Ohio Republicans bet voters would dilute their own power. They lost

When Ohio Republicans decided to rush a constitutional amendment on to the statewide ballot this year, they made a big bet.

They bet that turnout would be low in an election held in the middle of the summer (it was just 8% in last year’s August contest). They bet that voters in the state, which voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, would willingly dilute their own political power, raising the threshold to pass constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. And they bet that voters would embrace such an idea knowing that a constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall would protect abortion rights.

All three of those gambles backfired on Tuesday. Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, called Issue 1. Unofficial results show that more than 3 million people voted in the election, a 38% turnout that exceeded expectations.

But beyond reproductive rights, the Ohio contest also signals the growing awareness of and backlash to efforts to change voting rules to benefit politicians. Protecting abortion access is extremely popular in the United States. Efforts that would make it harder to ensure abortion rights can help voters understand how Republican politicians are trying to tilt elections to thwart majority rule.

“Those two issues are now conflated. They’re going to remain conflated,” said Sarah Walker, the policy and legal advocacy director at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a left-leaning group that works on ballot initiatives. “It looks like a power grab from politicians. It looks like a consolidation of power and an inability to listen to the majority-will of the voters.”

The election result is a firm data point showing how reproductive rights continue to motivate voters in the wake of the supreme court’s decision last year overturning Roe v Wade. Since the decision, abortion rights have been on the ballot in seven states – the pro-choice position has prevailed in all of them.

In Wisconsin, Democrats won a critical state supreme court seat earlier this year by building a campaign around protecting abortion and fighting gerrymandering. And in Michigan last year, voters overwhelmingly approved separate ballot initiatives supporting abortion rights and voting rights while flipping the state legislature to Democratic control.

“As we’ve seen over and over again now since the Dobbs decision, abortion wins elections,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, a non-profit organization that focuses on down-ballot races. “There were points during the campaign for Issue 1 where the Republicans were trying to make the case this was about something other than abortion access, the impending election in November. People smelled the bullshit. And they made it quite clear.”

In Ohio, the victory was especially significant given that Republicans in the state legislature have openly rebuffed the will of the voters recently. Last year, they ignored a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2015 to end extreme partisan gerrymandering in the state legislature. They kept districts distorted to preserve their supermajority in the state legislature, and then used that majority to send Issue 1 to the ballot. Voters issued them a rebuke on Tuesday.

The Republican state representative Jim Hoops, right, talks to reporters in Columbus, Ohio, as Republican Ohio senate president Matt Huffman listens after the vote. Photograph: Paul Vernon/AP

Jen Miller, the president of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters, said that the campaign against the initiative didn’t lean on abortion to convince voters. Instead, she said, organizers focused on how the stakes extended beyond abortion and emphasized neighbor-to-neighbor canvassing to educate people about significant changes in Ohio that had come through constitutional amendments.

“We were not really talking about abortion in the field,” she said. “The League’s message was very clear that this was bigger than one issue, bigger than one party, bigger than one election. And people understood that.”

Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, said early vote totals in Ohio offered a glimpse of who was turning out to vote (he was still waiting for full results to get a comprehensive picture of the electorate). Women accounted for 60% of those who voted early this year but did not vote in 2022 and there were also signs of increased turnout in the state among Black women and young voters, he said.

“If you can get 3.1 million people out to vote in an August election in Ohio, on something that isn’t even directly voting on abortion rights, but is tangentially, it clearly speaks to the organizing and mobilizing power of the issue,” he said.

The result in Ohio is unlikely to stop Republicans in the state or elsewhere from trying to make it harder to amend state constitutions. Republicans in Missouri are pushing a similar measure to raise the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment ahead of an expected referendum to protect abortion rights there. “I think you’ll probably see the question coming back,” Matt Huffman, the Republican president of the Ohio senate, said on Tuesday evening, according to Cleveland.com.

Miller predicted that another effort to raise the amendment threshold in Ohio would not be successful.

“I sincerely hope that last night’s victory is a cautionary tale to lawmakers and special interests who may consider other brazen power grabs in the future,” she said. “I don’t necessarily see an appetite to revisit that in any way. But if they do, they need to know that Issue 1 created a pan-partisan movement to defend voter rights in our democracy here in Ohio. And we’re ready.”