GOP, be afraid: Ohio vote a win for abortion rights
Ohio voters on Aug. 8 sent the Arizona Republican Party a message.
Be very afraid.
Ohio voters didn’t just reject a Republican proposal to make it harder for voters to change the state’s constitution — a move aimed at defeating a proposed constitutional amendment to guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion.
They stoned the thing. Then they tossed it into the street and ran over it.
Then they backed up and ran over it again, with 57% of Ohio voters defeating Issue 1.
This, on the very day that abortion rights groups in Arizona launched an initiative drive to enshrine the right to an abortion into our constitution.
With Ohio Issue 1 results, voters clearly affirmed abortion rights
If I were the Center for Arizona Policy’s Cathi Herrod, I’d be worried. If I were the Arizona Republican Party, I’d be frantic.
Momentum is not their friend. Already six states – including three red ones – have sent a message that the right to abortion should be protected in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last year. Voters in the three blue states – California, Vermont and Michigan – actually enshrined the right to an abortion in their state constitutions.
Red-leaning voters in Ohio are set to decide whether to join them in November, prompting Tuesday’s preemptive strike: the Republicans’ doomed proposal to raise the threshold for changing the constitution to 60%.
Protecting abortion access? Arizona group wants to do the same
Meanwhile, a coalition of abortion rights groups in Arizona has taken out petitions to put a constitutional guarantee of right to abortion on next year’s ballot.
The Arizona Abortion Access Act is an aggressively written proposal, expanding the right to an abortion from 15 weeks to the point of fetal viability, about 24 weeks. But it also would allow abortion beyond that if a doctor deems it necessary to protect the physical or mental health of the mother.
The language is vague, meaning Herrod – the face of Arizona’s anti-abortion movement – will haul out the horror stories. It has already started.
“The measure not only allows abortion up to birth but forbids the state from shielding unborn babies from excruciating pain, dismemberment, or any other humane limitation,” Herrod said. “It quite literally is abortion on demand for any reason, at any stage of development, even partially born.”
Anti-abortion activists will lose on this one
Never mind that abortions in the final weeks of pregnancy are exceedingly rare.
Terminations at 21 weeks or later account for about 1% of all abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
My guess is Herrod and company lose this one.
I’m not the only one.
“They’re in for a tough fight to preserve their way of thinking,” longtime Republican political consultant Chuck Coughlin told me. “They’ve known that for some time. It’s going be on the ballot. Cathi’s point of view just doesn’t represent the majority of the electorate.”
Voters won’t pare back their power
Not everyone buys into the idea that the Ohio vote was about abortion.
Republican consultant Chris Baker points out that Ohio is the third state to reject a GOP proposal asking voters to rein in their own power to enact laws at the ballot box.
“The Ohio measure was doomed from the start,” he told me. “You can’t discount people’s hostility to ideas that take power away from them. A lot of voters just won’t do that, and now you have three states where voters not only said no but hell no.”
There’s a message there for Arizona’s Republican legislators, who spend a fair amount of time plotting new ways to limit our constitutional right to make laws via initiative.
Republicans have real reason to fear in 2024
As for abortion, polling shows Arizona voters support a woman’s right to choose to a certain point.
Younger voters and women come out especially strong for abortion rights, and this ballot issue will bring them streaming to the polls in this swing state.
That’s not great news for Donald Trump or for the Republicans who hope to retake a U.S. Senate seat. (Just ask Blake Masters, whose 2022 Senate campaign never recovered from his early call for a national abortion ban.) Expect a pitched battle as the abortion rights groups take to the streets to collect the 383,923 valid signatures they need to put it on the November 2024 ballot.
If I were the Republicans, I’d be afraid.