Ballot Initiatives Are Critical to the Left’s Strategy, and Ohio Has Proven It
In Ohio, where the state legislature is solidly Republican, people voted directly to protect abortion rights and legalize marijuana last week. Once again, ballot initiatives have shown voters to be far more progressive than their lawmakers.
Abortion rights supporters celebrate winning Issue 1, a measure to enshrine a right to abortion in Ohio's Constitution, in Columbus, Ohio on November 7, 2023. (Megan Jelinger / AFP via Getty Images)
On November 7, Ohio voters approved two ballot measures: one protecting abortion rights in the state constitution, the other legalizing marijuana. The measures passed by nearly identical margins, roughly 57 percent supporting to 43 percent opposing. Ohio’s state legislature, which is nearly three-quarters Republican, has shown no support for either policy. So Ohioans decided to go around them.
In the past decade, unions and progressive groups have turned to ballot initiatives to advance popular economic and social policies that they were unable to move through state legislatures. As seen in Ohio, they’ve found that many policies regarded as unrealistically left-wing in mainstream political discussions are in fact widely popular. The ballot initiatives strategy allows activists and organizers to get around gerrymandering and appeal to people directly — most often showing that voters themselves are more progressive than their lawmakers.
Reproductive Rights
Across the country ballot initiative votes are codifying what polls have shown for years: a majority of Americans support abortion rights. The Ohio election results match every other state that has put the issue on the ballot since abortion rights became a state-by-state issue last year. Reproductive freedom is now seven for seven in popular votes, including in constituencies that are dominated by Republicans.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which protected abortion rights at the federal level. Republican legislators in Kansas immediately moved to capitalize, rushing a referendum onto the state’s August 2022 primary ballot that would have enabled them to ban abortion. It backfired, with nearly 60 percent of voters rejecting the ban.
That was only the beginning. The November election saw five more state-level abortion initiatives and all of them went for reproductive freedom — voters in Kentucky and Montana rejected abortion bans, while California, Michigan, and Vermont affirmed abortion rights.
When organizers in Ohio began gathering signatures to put an abortion rights initiative on the 2023 ballot, anti-choice opponents feared the same outcome and tried to defeat the measure before it could go to a popular vote.
Among other tactics, lawmakers attempted to make it more difficult to pass ballot initiatives. At the time, Ohio polls were suggesting that 58 percent of voters would back abortion rights, so opponents of the abortion initiative tried raising the winning threshold for ballot initiatives to 60 percent instead of the standard 50 percent plus one. Claiming it was about everything from good governance to lowering taxes to preventing out-of-state money from ruining local elections, Republican legislators put a 60 percent rule to referendum on the primary ballot in August, but voters saw through the charade and decisively rejected it.
Antidemocratic efforts to stymie a popular vote on abortion rights didn’t stop there. The unpopular referendum for a 60 percent rule had been labeled “Issue 1” on the August ballot. In a move almost certainly designed to confuse voters, the Republican secretary of state gave the November abortion rights initiative the exact same name: “Issue 1.” This forced abortion rights organizers who had been campaigning “no on 1” in August to switch to “yes on 1” for November.
But Republican trickery proved insufficient. When Ohio Issue 1 made it to the November ballot, voters turned out exactly as predicted — a significant majority in favor of abortion rights. The approved initiative enshrines in the state constitution the right to reproductive medical treatment including but not limited to abortion and will take effect on December 7.
Abortion rights will be on the ballot in multiple states next year, and we can expect similar antidemocratic efforts to stop the popular vote.
Marijuana Legalization
The progressive momentum around ballot initiatives grew alongside citizen efforts to pass marijuana legalization in the 2010s. Once considered a taboo issue in mainstream politics, the tide of public opinion has been steadily shifting toward legalization, due in large part to successful ballot initiatives across the nation. Of the twenty-four states where recreational marijuana is legal, more than half passed by citizen initiative and another two by legislative referendum.
However, recreational legalization is still a contested issue. While voters in Ohio approved recreational marijuana on November 7, voters in Oklahoma rejected a similar measure in March. In 2022, Maryland and Missouri voters approved recreational legalization, while Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota rejected it. At least six states will see marijuana-related initiatives in 2024.
Ohio Issue 2 legalizes marijuana possession, cultivation (including growing at home), recreational use, taxed sale, and purchase for adults over twenty-one years of age and goes into effect on December 7. Issue 2 does not immediately create paths for people to expunge marijuana-related convictions, as states like Illinois have done. However, many details of implementation and enforcement still need to be sorted out. Unlike Issue 1, which was an initiated constitutional amendment and is final, Issue 2 was an initiated statute, meaning state legislators have the ability to amend it.
Wins at the ballot for issues like abortion rights and marijuana legalization show what is possible when campaigns focus on bringing majorities together around shared agreement on a specific policy. Citizen initiatives face a long, arduous, and increasingly expensive journey to the ballot, often involving years of coalition-building, signature-gathering, and court battles. But if they can make it to election day, initiatives can counteract the antidemocratic elements of our political system and directly pass policies that improve living conditions for the majority in a way no other existing mechanism allows.