In addition to providing an early indication of how widespread this backlash may benefit Democrats in the 2024 election, the ballot initiative Ohio voters will decide on Tuesday is likely to demonstrate again the continuing public resistance to last year’s Supreme Court decision ending the nationwide constitutional right to abortion.
State Republicans in Ohio have put a proposition on the ballot that would make future initiatives to amend the state Constitution dependent on receiving 60% of the vote in order to be adopted. The new rule would apply to all amendments, but the campaign has become a litmus test of public opinion in the state over abortion. A proposal to end majority rule on ballot initiatives has been put forth by Republicans and their anti-abortion allies because they are afraid that Ohio voters will approve of a separate ballot initiative in November to overturn the six-week abortion ban passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
To reinstate abortion rights in the state, proponents of the right are optimistic about today’s vote and the subsequent election in November. “If I were on the ground in Ohio, I’d be feeling very good about the work I was doing,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications and research at NARAL Pro-Choice America.
The widespread public support for keeping legal access to abortion, even in most states that currently lean firmly towards Republicans, would be underscored if Ohio voters on Tuesday rejected the plan, known as Issue 1, to demand super-majorities for future initiatives. The majority of people in 43 states stated they think abortion should stay legal in all or most instances, according to a big polling experiment conducted in 2022 by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute.
The outcomes at the polls reflect those attitudes. Each time voters have had the chance to decide whether abortion should stay legal in their state through a ballot initiative since the Republican-appointed US Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, proponents of abortion rights have prevailed. This trend may be seen in both traditionally “red” states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana and traditionally “blue” places like California and Vermont. After Tuesday’s win in Ohio, a state that former President Donald Trump easily won in both 2016 and 2020, advocates will likely push for ballot initiatives restoring abortion rights in other traditionally Republican states next year, such as Florida, South Dakota, Missouri, and possibly Arizona, where Republican governors and legislators have restricted or banned the procedure.
Abortion rights supporters might get a boost from an Ohio victory, but it could also highlight the substantial political obstacle they still face. Pro-choice advocates have a solid track record of success with ballot initiatives, but the issue has had a more variable impact on campaigns at the federal and state levels.
Democratic politicians in blue and swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where abortion is largely still legal, used promises to safeguard abortion rights as a campaign weapon in 2022. Even though polls, including the PRRI project and local surveys, showed most voters in those places supported maintaining legal abortion, in more red-leaning states like Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Ohio itself in 2022, Democrats were unable to generate any meaningful backlash against Republican state officials who imposed severe abortion bans. In Ohio, where he signed a stringent abortion law that voters appear prepared to repeal this year, DeWine won reelection in a landslide.
According to Democratic pollster Molly Murphy, “ballot measures can win in very hard places that Democrats will struggle to win” because of the binary nature of the decision on abortion. She did note, however, that “in red states voters may use other issues” like crime or immigration “more heavily than abortion” when selecting which candidate best represents their views.
In 2024, Democrats’ ability to successfully mobilise voters in favour of abortion rights to vote against red state Republicans who oppose those rights will be put to the test in Ohio. That’s because it’s one of the three states that might make or break the next Senate majority. There are only three Democrats still serving in the Senate from the 25 states that went for Trump in 2020. They are Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Jon Tester in Montana, and Joe Manchin in West Virginia. In the upcoming November election, all three of those positions will be up for grabs. “What’s really going to be important for folks in these Senate races is to underscore for voters, your rights are important to me, I’m here to protect and restore your rights,” said Vasquez-Giroux. Candidates must take the lead.
Brown painted Tuesday’s vote as the beginning of a chain reaction that may help him overcome the rightward tilt of the state in a conference call with Democratic activists earlier this month. According to Brown, “If we get our people to the polls, we win this overwhelmingly” on Issue 1. In the words of Hillary Clinton, “that will give us momentum for the vote in November on protecting women’s rights, and then it will give us momentum for our elections next year.”
That’s not impossible. But it would require Brown and abortion-rights advocates to break the pattern from 2022, when the issue, somewhat paradoxically, benefited Democrats more in places where the procedure remained legal than in places where it was banned.
On a national basis, support for abortion rights clearly helped Democrats hold down their losses in the House of Representatives: more than three-fifths of voters said they supported legal abortion and almost three-fourths of them backed Democratic candidates for the House, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including AWN. And, the exit polls found, in most key swing states abortion likewise benefited Democrats running in gubernatorial and US Senate races against Republicans who opposed abortion rights.
A remarkably similar 62% to 63% of voters supported legal abortion in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona, the exit polls found, and Democrats won the governorships in all four – carrying over four-fifths of those pro-choice voters in the first two states and almost exactly three-fourths of them in the latter two. Huge margins among voters who supported abortion rights also keyed Democratic Senate wins last year in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona and Nevada. And abortion rights was the critical issue that powered a landslide Democratic victory in a Wisconsin state Supreme Court election last spring.
But in more solidly Republican-leaning states, Democrats faced, as I wrote last November, a “double whammy.” While most voters in those states also supported abortion rights, the majorities recorded in the exit polls were in the range of 53% to 58%, narrower than in the purple (much less blue) states. As important, compared to the swing states, Republican candidates in the red states frequently won a higher percentage of voters who said they supported abortion rights. In Florida, for instance, both Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio carried almost exactly one-third of voters who backed legal abortion, the exit polls found; in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed a six-week abortion ban, carried nearly 3 in 10 voters who supported legal abortion, and strikingly won nearly three-fourths of all White women. Apart from Arizona, which has been trending away from the GOP, Democrats didn’t flip the governor’s seat in any state that restricted or banned abortion; Democrats didn’t dislodge a GOP state legislative majority in any state that retrenched abortion rights.
Jim Henson, executive director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, said in that state Republicans were able to overcome majority public opposition to their sweeping abortion ban mostly by convincing voters to focus more on other issues. That success reflected both Democratic weakness and Republican strength. In Texas, as in other red states, Henson notes, the Democratic party is too weak to shape what issues define the public debate. “You lose influence over the public discussion,” Henson said. Rather than abortion, which split even their supporters, Texas Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott were able to keep voters in their coalition focused on the issues where they agree with the party, particularly border security. “It’s about agenda management and the salience of issues,” Henson said.