BREAKING: Ohio voters reject GOP attempt to sabotage abortion rights

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

Welcome a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.

I’ll have a longer feature story tomorrow, but tonight we’re focused on the massive election happening tonight in Ohio. And for the first time in quite a while, the news out of the Buckeye State is very, very good.

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As votes pour in, it’s becoming clear that voters in Ohio have rejected Issue 1, setting the stage for a major victory on abortion rights in November.

The GOP-driven proposal would have raised 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.

With 28% of the ballots counted, 65% of Ohioans have voted to reject the proposals. That number reflects the massive early voting numbers, and will drop as election day ballots are counted, given conservatives’ penchant for voting on the day, but it will be almost impossible for “yes” votes to overcome that gigantic margin.

Democratic-leaning counties have turned out en masse, and thus far, they have outperformed even the heavy margins they gave Biden in 2020. Even more telling is the fact that voters in some larger Trump counties are also rejecting Issue 1 by significant margins. While nearly two-thirds of voters in Warren County backed Trump in 2020, 59% of them have thus far voted to reject Issue 1. Even if that falls back to a more even split with election

Support for the anti-democratic amendment won’t even come close to breaking 50%, much less the 60% that Republicans were trying to impose on future proposals. Last month, one poll found that 57% of voters were firmly against the GOP proposal, with 26% in favor and 17% uncertain.

This result will come as an 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.

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.

More to come, so I’ll send an update later tonight.

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