By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion
Facing a ballot measure in November that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, Ohio Republicans came up with what they thought was a clever scheme: They scheduled a ballot measure in August that would have made it harder for ballot measures to pass. The attempt blew up in their faces Tuesday, with the proposal rejected by some 57 percent of voters.
The question on the ballot, known as Issue 1, was whether to raise the threshold for approval for initiatives from a simple majority to a 60 percent supermajority, along with some other relatively technical changes. Democrats and abortion rights groups opposed the measure, while Republicans and business groups supported it. And while it’s certainly possible that many Ohio voters were just uncomfortable with the concept of making direct democracy more difficult, there are a few more practical — and political — takeaways:
Abortion rights remains an issue that is firing up Democrats. It’s hard to say what voters were thinking, but Democratic activists saw Issue 1 as an attack on abortion rights, and their energy and enthusiasm produced a huge turnout in an August election with nothing else on the ballot; some 2.8 million votes cast, compared to 1.7 million in last year’s primaries. Republicans put together a formidable coalition in support of the measure, with not just antiabortion activists but business interests fearing initiatives over such issues as raising the minimum wage. But their well-funded campaign and decent turnout was no match for the women and others who have been fueling Democratic campaigns even before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Anti-trans issues are not firing up Republicans. The pro-Issue 1 side didn’t focus exclusively on abortion, according to Semafor’s Dave Weigel, and ran ads claiming that a defeat would produce all sorts of horrors about a “trans ideology” taking over the schools. But voters were not scared. Again, I’m not going to try to guess what was in the voters’ minds, but it’s pretty clear what wasn’t convincing them. If Republicans’ anti-trans message had been at all effective, the ballot initiative wouldn’t have lost so badly.
Republicans have an electoral problem. With an unpopular Democratic president, Republicans should be doing well, yet they keep falling short of reasonable expectations. That was the story in the midterms last year, and it’s been the story in various special and off-year elections so far this year. It’s hard to say exactly why this is happening, but there are two obvious suspects. One is abortion. The other is that the Republican Party’s leader is a wildly unpopular, three-times-indicted former president. So maybe the incumbent president’s unpopularity is less important than usual.
Going forward? It’s likely that abortion will continue to be an energizing issue for Democrats. What’s less clear whether Republican politicians and their media will stop obsessing about gender, race and other issues that fall under the banner of “wokeness,” even though there are signs Republican voters don’t share their obsession. Meanwhile, the Republican strategy on the abortion issue seems to be a split between those pushing extremely unpopular policies — a total ban or close — and those hoping that the policy question will just somehow magically go away. The party split over Trump is much the same.
None of this means that Democrats are headed for a landslide next year. As long as the president remains historically unpopular, it’s going to be hard for Democrats to be too optimistic about 2024. But as long as they get results like Tuesday’s in Ohio, they’re not going to be too pessimistic, either.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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