Ohioans voted Tuesday night to make abortion rights part of the Buckeye State’s constitution, the latest in a string of defeats for pro-life activists at the ballot box.
With 60% of the expected vote in, the pro-abortion side led 56.1% to 43.9%, a margin of more than 280,000 votes out of more than 2.3 million cast.
The ballot outcome illustrates the thorny nature of abortion politics for Republicans — even in solid red states — as they grapple with how to handle the issue ahead of next year’s presidential and congressional elections.
Issue One specifically asked voters if they wanted to amend the state constitution to guarantee a right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.”
An effort led by Republicans to raise the threshold for approving the amendment to 60% from 50%-plus-one was soundly defeated in August of this year.
President Biden hailed the result late Tuesday, saying in a statement that “Americans once again voted to protect their fundamental freedoms – and democracy won.”
“Ohioans and voters across the country rejected attempts by MAGA Republican elected officials to impose extreme abortion bans that put the health and lives of women in jeopardy, force women to travel hundreds of miles for care, and threaten to criminalize doctors and nurses for providing the health care that their patients need and that they are trained to provide,” the president said. “This extreme and dangerous agenda is out-of-step with the vast majority of Americans. My Administration will continue to protect access to reproductive health care and call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law once and for all.”
In a one-two punch to the gut of Ohio’s social conservatives, voters also backed legalizing marijuana for residents age 21 and older on a separate ballot question.
After the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, many states — including Ohio — enacted so-called “heartbeat bills” all but prohibiting the procedure after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, which pro-life advocates say can occur around the six-week mark of a pregnancy.
Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who approved his state’s heartbeat bill and won re-election in a landslide last year, cut a TV ad opposing passage of Issue One alongside his wife Frances.
“I think whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, the constitutional amendment that we will be voting on in a couple of weeks just goes way, way too far,” DeWine told Fox News Digital last month.
“It would allow abortion at any point in the pregnancy,” the governor insisted. “It would negate Ohio’s law that we’ve had on the books for many, many years that prohibits partial birth abortion … It also really strikes at parents rights and the relationship between a parent and in this case, a daughter.”
Since Roe was overturned, at least six other states — California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont — have voted on abortion ballot measures. In all of those states, the abortion rights side prevailed.
Additionally, Republicans massively underperformed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections, something many political analysts pinned at least partly on backlash over the abortion issue.
A mélange of polling has also shown that the vast majority of voters nationally trust Democrats over Republicans on the issue of abortion.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 62% of registered voters say that abortion should be “always” or “mostly” legal, while just 30% said the procedure should be “always” or “mostly” illegal.
Ohioans also overwhelmingly voted in favor of a second ballot measure legalizing marijuana, making it the 24th state to do so.
The measure will go into effect in 30 days and allow adults 21 and over to legally buy and possess up to 2.5 ounces of cannabis, along with an imposed 10% tax rate.
The legislation will also permit Ohioans to grow the marijuana plants at home.
The “yes” vote marks the end to a years-long struggle by activists to legalize non-medical cannabis use.
Republicans generally oppose cannabis legalization and still have the ability to tweak or repeal the new law.
