Did you hear about the referendum last week in the red state of Ohio to enshrine abortion rights in its state Constitution? It passed resoundingly, 57% to 43%. (“Abortion rights advocates win major victories in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia” – Washington Post)
Well, what about the results of the referendum to ban child gender transitions? Oh wait, there wasn’t one.
What about the referendum to ban sanctuary cities? Nope, that wasn’t on the ballot anywhere either.
Conservatives have got to start using ballot initiatives on issues such as these to drive our turnout and put the left on defense. This tweet from Patrick Ruffini is spot on.
While we on the right celebrated the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which finally overturned Roe vs Wade, we also understood that the abortion debate was being shifted back to the states, and there would be some political consequences as it gets hashed out. Like it or don’t, a majority of Americans are in the middle on the abortion debate, supporting neither a total ban on abortions nor supporting abortion for late term pregnancies. A bell curve would tend to place the median point beyond which there is majority support for banning abortions to be about three months. Hearts, minds, and behaviors will have to change to move it closer to zero months. Beyond that I’ll leave the abortion debate to others, but the reality is that a majority of Americans do not want to see a total abolition of abortions, and putting “protection” of abortion on the ballot will propel Democrat turnout, and also put at risk the votes of conservatives who support some level of legalized abortion.
Even in deep-red Kansas, voters approved a statewide referendum to keep abortion legal after Roe vs Wade was overturned. “Kansas Votes to Protect Abortion Rights in State Constitution”
Guess what, when a product is successful, you see a lot more of it, so Democrats plan to roll out a whole lot more abortion initiatives. Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, has been quoted as saying the Democrats’ path to victory in 2024 is “Dobbs and Democracy.”
“Democrats' new abortion battle plan: Rush to get it on ballots in 2024” [Axios – 11/09/2023]
After Ohio's vote Tuesday to protect abortion rights, Democrats are rushing to get similar measures on the ballot next year in key states such as Arizona, Nevada and Florida — partly to boost President Biden and down-ballot Democrats.
With the economy, border, and foreign affairs in disarray, Democrats have virtually nothing else to campaign on except abortion, so of course they are pushing it. Arizona and Nevada are winnable states for the GOP. The Democrats aim to get abortion initiatives on the ballot in those states.
Why it matters: In the face of bleak polling on the economy, abortion continues to be a winning issue for Democrats — one that could motivate otherwise uninspired voters to turn out and keep the White House in the party's hands.
Voters now have explicitly endorsed abortion rights via ballot initiatives in seven states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year — in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont and now Ohio.
The wins are boosting confidence among Democrats that similar ballot measures — and candidates who cast the high court's Dobbs ruling as a government assault on individual rights — can help the party ride the backlash in the 2024 elections.
What popular initiatives that favor conservatives will the GOP be getting on ballots to drive turnout?
The otherwise red state of Kentucky re-elected Democrat Andy Beshear last week in an election which was very much about abortion. Per Decision Desk HQ, 79% of Biden’s 2020 voters turned out for the November 2023 election, whereas only 53% of Trump voters did the same.
If voters were being asked to approve a Constitutional ban on child gender transitions would more of them have shown up at the polls?
Of course, it’s not just a matter of driving turnout, it’s also about making Democrats defend the indefensible. Republicans cannot expect to win by playing defense on abortion while never making Democrats play defense on the toxic social issues that they support.
Regarding the Initiative & Referendum process, in which citizens vote directly to create laws, conservatives have generally been opposed to it, in part because there have been plenty of bad laws passed in that fashion, but also out of an old-fashioned respect for traditional legislative lawmaking through elected representatives.
The responses in opposition to Patrick Ruffini’s call for conservatives to embrace ballot initiatives revealed some residual, principled “conservatarianism” that simply opposes the concept of making new laws. It was conservative boilerplate back in the 1980s and ‘90s that it was a wonderful thing when lawmaking bodies such as Congress or the state legislature were not in session, because the assumption was that any new laws they passed would impinge on freedom, thus an absent legislative body was a good thing because no new laws could be passed.
In other words, conservatives were still trying to conserve the status quo and maintain the old order by not passing new laws.
But the old order has been broken. We need new laws to repair, replace, and rebuild that which is broken.
In a sane society, there wouldn’t be the need for a referendum to prohibit blue jurisdictions from releasing hardened criminals without bail. In a sane society we wouldn’t need to get laws passed to protect the medical establishment (and Munchausen mommies) from sterilizing and mutilating children. But that is not the society we live in right now.
Political inaction might once have been an appropriate prescription for conservatives to protect the old order. But the old order is long gone and there is little of it left to “conserve.” Maybe we should stop referring to ourselves as conservatives and start considering ourselves restorationists.
Using the Initiative and Referendum process to push back against the most toxic issues being advanced by the left is a winning way to drive conservative turnout, to put the left on defense, and above all else, to advance our agenda.
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]