IN OHIO REFERENDUM, THE MAJORITY BACKED MAJORITY RULE

WASHINGTON — When you do everything you can to rig an election and still lose, you have a problem. Voters in Ohio told the state’s Republican Party on Tuesday that it has a big problem, and they sent that message to the GOP nationwide.

The outcome is also a major challenge for opponents of abortion. They might come to see the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade not as the victory they celebrated in 2022 but as the decisive moment when the politics of the issue turned against them.

The combination of hypocrisy and opportunism proved too much for most Ohioans, who defeated the GOP legislature’s referendum proposal that would have made it far more difficult for future electorates to change the state’s Constitution. Even though the state voted for Donald Trump by eight points in 2020, a majority refused to accept the Republicans’ invitation to throw away its own power.

Issue 1, as the referendum was known, would have raised the margin required to amend the state’s constitution from a simple majority to 60%. Despite the GOP’s claims to the contrary, the measure was clearly designed to head off a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights on November’s ballot. Polls show that abortion rights command majority support in Ohio, as they did in other red states such as Kansas and Kentucky. Reaching 60%, however, would have been difficult.

But if Issue 1’s defeat was a statement about abortion rights, it was also a harsh judgment against the anti-majoritarian politics that Republicans are practicing in many states they control. Their methods include highly partisan gerrymanders, efforts to make it harder for some groups to cast ballots (particularly Black and younger voters), and state takeovers of election administration in Democratic cities.

On gerrymandering, Ohio is a model of unrepresentativeness. Republicans control 70% of the state House and Senate seats even though the party has averaged around 54% in statewide races over the past decade. Issue 1 was an effort to gerrymander the referendum process by allowing just over 40% of the voters to foil the will of the majority.

Ohio Republicans also scheduled the referendum in August, even after passing legislation banning August elections because — wait for it — low turnouts made them unrepresentative. That did not detain them here, since they plainly hoped that their effective political machine could turn out the Republican base while the rest of the electorate enjoyed its summer vacation.

That Ohio Republicans sought to curb the use of referendums — Issue 1 would also have made it harder to put constitutional measures on the ballot — marks a sharp strategic reversal by conservatives rooted in fear that they are losing support on social issues, especially abortion.

In the past, conservatives welcomed referendum votes. In 2004, the party put a constitutional prohibition against same sex marriage on Ohio’s ballot, partly to boost turnout for President George W. Bush’s re-election. The measure passed by a large margin, and Bush narrowly carried the state.

Now, the GOP no longer has confidence in its ability to prevail, said Katie Paris, founder of Red Wine and Blue, a group that organizes for Democraticleaning suburban women. “They tried to change the rules because they are losing with existing ones,” she told me, referring to the outcomes of abortion-related referendums in other Republican states.

Another problem with the GOP’s scheming is that it blocked what might have been a reasoned debate over when supermajorities for constitutional changes might be justified. By placing it on an August ballot and waging a last-minute disinformation campaign on the issue, Republicans undercut any claims to philosophical seriousness.

When Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority in striking down Roe, he was (one imagines unintentionally) prophetic: “Women are not without electoral or political power,” he said, emphasizing that the court was returning authority over abortion law “to the people and their elected representatives.” By turning out in unexpectedly large numbers in Ohio, the people, and especially women, took that authority seriously.