DeSantis Fight to Limit Florida Ballot Measures Could Stymie Trump’s Miami Casino Interest

^{Florida Gov. Ron Desantis is asking for a new law to raise the bar for citizen initiatives to get on the statewide ballot, thus adding hurdles for a proposed Trump casino in Miami. (Image: Chris O’Meara / AP)}

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is asking his state legislature to pass new laws that would make it far more difficult for citizens to get initiatives that would amend the state constitution on the ballot. 

Such a move would make any expansion of gambling more difficult. But how much impact would it have on President Donald Trump’s ambitions to build a casino in Miami?

CNN reported that the proposed legal changes could put a damper on those plans – though that analysis is contingent on several factors that are far from certain.

Trump Has Long Sought Doral Casino

To understand why all this matters, it’s first important to look at Trump’s historical interest in building a Miami casino. While Trump famously denied wanting to open a Florida casino during a 2015 primary debate exchange with Jeb Bush, he had already spent decades talking about the idea and exploring the possibility at the time, and observers around the state laughed at his assertion that he never wanted a casino.

“Donald Trump has tried almost every year to have a casino, even before Jeb was governor,” Mardi Gras Casino president Danny Adkins told Politico in 2015. “It’s not even a secret.” 

Trump received some good news in 2021, when Florida’s new gaming compact with the Seminole Tribe prevented the tribe from contesting any gambling facilities more than 15 miles away from the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood. That distance is just enough to place the Trump National Doral resort in Miami outside of the contestable zone. 

But even if Trump or his family could wrangle the political support for a casino at Doral, there’s another catch. 

A 2018 constitutional amendment requires that Florida voters pass a ballot initiative to change the constitution before any new gambling expansion can take place. This includes the awarding of new casino licenses. 

That’s already a tough sell in Florida, where a 60 percent supermajority is necessary for new amendments to pass. Las Vegas Sands failed to even get their bid for casinos in North Florida on the ballot in 2022, as did DraftKings and FanDuel, who pushed for a sports betting initiative in the same year but came up short on security enough signatures.

Now, DeSantis is proposing new rules that would prevent groups for canvassing for signatures. Instead, every Floridian interested in signing a petition would have to request a form from a local elections office. That barrier would make it extremely difficult to get 8 percent of voters – about 900,000 people in the state – to back an initiative. 

Trump Miami Casino Has Always Faced Long Odds

But how much will this impact Trump or the Trump Organization? DeSantis wants legislators to take up his proposal in a special session that began on Monday, Jan. 27. However, even Republican leaders in the state have expressed skepticism about the need for such a session, and most lawmakers haven’t signaled whether they’d support such a change to the ballot initiative process.

But even if the change does come to pass, there are two reasons to suspect it won’t change much in terms of the odds of a casino popping up in Doral.

First, there’s the fact that Trump is a singularly motivating figure, one of the few that could probably organize a drive to collect the necessary signatures even with hurdles put in place.

Perhaps more importantly, the supposed Trump casino in Miami has never come particularly close to willing itself into existence, either. Over the course of three decades now, the biggest win was the 15-mile rule in the 2021 compact, and that’s far from a green light for Trump to install blackjack tables at Doral. 

So would a change to Florida’s ballot initiative laws hurt Trump’s chances of building a casino in Miami? Sure. But considering the low odds of that happening to begin with, and the uncertainty over whether DeSantis can get legislators to even pass his changes, it’s more likely that we’ll remain in the current status quo – with the Doral casino project perpetually sitting on the back burner.