Ohio Republicans tried to hold off a November referendum to enshrine abortion rights in the state by ramming through an August special election to vote to make it almost impossible to pass referendums at all, raising the required margin to 60 percent and imposing draconian new signature requirements to even get measures on the ballot — and voters fought back, defeating Issue 1 by a crushing double-digit margin.
Writing for The Bulwark, Ohio freelance reporter Daniel McGraw outlined how it all went wrong for Republicans — and how they catastrophically misread the electorate.
"The Issue 1 vote highlighted several problem areas for the GOP — and that Trump is at the center of them all: misreading the electorate in lazy ways, having no party leadership in place that can tell certain factions of the coalition to go sit in the corner for a while, and confusion about how abortion will affect the GOP’s women vote," wrote McGraw.
Voters, he said, were outraged that the GOP tried to sneak the amendment through a low-profile August election, immediately after voting to ban August elections — and they saw through GOP efforts to deny it was an attempt to block an abortion referendum, even after they had already admitted, and kept admitting in their more candid moments, that was what it was.
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"All this idiocy brought voters out in droves," wrote McGraw, with 8 million people casting ballots — almost four times as many voters turning out as the GOP had expected based on past off-cycle elections. And furthermore, it brought out voters who didn't even care about abortion, but were disgusted the state GOP resorted to underhanded tactics to strip power from the electorate.
Nearly all the voters McGraw talked to during the election, from Trump-supporting exurbs like Strongsville to liberal suburbs like Shaker Heights, to inner city Cleveland, "indicated they felt that Issue 1 was an overreach of the highest order," with one voter saying that “this is one of the lowest below-the-belt actions I’ve seen in politics ever” and an art teacher saying the vote was "just kind of creepy."
Meanwhile, polling suggests that the November abortion amendment itself is in strong shape, with almost 60 percent of voters backing it — near the threshold Issue 1 would have required in the first place had it passed — potentially upending the state GOP's draconian abortion bans that made national news last year for forcing a child rape survivor to cross state lines for treatment.
The upshot, McGraw concluded, is that abortion is a salient issue Democrats can use to drive a wedge in the GOP electorate to help President Joe Biden in 2024 against former President Donald Trump — but even more than that, "in Ohio and elsewhere, Biden can add that Trump is part of the party that tried to pull strongman politics in Ohio that would have taken away women’s healthcare if you lived there."
