For years abortion has been thought of as a bitterly partisan issue, but the Ohio vote is the latest example of how the issue seems to defy the partisan 50/50, red/blue lens that defines most everything in American politics in 2023. In state after state, initiative after initiative, voters seem to be coming down on the side of abortion rights — and the data suggest one big driver of those outcomes might be suburban Republicans.
I don't think anyone's seriously considered abortion a 50:50 issue in a long time. As far as I remember, it's always been an extremist faction within the GOP, but a faction large and energized enough to dominate party politics. And it's been 'safe' enough for mainstream GOP to play along with, because it was settled law protected by SCOTUS. Now that protection is gone, GOP politicians are going to have to decide whether courting those extremists in the primaries is worth the cost in the general.
That's ridiculous. You would need 3/4 of the 50 states to ratify that change. There are way too many pro-2A red states for that to ever happen.
Throwing away your rights is the dumbest thing you could vote for. They don't just give out new rights regularly, it takes a lot of fighting and effort to get rights.
Ya, that was my reading of this. It seems like "Issue 1" was a change in the Ohio Constitutional process. Yes, it was absolutely aimed at the potential abortion rights amendment; however, it makes much more sweeping changes and there may be people who were opposed to such changes on their own merit.
Precisely! In addition to abortion, Ohioans are working on recreational marijuana which also would've needed the insanely high 60% vote, had this issue passed.
It's funny because the pro issue one people on my Facebook were all either completely focused on abortion or the fact that currently a 50.1% vote (or a single person) determined the outcome of something.
Both just completely disingenuous arguments... but arguments that are successful to a certain group of people.
Issue one wasn't about abortion, no matter how much people want it to be. Convoluting it with the November abortion rights issue will only give false confidence for the November vote. It's going to be a much tighter vote than what this was. Plenty of people across the political spectrum saw the long reaching implications passing issue one would have and voted it down for being a power grab.
As an Ohio resident it's extremely frustrating that every national news outlet is trying to equate the issue 1 vote with abortion rights. Issue 1 would have fundamentally changed how citizens can interact with our constitution by making voter initiatives almost impossible to pass.
Yes, our farcical GOP government went on record saying this issue was in response to the November initiative about abortion rights, but this vote if passed would have made every other future voter initiative all but impossible to pass. It would have consolidated power into the hands of the minority. I'm so thankful people turned out to vote it down.
Issue 1 would have fundamentally changed how citizens can interact with our constitution by making voter initiatives almost impossible to pass.
Honestly - I think it was about both, but the November ballot initiative was absolutely the catalyst. Why else would lawmakers call an August election (something recently abolished), out of a seemingly new concern about ballot initiatives? A power grab was absolutely the goal, but there's a reason they tried for it now.
That's the only way I can see happening that would preserve our democracy. A part of GOP is clearly for authoritarianism and that's not negotiable to them.
While it was super obvious that it was aimed at the upcoming abortion vote I'd think it would be universally unpopular to more or less remove the ability to get grassroots proposals on a ballot.
But its prob more like the cat is out of the bag on abortion rights. We've had a generation of the freedom to get abortion care and its gotta be hard to follow through banning that option for yourself no matter how much you run your mouth about opposing it.