Ohio GOP’s failed war on freedom is a 2024 gamechanger

With Issue 1 defeated, the stage is set for a major November victory

Welcome a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

Lots of news today, including Ron DeSantis’s latest dictatorial decree and some good news from around the states. But tonight we’re looking at the final results in Ohio, what they mean, and the lessons they offer for strategizing for the next general election.

Be ready for an email of good news and positive stories later this seek.

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Voters in Ohio on Tuesday voted 57-43% to reject Issue 1, a proposed constitutional amendment to make it much harder to pass future constitutional amendments, such the stage for a major victory on abortion rights in November.

The GOP-driven proposal would have oraised level of support needed to pass amendments to the state constitution from a simple majority to 60%. Issue 1 was designed to sabotage November’s vote to enshrine the right to reproductive care, including abortion, into the state constitution. Right now, a six-week ban on abortion passed by the GOP is held up in court; by November, it may be irrelevant.

Democratic-leaning counties outperformed even the heavy margins they gave Biden in 2020, while counties that Trump won by huge margins were far more narrower on the amendment: while 65% of residents in Warren County voted for Trump in 2020, only 52% of them voted in favor of Issue 1.

The numbers line up with expectations: Last month, one poll found that 57% of voters were firmly against the GOP proposal, with 26% in favor and 17% uncertain.

This result is an utter embarrassment for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who has veered from more moderate to an enabler of right-wing attacks on the basics of democracy. He committed a major blunder earlier this year, when he admitted to a far-right audience that Issue 1 was all about defeating abortion, giving opponents all the ammunition they needed in ads and outreach.

Now, LaRose’s rivals in the state’s GOP Senate primary are likely to seize on his words and regularly remind voters of them.

That screw up could even lead to further progressive victories in the state; gun control advocates in particular were watching this amendment process with a renewed sense of hope for the potential of direct democracy to overcome a gerrymandered GOP supermajority’s blockade on safety measures.

Voting rights activists could also be encouraged to try their hand at passing more airtight amendments to ban gerrymandering after the conservative state Supreme Court essentially allowed the GOP to ignore the spirit of publicly approved fair redistricting amendments in 2015 and 2018.

The triumph in Ohio reaffirms that abortion rights, long thought to be a third rail that Democrats needed to avoid, actually transcends typical partisan politics in the complete opposite direction. After failing to support popular ballot initiatives in the recent past, Democrats in Florida have enthusiastically lined up behind a pro-choice amendment that will most likely be on the ballot there in 2024, offering the party a boost after more than a decade of struggles.

Missouri is also likely to have abortion rights on the ballot in November 2024, and tonight’s results may make Republican leaders there think twice about their desire to run a similar anti-democratic amendment on the ballot during the primary election next summer.

At the moment, they’re working desperately to find a way to disqualify the abortion rights amendment through legal means, including another lawsuit filed on Monday, but the state’s Supreme Court has shown little patience for the GOP legislature’s meddling with direct democracy.

In Arizona, pro-choice activists just kicked off their own campaign to put abortion rights protections to a vote next November. They’ll have to word the amendment quite carefully, given the restrictions that Republicans managed to pass in 2022 and the willingness of the state Supreme Court to toss out liberal ballot measures, but popular support shouldn’t be a problem.

With razor-thin margins at every level of government there, from the state legislature to the results of the most recent US Senate and presidential elections, the additional incentive for liberal voters to turn out in 2024 will no doubt be welcomed by Arizona Democrats. Should Sen. Kyrsten Sinema decide to run for re-election as an independent despite her cratering poll numbers, she’ll really rue losing the support of pro-choice groups, including the usually centrist Emily’s List, given the support they’re going to give Rep. Ruben Gallego while running a massive GOTV operation for the amendment.

Both Missouri and Florida are politically quite similar to Ohio; all three have transitioned in recent years from legit swing states to Republican stamping grounds, yet each have sizable pro-choice majorities. The natural question for Democrats is how to harness that overwhelming support for abortion rights and direct it toward electoral politics, where they tend to run 10-15 points behind pro-choice initiatives.

There is no easy answer, obviously, because ballot questions are unencumbered by party politics, candidate personalities, and the other policies and priorities that have to be considered when it comes to voting for representatives. There’s far less partisan tribalism, even when the issue at hand is generally associated with one party or the other. Wealthy fiscal conservatives can feel good about voting for a pro-choice initiative while backing Republicans in elections, just as people who are sick of politics can abstain from voting in most elections but turn out to support a ballot question that impacts their own lives.

The aim, then, has to be rhetorically transforming what is technically a referendum on one discrete issue into a referendum on an entire political philosophy. While Issue 1 in Ohio was very smartly framed as being the first in a two-part election over reproductive rights, it was also very clearly a battle over the fundamental right to self-governance. The GOP’s descent into Trumpism and fascism has obliterated its self-assigned image as the party of individual liberties, giving Democrats a wide open opportunity to seize that mantle.

As I’ve been saying for the past 18 months, Democrats need to make a cohesive case that ties abortion rights to so many of the other freedoms and democratic processes that Republicans have been systematically disnantling. Banning books, massive preemption laws that strip power and decision-making, denial of health care, voter registration purges, firing democratically elected public officials — all of those things are deeply unpopular on their own, but perhaps for many, not serious enough infractions to motivate a first-term voter or inspire someone to reconsider their personal partisanship. As damning evidence for a larger conspiracy against the American people — or what I call the Republican War on Freedom — those travesties are suddenly part of a cohesive narrative and thus far harder for someone to shrug off as irrelevant to their own lives.

Pundits insist that the 2024 election will ride on the economy, and to some degree, that’s inevitable. But people organize around freedoms and progress, as we just saw in Ohio.

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