Ohio Voters: "Don't Screw With Democracy"

Fusing the issues of democracy protection with abortion rights will be a potent combination for driving voters to the polls in 2024

The vote in Ohio this week was, as our current president once commented, “a big f---ing deal.” 

It showed not only that abortion rights are a potent electoral issue that brings voters to the polls, but that voters become especially agitated, and more than willing to come out to vote, when it appears that democratic norms are on the line. When these issues are combined as they were on Tuesday … kaboom … you have an almost 60/40 defeat of a Republican ballot initiative in a state that went for Donald Trump by eight points in 2020.

Here is what happened. 

In 2019, Ohio passed a ban on abortion after “cardiac activity” is detected, usually around six-weeks into a pregnancy. The law was initially enjoined as unconstitutional but went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. A group of abortion clinics then sued, and the six-week ban is now suspended while the lawsuit goes forward. 

To keep abortion available in Ohio, pro-choice advocates succeeded in qualifying a referendum for the November 2023 election to protect abortion rights. If it passes, the Ohio Constitution would be amended to 1) establish an individual right “to make and carry out reproductive decisions,” including abortion; 2) provide that this right can only be limited by the state to “advance the individual’s health” based on “widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care,” and 3) allow regulation of post-viability abortions except when a physician has determined that an abortion is necessary to protect the “life or health of the mother.” Polls have shown that this ballot initiative has sufficient support to pass by a wide margin.

To prevent this from happening, in May the GOP-dominated state legislature scheduled its own referendum for August to raise the enactment threshold for all future voter-initiated constitutional amendments from 50 to 60% of the voters. The legislature also proposed to dramatically increase the number of signatures needed to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot. The vote was scheduled for August even though just four months earlier the legislature passed a law barring August special elections because they typically have low turnout and are expensive to operate. The sponsor of the referendum had previously said August voting should be banned because they “aren’t good for the taxpayer, elections officials, voters or the civic health of our state.” The referendum also imposed the 60% threshold only on voter-initiated future referenda, but kept the normal majority-rule threshold for referenda put to the voters by the state legislature.

The plan backfired as voters came out in droves to defeat the legislature’s referendum by a 57-43% margin on Tuesday. The main force behind the “no” vote was clearly abortion rights. But there is at least anecdotal evidence that voters were also motivated by the “sneaky tactics” of the referendum. At least a chunk of voters, many of whom were Republicans, must have believed the referendum was an attack on the democratic rights of citizens. Indeed, the referendum failed in Delaware County, OH, which has voted for the GOP nominee for president every election since 1916.

Legislatures dominated by the GOP have developed a pattern of abusing their power to frustrate or ignore the expressed will of the voters when it contradicts their agenda. In 2018, almost two-thirds of Floridians voted to allow felons to vote after they had finished serving their sentences. The state legislature then placed a “byzantine bureaucracy” in the path of this initiative and almost five years later it is estimated that over a million formerly incarcerated individuals are still unable to vote. In 2020, 53% of Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment to expand Medicaid eligibility. The state legislature then refused to appropriate funds for the expansion until forced to do so by the courts. To stave off additional ballot initiatives, many red states have been changing the rules by increasing the number of signatures required or upping the voter thresholds for an initiative to pass. But Ohio voters smelled a rat when the legislature first banned August special elections and four months later totally reversed course in order to impact the November abortion referendum.

While abortion and democracy may seem to be very distinct issues, they really are not.

Even though the main theme of the pro-choice movement for decades has been protecting individual bodily integrity, abortion rights can also be framed as an attack on women’s ability to be free and equal citizens in our democracy. Without abortion, women lose control of their economic futures, forced into child rearing at a very young age in a way that denies them the ability to obtain higher education and vie for career advancement and power in society. None of these impediments are imposed on the men that participate in initiating pregnancy.

It is also not lost on women that the process that resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade was deeply problematic. Two generations of American women had grown up having and expecting the abortion rights that Roe provided. 

But since Roe was decided, Republican presidents have made almost 3 times the number of Supreme Court appointments as Democrats (14 to 5) even though they have held the presidency only 56% of those years (28 to 22).

In addition, the membership of the current Court was distorted when Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow even a hearing on President Obama’s nominee for the Court for nine months, claiming the nomination fell too close to the 2016 election.  The seat was left open for President Trump to appoint Neil Gorsuch, who voted to overturn Roe. Four years later, McConnell reversed course, with the Senate approving Amy Comey Barrett’s nomination a mere eight days before the 2022 election. She also voted to overturn Roe.

And then there is the story of Brett Kavanaugh. Pro-choice Senator Susan Collins, who was a pivotal vote on confirmation, claims that Kavanaugh “misled” her that he would not vote to topple Roe. Kavanaugh promised Collins that he “believed in stability” and was not “a rock-the-boat kind of judge.” In lobbying Collins, Kavanaugh referenced his “respect for precedent,” “belief that [Roe] is rooted in the Constitution,” and his “commitment … to the rule of law.” During his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh reinforced these themes, noting that the 1992 case rejecting the argument that Roe should be overturned was “precedent upon precedent.” Despite these assurances, Kavanaugh provided the 5^th vote to provide states the unrestricted power to regulate abortion.  Supporters of abortion rights have good reason to believe that the system was rigged against them.

So, the threat to abortion rights runs in parallel with the threats to democracy that America is facing. The GOP is attempting to advance a system of minority rule across America, whether it is through restricting abortion rights against the clear will of the majority, curbing the power of voter-initiated referenda, maintaining the Senate filibuster, making it harder for college students and people of color to register and vote, and other schemes. The list goes on…

Fusing abortion rights and democracy should be a powerful theme especially in light of the likely GOP nominee for president.  He brags about being the architect of the toppling of Roe through his Supreme Court choices, serially abused his powers while president, and is the only president in American history to contest the peaceful transfer of power. 

The future of American democracy and abortion rights are each powerful issues for the 2024 election. When coupled, their cumulative impact could be explosive.