The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas. The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.
The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state. In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.
These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
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