Democracy Is On The Ballot In Ohio

Republicans can't get over it that independents, and lots of their own voters, want legal abortion and other rights. So they want to change the rules

Jul 20, 2023

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Image credit: Steve Shook/Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a campaign message that could resonate in 2024: Don’t vote for Republicans because Republicans don’t want you to vote. And if they can’t stop you from voting, they will do their best to ensure your votes don’t matter.

How do we know? Well, let’s see. This week, voter fraud indictments came down against 16 fake electors in Michigan: these partisans tried to swing the state to Trump even though Michiganders had voted for Biden. But Republican-led states are also reducing or closing polling places, so voters must drive long distances and endure lengthy waiting times. Then there is the GOP fight against voting by mail and the efforts to discourage or outright prevent college students from voting. We should expect these tactics to be accelerated as the 2024 election approaches.

And then, there is an even more ingenious tactic to break our democracy: getting citizens to agree to it by allowing 40% of the voters to block any ballot initiative or referendum. This is the strategy behind Ohio’s Issue 1, which would, according to Associated Press reporter Julie Carr Smyth, “raise the threshold for passing future constitutional changes from a simple majority in place since 1912 to a 60% supermajority.”

I became aware of Republicans’ latest attempt to roll back our rights because of this ingenious political ad urging Ohioans to vote No on Issue 1 (I can’t paste it here because YouTube worries that your children might be reading this newsletter. Intrigued? You should be!)

So what’s at stake? Democracy. Let’s begin at the beginning.

The year 1912 is significant in American history because it was when Progressive reformers were at the peak of their cultural and political influence, and Ohio’s fifty years of dominance in the Republican Party ended. That year, Democrat Woodrow Wilson defeated incumbent William Howard Taft (of Ohio), partly because Taft’s fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, insisted on running as a third-party candidate on the Bull Moose ticket.

But 1912 was, in many ways, a victory for the Progressive movement. Wilson and Roosevelt could reasonably describe themselves as adherents of a political philosophy that sought to formally expand democracy, at least among white men. Women, who were well-organized at that point, would not vote in federal elections for almost another decade. Southern states had successfully reduced Black voting to an all but insignificant level, instituting Jim Crow laws, restrictions on public accommodations, education, and the right to work. Under Wilson, Washington D.C.’s civil service would become racially segregated. That wouldn’t change for another half-century.

So we must stipulate that the Progressive project was deeply flawed. But it had two lasting principles that shaped the twentieth-century liberal state-making project. First, progressives believed that the federal government had an interest in regulating the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens. In addition, they believed in balancing the collective power of corrupt politicians through direct democracy. Citizens had the right to regulate the state and shape their own society through instruments like recalling politicians, amending state constitutions through direct balloting, and passing referenda that could affirm or reject public policies.

And Ohio was a legendarily corrupt state. Taft eventually returned to Washington, this time as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by the last Ohioan to not just win, but even be nominated for, the presidency Warren G. “Teapot Dome” Harding’s name is so synonymous with corruption, scandal, and cronyism that a state which put someone on the Republican presidential ticket nine times after 1865 had never had a nominee since.

So, Ohio’s current Republican legislature is well within the state’s political tradition. And up to now, they have managed not just to gerrymander the state into a supermajority but also use that supermajority to further gerrymander it into what we might call, for lack of a better phrase, a super-duper majority.

They are shameless: Warren G. Harding is giggling in his grave. But it’s this kind of situation that Progressives anticipated with that 1912 law: that there might be moments a legislative majority is so non-representative of the people’s will that most Ohioans would not support the laws it passes. And this is how the pro-choice majority in Ohio hopes to restore a right to abortion that the extremist legislature took away when it passed its version of the “fetal heartbeat” bill in 2022. That initiative, which would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution, will be on the ballot in November.

And here’s the thing: Republicans always lose when abortion is on the ballot.

Americans know, as feminists repeat tirelessly, that abortion is a form of medical care, one that many people who would not normally elect to terminate a pregnancy need to access with surprising frequency. The United States Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, overturning the right to terminate a pregnancy up to 24 weeks, established in Roe v. Wade (1973), has highlighted this. And it has had one outcome that still surprises me: making visible the ideological diversity, and potential strength, of a pro-abortion coalition. You may recall that during the November 2022 midterms, five states put the legality of abortion on the ballot, and anti-abortion conservatives lost every time. As Temple law professor Rachel Rebouche wrote after the election,

voters added protection for the right to get an abortion to constitutions in California, Vermont and Michigan. Kentucky voters were asked a reverse version of this question – whether the state constitution should bar abortions. They said no.
Kentucky’s vote is similar to an August 2022 referendum on abortion that was held in Kansas. Fifty-nine percent of people in Kansas – a state with a history of anti-abortion policies and activism – voted to keep state constitutional protection of abortion rights.

Furthermore, the long-term political consequences of putting abortion on the ballot are significant because they reveal extremist Republicans as a minority pretending to represent the majority. Under the leadership of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Dobbs appears to be helping to push Michigan back into the Democrats’ “Blue Wall,” a coalition of reliably Democratic states that trembled and fell in 2016. But in 2022, Proposal 3, which codified the right to abortion through direct voting, helped to reverse what seemed to be a state teetering on the brink of Republican domination.

The GOP’s anti-abortion zealots lived in such a secure political bubble that they were shocked by the backlash of rage that greeted the re-criminalization of abortions in many states. Republicans courting pro-life voters for years scrubbed any reference to that past from their campaign websites. And yet, like so many bowling pins, they still lost, reducing what should have been a robust House majority in 2023 to a thin plurality.

Now they are trying to stop the bleeding, which is difficult because the party has no platform and no principals. The presidential candidate they are poised to nominate in 2024 is charged with more felonies than Carter has pills (which is the kind of thing Warren Harding, who did not live long enough to be indicted, might have said.)

So what do Ohio Republicans do, knowing that the constitutional amendment on the ballot is likely to pass and put women’s right to reproductive healthcare and freedom beyond the reach of the legislature? They move the goalposts and lie, telling their voters that the 60% threshold is necessary to prevent voter fraud and allow more citizens to be heard. “The very integrity of Ohio's constitution hangs in the balance,” Ohio Right to Life argues as if voting Yes on Issue 1 does not reduce citizens’ voices across the board and permits 40% of voters to block any citizen initiative. “The abortion lobby is currently attempting to enshrine abortion up until birth with zero restrictions in Ohio's constitution this November. That is unacceptable and goes against the very nature of our nation's principles. Our state's founding document was created to protect Ohioans' liberty and freedoms, not take them away. Enshrining abortion removes the most foundational right that any of us have—the right to life.”

And they are doing it in a late summer primary, always a low-turnout election when the vast majority of voters are too hot, too tired, and too on vacation to vote. So keep your eyes on Ohio, friends. Democracy is on the ballot.

Political Junkie

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