The tactics that helped abortion rights defy politics
Even in the reddest states
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Today we’ve got a deep dive with the executive director of The Fairness Project, who takes us into the weeds of the pivotal reproductive rights campaigns and other huge ballot initiative campaigns they’re running, GOP opposition, and the political challenges they face.
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The national election outlook took a very bleak turn for Democrats last week, but the major policies for which they advocate continue to prove broadly popular even in red and purple states.
On Wednesday, activists in Arizona submitted a record 824,000 signatures in support of a constitutional amendment to guarantee abortion rights up to the point of fetal viability. That’s the equivalent of one in five registered voters in the state, where a 15-week abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape or incest, remains on the books even after the legislature was forced to repeal the Civil War-era law that banned the procedure outright.
In Nebraska, activists just handed in the signatures required to get paid sick leave, medical marijuana, and abortion rights on the ballot. Anti-choice forces are also pursuing a constitutional amendment in the state, setting up a unique battle in November.
Both the Arizona abortion rights amendment and the paid sick leave campaign in Nebraska are being supported by The Fairness Project, which has become perhaps the top ballot initiative campaign organization in the nation. Last year, they were behind the successful effort to stop Ohio Republicans from eviscerating the citizen amendment process and then worked on passing the abortion rights amendment that won 57% of the vote there.
Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, spoke to me about their current campaigns, how they choose who to support, the tricky politics of this moment, and why progressive issues always outpoll Democratic candidates.
Progress Report: There could be up to nine different abortion rights initiatives and amendments on the ballot in November. You’re working on the ones in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, and Montana. How do you choose which campaigns to support, both in terms of abortion as well as other issues?
Kelly Hall: We take a really open-minded approach to engaging with almost every coalition that comes to us early in the cycle, and we invest a ton in polling and legal research in understanding the contours of the coalition partners. The first question is whether this is a state that has limitations on abortion or is deeply at risk of losing access to abortion. And then, if we won, would the thing that we're passing change abortion access significantly for the better?
Unfortunately, that takes a bunch of ballot measure states off the map immediately, because there are some places where you can't do constitutional amendments. You're just passing a law at the ballot box. I wish that in a place like Utah or Idaho, we could move forward with this strategy and pass a constitutional amendment, but if we passed something and the legislature can immediately amend it, what’s the point?
Similarly, there are places where legislatures have put things forward to voters to further confirm the constitutional right to reproductive freedom, which we think are inspiring and great, but they're not states with direct risk of losing reproductive rights, like Maryland, for example.
The second question is, can it win? And we have been really bullish even from the early days, when folks were doubting whether the Michigan campaign was a good idea. We’re [looking for states where] if we put this in front of voters, they broadly support this issue and we can run a campaign that will win. That is true in Florida, it is true in Arizona, it is true in Montana, it is true in Missouri, it was true in Michigan. It is more borderline in some other places across the map.
We prioritized places where we see that magic combination of really high impact, and even in a deep red state like Missouri, we have done enough research, enough polling, enough work on the ground to believe that there is a really clear pathway to winning.
I was looking at national polling numbers over the years and found that at different points in the 2010s, more people said they were “pro-life” than pro-choice. That began changing in 2020, before Dobbs, then really took off. It’s a huge swing on a major issue, so what do you think causes that and do you ever see that same kind of dramatic shift in states where you run initiatives?
There are two things that swing public opinion in a really big way on abortion. One is an event that illustrates how at-risk reproductive rights are and what the stakes are. The marquee moment, of course, was the Dobbs decision, but we've seen other things over the last couple of years. Stories about women in Texas unable to get care under medical exemptions, and that being a huge national story, helps people understand what happens when abortion is fully banned, when it makes it harder to say, “Oh, well, it's okay that there's a ban, because there's an exception for the health of the mother.”
Similarly, stories about IVF being banned in Alabama and folks going, “Wait a second, I thought this was just about abortion, are they also coming for this?” We really do see a shift in people's understandings of the stakes, which is reflected in changes in polling, in how people respond in focus groups, even if those stories are happening in places across the country from where the voters live.
The second thing I think that really shifts [attitudes] is how much is the campaign is able to communicate that with stories of real people in the state, why they had abortions, why their family chose this, and helping to make the issues so relatable. We have to make sure that we are reminding voters that bans are really extreme policies that have extreme impacts and that the thing in front of them is a common sense, widely popular policy that matches their values.
People want folks to be able to get health care when they need it, and they often don't understand that six week ban means most people don't even know they're pregnant.
Despite a huge shift to people now self-identifying as pro-choice, Republican politicians have stayed staunchly anti-choice and are leading in many polls right now. How does that dichotomy work? How have these issues transcended partisanship?
I think that political coverage is very partisan and we push voters into a very partisan system of choosing candidates. Ballot measures are really the one of the only opportunities that voters have to engage in a nonpartisan thought exercise, which is like, how do I feel about abortion on its own, when I don't have to think about whether I care about abortion enough to vote for Hillary Clinton, with whom I disagree on all of these other things.
When you're able to remove an issue from being characterized as a litmus test for a political party, people actually do have a much wider range of opinions that are much more fluid than their partisan identities. And that's true not just on abortion, but on all of the issues that we see go to the ballot, where we're seeing so many ballot measures succeed on issues that are typically characterized as progressive.
Even in deep red states — we saw this on Medicaid and expansion of minimum wage, we're seeing people pass marijuana legalization ballot measures in a bunch of places where folks are like, “well, that's not really central to my identity as a Republican or as a libertarian, and I have an opinion about this issue and what it would mean for me, my family, my community.”
Abortion happens to be the most salient example that we're seeing this cycle, but I think there will be subsequent conversations on different issues at the ballot box.
There are red states where Democrats are now speaking as if initiatives are going to help them do better at the ballot box, and in some situations actively attaching themselves to the campaign. It’s happening in Florida, where activists I’ve spoken with really don’t appreciate the Democratic Party jumping into the abortion campaign.
It's particularly pronounced in Florida, because there a ballot measure needs to win with a 60% supermajority. I don't think by any stretch of the imagination that 60% of the voters in Florida are Democrats. Similarly, I would say that there is no way that 50% of voters in Missouri are Democrats. So there's been a lot of examples over the years, not just on this issue, but on ballot measures generally, where rule number one has been keep this nonpartisan and keep the tent as open as big as possible.
We really want to be running campaigns that are as open and welcoming to any potential voter that wants to see themselves as part of this campaign as possible. And that typically means having a wide diversity of messengers in addition to messages. So it's not just about making sure that the campaign is communicating in a way that uses language that is accessible to as many people as possible, it’s also making sure that we are not just using messengers that amp up our base but leave a whole lot of other people out in the cold.
If you look at the Ohio campaign in 2023, there was lot of work done to have different faith leaders communicating about what the stakes of this were and what compassion in their faith or tradition really looked like, in support of the reproductive rights Initiative.
On minimum wage campaigns, a lot of business leaders and other odd bedfellows come out in favor of those because it helps to make it clear to voters that this is not an extreme policy. This is a policy that is broadly popular, and therefore I can see myself in it. If it looks like it's something that's coming just from an activist fringe, it is harder for people to even engage in the conversation about whether they support it.
So the key is to keep it as nonpartisan as you can, but most importantly, to have a diversity of messengers. So even if you do have Democratic elected officials speaking about it to their core constituencies, you've also got got a lot of other folks communicating to the rest of the world, people who are not listening to politicians, but are instead listening to the folks who are leaders in whatever small community they've built.
On the other hand, things don’t look good for Democrats right now, at least at the top of the ticket. Do you worry that lack of enthusiasm from core voters may hurt the chances of these initiatives succeeding?
I'm not particularly worried about that. There's the common narrative that abortion ballot measures are being put forward in full or in part to help boost the electability of Democrats, but that’s not accurate. These advocates have been working on this for an incredibly long amount of time. The Arizona coalition, we've been working with them for well over a year and they have been working together for even longer before that. There is all of the support coming from these grassroots organizations and from folks like us who are not part of the Democratic Party apparatus.
But I think the reason that folks are attached to this narrative that it helps boost the fortunes of Democrats is that we do see a real enthusiasm gap between people's support for these abortion ballot measures and their support for candidates who hold the same position on the issue. You can analyze all day long why that might be, why some people are just like, “Hey, I don't trust politicians,” or “These particular politicians don't inspire me” or whatever it is. But we do think that these ballot measures are an incredibly powerful voice for why people should turn out to vote, even if they might otherwise be somewhat uninspired by candidates across the political spectrum.
They are a really big turnout tool, especially for low propensity voters, for students, for young people, regardless of how they feel about the political landscape. They can understand that “if I go to the polls, I can at least vote for putting my reproductive rights into the constitution,” or in other places, “I can go to the polls and vote myself a raise by voting for the minimum wage increase” or something else. And that’s a very linear relationship between voting and change, as opposed to voting and then hoping your guy wins, and then hoping he's in the majority and then hoping the issue you care about is on the agenda, and then hoping he votes the right way.
There’s [usually] a lot of steps between voting and seeing something in your life change. So that linear relationship is really a powerful turnout motivator, and whether candidates can then capitalize for their own fortunes on that once we are helping to get people to the polls, that’s their job.
Last question: Because these initiatives are popular in a way that transcend partisanship, a lot of Republicans are trying to make them harder to pass. They failed in Missouri this year because they’re just dysfunctional, but we’ve seen it in other states. How does that impact your work?
We as a ballot measure organization are one of the few entities in America that have said we care about preserving access to direct democracy regardless of what is on the ballot this year. It is a fundamental key tenant of our civic participation, we need to have regular voters have a check on lawmakers who are not listening to them on a particular policy.
We would have been fighting Issue 1 [which made the threshold to pass an amendment 60%] in Ohio last year whether or not abortion was on the ballot, because it’s also important to redistricting and minimum wage and childcare and all sorts of other things that folks may want to make progress on in future years.
My view is that those fights are going to come to us no matter what, and it is always on our mind as we're evaluating what the risk calculus is and whether we're going to succeed in a campaign, but it has never been a deterrent against us engaging with a campaign that we think is worthy and can win. We are signed up to help them win and signed up to help them defend the process that they need in order to get there.
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A lovely articulation of how these systems work.
Thank you.
Great article!