, of where the state’s politics are heading is no less real. “I think DeSantis and Rubio, my God,” Routt said. “I think they relish the opportunity to embolden their GOP base, which is now more aligned with Trump-era policies, which is unfortunate because those policies are … the most extreme when it comes to building on former traditional views of how women should be in society.” Deans, the doctor who performs abortions at the clinic where Routt received hers, said she thinks Florida’s new and potential future abortion restrictions have made her patients “more angry, and more likely to make their voices heard with their vote.” Fernandez of Sidewalk Advocates isn’t angry: She’s hopeful, and she thinks there should be a full statewide ban. “I do believe that there’s going to be a change, but it’s going to take time. It’s just like, a wound that we have to take care of.”
Meanwhile, there’s a large group of Florida women who have also had abortions and haven’t engaged in activism in any direction. If they expected to move on, they may now find themselves drawn into a debate they didn’t seek. But many of the ones I spoke to doubted that the outcome, whatever it is, would weaken the state’s Republicans. Valerie from the panhandle, in fact, is a registered Republican just so she can vote in her part of the state, where the primaries settle the outcome because “a Democrat’s not going to get elected up here.” She remains sorrowful about her own abortion; her daughter Rebecca had been due in May. “If life had been kind, I would have a newborn right now,” she said. But she also says she’s “terrified” about what new abortion restrictions could be coming in her state, and the idea that her daughters won’t have the same options she did. “I think what I really want people to know is just, we’re not bad people,” she said. “We really are making the best decision that we can.” Dana Sloope’s husband Adam, who describes himself as left-leaning, said he sees abortion politics as a tug-of-war between extremes of left and right. “And everyone in the middle is being dragged through the mud.”
In Tallahassee a few days later, Florida Voice for the Unborn, an anti-abortion lobbying group, hosted a “Day of Action” on the steps of the Historic Capitol. A media advisory ahead of time had promised that “several stalwart pro-life legislators” had confirmed speaking slots, and that “members of the Governor's staff are also expected to attend, and may speak as well.”
The hope was to attract the attention of lawmakers, who were meeting across the brick courtyard, in the current Capitol building, for a special legislative session on property insurance. Three House Republicans made an appearance at the rally. State Rep. Dana Trabulsy (R-Fort Pierce) attended but told Voice for the Unborn founder Andrew Shirvell that she did not wish to speak. State Rep. Barnaby, whose post-six-week abortion ban foundered in the legislature previously, told rallygoers he wouldn’t follow House leadership on abortion unless they pushed for a complete ban. State Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay) professed that life begins at conception and said that “if there’s anything unfair about the entire debate that I hate, I wish we men shouldered it as well.”
They were addressing a crowd of about 50 people. No one from the governor’s office showed up.
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