Ohio Referendum Was Doomed to Fail
An attempt to amend the amendment process was unprincipled drivel
You may have heard about Issue #1 in Ohio, the referendum that would have increased the threshold for passing Constitutional Amendments in Ohio from 50% to 60%.
The whole idea behind Ohio Republicans pushing for the amendment (in pretty extraordinary fashion, to be honest) was to head off at the pass and attempt by Ohio Democrats to amend the State Constitution to enshrine abortion in it.
It of course failed spectacularly:
There is an old saying that “pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.” It is an apt description for what happened in Ohio’s Issue 1 vote on Tuesday evening.
Ohio Republicans, who already dominate state government, asked voters to essentially take away their own power by raising the threshold for voters to approve statewide constitutional amendment ballot measures from a bare 50% majority to a 60% supermajority. The proposal also would have made the signature-gathering process much more difficult in order to place such amendments in front of voters…..
……Basically, the Ohio Republicans got greedy in seeking to eliminate the most surefire way in which voters could go over the top of elected state leaders and impose something that Republicans did not want. The voters did not respond kindly to it.
So Ohio Republicans put tons of effort into a special, oddball, summer referendum only to be slapped across the face with reality.
The problem with the referendum, as Kondik and Coleman point out above, is that the Ohio Republicans were basically asking voters to limit their own power in approving statewide constitutional amendments. The entire concept flies in the face of the populist rhetoric that Republicans, especially in Ohio, use for justifying whatever policies they support. The proposal would actually have created barriers to people influencing their government, not removed them.
Look, I am as anti-abortion as one can possibly be, and if I were an Ohio voter I would have voted against the amendment for that very reason. The entire concept was an unprincipled end around the Amendment process as a way for Ohio Republicans to protect themselves from being hurt by Donald Trump the electorate.
But the Amendment was doomed to fail because of the Special Election nature of the Election, not despite it. As Kondik and Coleman point out, turnout was smallest where Republicans needed it most and highest where Democrats needed it the most:
The state has 32 counties in eastern and southern Ohio that are classified by the federal government as part of Appalachia — all but one of them is in purple. The lone exception is Ashtabula in far northeast Ohio, a postindustrial Obama-to-Trump county that really isn’t actually Appalachian at all, culturally-speaking, but the designation opens it up to economic development aid.
Meanwhile, the state’s bluest county, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga, was at 81% of 2022 Senate votes cast, the third-best mark in the state. Just ahead of it were Delaware, the traditionally Republican but blue-trending northern Columbus suburban/exurban county, as well as traditionally Republican Geauga, which is southeast of Cleveland and is relatively well-off and highly educated.
Not only was turnout robust in those two counties, but they also shifted by more than the state did from the 2022 Senate race. In that contest last November, Sen. J. D. Vance (R-OH) defeated former Rep. Tim Ryan (D, OH-13) by 6 points, 53%-47%. On Tuesday, Issue 1 lost by 14 points, 57%-43%. So there was a 20-point statewide difference between the Senate margin and the Issue 1 margin — yes, we know that one was a partisan race and this one was not, but we thought some of the differences were telling.
Delaware and Geauga were among the counties that exceeded that 20-point Senate-to-Issue 1 shift, as Delaware went from backing Vance by 6.3 points to rejecting Issue 1 by 15.4 (a nearly 22-point swing) and Geauga went from Vance by 18.7 to No by 4.4 (a 23-point swing). Other higher-turnout counties with above-average swings from 2022 Senate to Issue 1 were Lake, Lorain, Medina, and Portage. These are all places in Northeast Ohio, and Lorain and Portage were important parts of the state’s Democratic coalition that swung to Donald Trump. Another place with high turnout and a high swing was Union, a northwest Columbus exurban county.
Other “collar counties” surrounding the big city counties — Cleveland’s Cuyahoga, Columbus’s Franklin, and Cincinnati’s Hamilton — also saw bigger-than-average swings against Issue 1 but were also below average in terms of percentage of 2022 votes cast. That description applies to Hamilton’s trio of blood-red collar counties, Butler, Clermont, and Warren. According to our calculations, Issue 1 passed with just about 51% in the 8th Congressional District, a 60% Trump district that includes Butler County. Similarly, Issue 1 failed by nearly 30 points in District 1, a Joe Biden +8 seat that pairs Cincinnati proper with Warren County. All of this is suggestive of both a turnout and persuasion problem for Republicans that we would not expect in, say, a presidential general election. (We would apply this analysis to Appalachian Ohio, too.)
In a Presidential Election, voters in those 32 counties would reliably turn up to vote for the Republican Nominee for President. These are not the kind of voters who show up to vote but in November and only every four years. They don’t vote in primaries, they don’t vote in state elections, and they certainly are not going to show up to vote on a Tuesday in the summertime.
On the other hand, Democrats were motivated to show up and vote, even in a summertime election, due to the fact that the right to an abortion is a sacrament of the modern Democratic Party and they try to defeat any measure that might even tangentially interfere with their right to kill babies by any means necessary.
In other words, the Ohio Amendment never had a chance of passing because Republicans picked a stupid fight at the wrong time.
I have no doubt that the Abortion Amendment in Ohio will be razor thin next year, as it will be tied up in the mishigas of the Presidential Election. What we saw yesterday was indicative of nothing that will happen next year other than Republicans leaders who played themselves and ended up with a political black eye to show for it.