But what does the vote mean? Is it a repudiation of GOP overreach? A proxy vote for abortion? Good news for Democrats going into 2024?
The short answer: What we don’t know exceeds what we know.
Let’s start with what we know. Some 57% of voters, in the unofficial count, supported keeping the 50%+1 threshold to amend the constitution through citizen’s initiatives and rejected the attempt to increase it to 60%, as Republicans sought.
Why voters decided to keep the status quo remains an open question. There’s a lot of conjecture, but so far, no hard evidence.
“I think people feel like they might be having a right taken away from them,” Nancy Martorano Miller, a professor in the political science department at the University of Dayton, said. “And once we’re given rights, we don’t usually like to have them taken away.”
Since 2017, 10 states have tried to increase the threshold for a ballot initiative to pass. Nine failed, including in deep red states South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Missouri, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight.com. One state, Arizona, narrowly passed a 60% threshold for tax issues only.
Some 16 states have tried to make it harder to get initiatives on the ballot, and none have passed.
Lee Hannah, Jr., a political scientist at Wright State, said, “We like direct democracy. We like voting on policies.”
We also know that some Republicans broke ranks and voted no on Issue 1 by comparing Donald Trump’s 2020 vote percentage with vote yes outcomes in GOP-leaning counties. For example, Preble County voted 78% for Trump and 67.7% for Issue 1; in Butler County, Trump got 61.3% of the vote, but Issue 1 just 50.3%; and Champaign County voted 73.1% Trump vs. 62.3% for Issue 1.
But we don’t know why these voters cast the ballots as they did. What turned them off? One reader provided a clue when he wrote that he voted against Issue 1 because he didn’t like politicians trying to sneak through such an important issue in a summer election. Still, he planned to vote against the abortion amendment because he’s proudly pro-life.
Maybe it’s as simple as that.
(If you voted yes for Donald Trump in 2020 but no on Issue 1, please email me and tell me why. I might run some of the responses in a later column.)
Hannah also noted that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about what this means for the November 2024 races. Frank LaRose, the Ohio Attorney General who became the face of Issue 1 and fought hard to get it passed, wants to challenge U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown for his seat. That election isn’t for a while, and who knows what can happen between now and then.
We can also expect, based on the outside money that flooded the state for and against Issue 1, the same for the abortion issue. Already both sides have raised $17 million, split roughly 50/50, according to Ballotpedia.
We don’t know what this means for the outcome of a ballot initiative to place redistricting in the hands of an independent commission. We don’t know if the state will try to put Issue 1 before voters again; South Dakota tried and lost both times.
There’s one other thing we know.
The abortion issue isn’t going away anytime soon. If it passes in November, Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) has already vowed an effort to repeal the vote.
Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday. He can be reached at raymarcanoddn@gmail.com.
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