Ohio Republicans Can’t Just Take the L

Why their ongoing fight against abortion rights could haunt them in 2024

Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.

I’ll start with a quick plug: took part in a round table of labor reporters hosted by Seth Harris, the long-serving deputy Secretary of Labor under President Barack Obama. The journalists involved were really impressive and seasoned, so hopefully I was able to create the illusion that I belonged. You can check the whole thing out at Harris’s website, Power at Work.

Before we get to tonight’s newsletter, here’s a bit of good news: While it looked like they were headed for disappointment on Tuesday evening, housing activists in Tacoma are now celebrating the passage of their historic tenants protections initiative. Strong margins with absentee and early voters pushed the initiative over the finish line, and soon working class renters will enjoy some of the most expansive protetions in the United States.

Tonight, I want to discuss a few major news stories as well as look at a potential 2024 strategy that’s been made possible by Tuesday’s election victories.

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More than 56% of Ohioans voted to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution on Tuesday, a decisive victory for pro-choice activists on a night that proved again the potency of abortion as a political

Most of the state’s Republican lawmakers, protected by a supermajority that also defies the state constitution, do not seem to care.

On Wednesday, state Senate Majority Leader Matt Huffman promised that the initiative was “just beginning of a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace Issue 1.” GOP House Speaker Jason Evans was more vague but no less vindictive in his own statement, suggesting that “the legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life.”

The brazen dismissal of democracy continued on Friday, with a statement from the House Republican caucus that included a number of bizarre allegations.

One member said the amendment was the work of “foreign billionaires” and constituted “foreign interference” in elections; another echoed desperate conservative claims that it could be “weaponized to attack parental rights or defend rapists, pedophiles, and human traffickers.”

Good luck to them on continuing to push that angle — it was thoroughly disproven and ultimately backfired during the campaign.

A third Republican insisted that “no amendment can overturn the God given rights with which we were born,” an argument that probably won’t hold much water in court.

There has been talk of placing an initiative to repeal the new amendment on next year’s primary ballot, though a mid-December deadline makes that a bit of a daunting task.

For now, Republicans are more likely to try to use the legal system to block the amendment, which goes into effect 30 days after its passage. The amendment doesn’t technically remove Ohio’s large number of anti-abortion statues from state law, and there’s an expectation that everyone from the state attorney general to local sheriffs and prosecutors could try to enforce them anyway. Such attempts would trigger legal fights over whether those laws remain valid.

Six abortion restrictions passed by the legislature remain tied up in court, including the six-week ban that was hit with an injunction by a Hamilton County judge. That one is almost assured to be tossed out, though Republicans will undoubtedly fight that, as well. Along with its array of paranoid and Christofascist complaints, the House GOP statement floated the idea of removing the judiciary’s jurisdiction over the amendment. What that means exactly remains to be seen.

Speaking of states where Republicans like to sabotage direct democracy, activists in Florida are in crunch time in their effort to qualify a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion and other fundamental reproductive rights in the state constitution.

So far, they’ve facd obstacle after obstacle in what should be a fairly straightforward process. They have to collect nearly a million signatures, Ron DeSantis’s attorney general has spent months trying to disqualify their initiative, and because the Florida Democratic Party has been so inept, national donors are largely ignoring the state.

The hope is that Tuesday’s results puts some wind changes that. Securing abortion access in the biggest state in the South would be a lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, force conservative politicians to reckon with the issue, and help drive voters to the polls in a place where Democratic turnout has plummeted.

Progressive champions like state Rep. Anna Eskamani are working hard to lead the necessarily grassroots petition-gathering campaign, which I’m told costs around $500,000 per month. The hope is that they’ll reach their signature goal within the next 10 days, though they will likely have to spend a fair amount in legal fees to contend with AG Ashley Moody’s various potshot challenges and an unfriendly state Supreme Court.

Once certified for the ballot, this is going to be a very expensive campaign. The legal fights won’t subside, Florida has a huge population spread across a number of major media markets, and conservatives will be going all-in to turn out their voters during a presidential election year.

I know you’ve been inundated with fundraising emails over the past few days — including an annoying number of emails with subject lines that are some version of “About last night” — but this may be the most effect use of your spare cash right now.

Clinging to the Institutions

The big victories won by Democrats and aligned activists on Tuesday night were a nice reprieve from months of mostly bad-to-miserable news. Over the last few days, some in the party have provided one reminder after another of why electoral success cannot be the end goal if we want anything tangible to change in this country.

On the bright side, this week’s news has produced what seems to me like a clear strategy for 2024, both to win elections and force Democrats to deliver on their promises.

Yacht Rocked

The biggest headline on Thursday was folksy coal waste magnate and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s announcement that he will not run for re-election. In terms of protecting the party’s majority, it’s no huge loss, because polls all showed that Manchin getting creamed by Republican Gov. Jim Justice. That’s also what makes his early surrender so annoying.

Manchin spent the entirety of the Democratic Party’s trifecta holding up a historically popular agenda, moralizing over the virtues of bipartisanship and touting his deep understanding of the average American voter. Democrats were forced to hack and slash their entire program to fit his whims, and the narrative that took root to excuse his malice and corporate favor-trading was that Joe Manchin was the only Democrat that could win in West Virginia.

The expanded child tax credit, which reduced child poverty by 50%, got axed because Manchin said he worried that moms used it to buy drugs. Childcare, universal pre-K, and a dream list of other promised programs were cut to please this supposed political genius, only to see him give up as soon as it became clear that he wasn’t going to austerity his way to re-election. (Kyrsten Sinema also played her part in stymying progress, but she was less of an obstacle when it came to ambitious public initiatives.)

Tens of millions of Americans — including a majority of West Virginians — suffered so that Joe Manchin could put on a big show on Fox News, please his donors, and then sail his yacht back home. The small consolation is that his early decision to bow out offers better Democrats a prime opportunity to win a fair number of other elections next year, if they can successfully frame a new kind of campaign, which I’ll explain below.