Into the Weed(s) in Ohio
Democrats were understandably exultant over the results of the November 7 elections. Other than the Mississippi governor’s race, which was probably hopeless to begin with, Democrats won every important election, including key contests in Kentucky, Virginia, New Jersey, where they defied expectations and increased their margins in the state legislature, Pennsylvania, where they added a justice to the state supreme court, and, of course, Ohio.
Most of these wins have been attributed to Samuel Alito’s boundless generosity in handing Democrats what now seems a can’t miss campaign issue with his medieval opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The right of a woman to determine whether or not she wishes to carry a child to term, and then care for it until adulthood—a part of the equation conservatives never mention—has resulted in Democratic victories across the nation, including the half-million vote win for Ohio Issue 1. That margin is made even more impressive in that Republicans employed any number of underhanded maneuvers to confuse, discourage, and frighten voters.
No reputable analyst has missed the significance of the victory for abortion rights, both direct, as in Ohio, or indirect, as with the Virginia legislature or the Pennsylvania supreme court, but most have treated these elections as sort of stand-alones, a single issue whose impact on conservative voters in 2024 remained uncertain. In other words, if, as some Republicans now suggest, the party modifies its stance, it may be able to blunt the Dobbs backlash.
Lost in the reproductive rights maelstrom is that Ohio voters also demonstrated that abortion may not be a one-off after all, but rather indicative that mainstream conservatives are growing tired of the Inquisition-like behavior of the far right.
For that, one need only look at the results of Issue 2, where voters were asked to determine whether marijuana should be made legal in Ohio for recreational use. That the measure passed is not all that surprising, since twenty-three other states, albeit almost all of them blue, had approved similar measures.
What was shocking was the margin of victory. While the abortion question passed by 511,000 votes, with 56.6% of the total, most prognosticators felt the margin of the marijuana measure would be far smaller. Abortion is emotional dynamite and had aroused not just young voters, but also many older and suburban Ohioans, who banded together to reject efforts by the state to control women’s bodies. Marijuana had nowhere near the visceral impact and was still viewed by many conservatives as a harmful drug and the gateway to more serious addiction.
Thus Issue 2 proponents were hoping for a sufficient coattail effect to push them over the finish line with a narrow victory.
But it was not narrow at all. Issue 2 did better than Issue 1, winning by 524,000 votes, with 57% of the total. The two initiatives thus had an almost one-to-one overlap. Turnout was identical as well, with only 50,000 more votes cast for Issue 1, out of a total of almost 4 million for each measure.
Even more surprising was that “the unofficial results suggest that the counties with the highest turnout in Tuesday’s election were actually jurisdictions that had favored Trump in 2020.” The victory, therefore, was “not driven by remarkable Democratic turnout,” as some Ohio Republicans claimed, “but by a significant share of voters in Republican-leaning counties.”
Nor did Issue 2 win due to the inattention of its opponents, the same conservatives who tried to kill Issue 1. The list on Ballotpedia, all Republicans, included Governor Mike DeWine, the lieutenant governor, and 25 members of the Ohio legislature. Among the organizations against the measure was the Center for Christian Virtue.
The official argument in opposition was submitted by three conservative Ohio legislators, Senators Terry Johnson and Mark Romanchuk, and Representative Bill Seitz. Their list of reasons relied on the same sort of scare tactics that they had tried so hard to make work with Issue 1 and read like something one might have encountered in Reefer Madness.
They included: “Ensures we will be overrun with marijuana, as California and Colorado have proven; Recklessly exposes kids to a mind-altering substance in kid-friendly forms, such as candy and cookies; Promotes recreational use of a drug that causes withdrawal, distorted perceptions, respiratory damage, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and schizophrenia.”
It is difficult to decide which is more absurd, their decision to employ guffaw-inducing throwbacks to the 1930s, or that the three authors believed voters would be convinced by them.
Their other ploy was to try to evoke class resentment. They also wrote, “Legalizing recreational marijuana is today’s version of Big Tobacco—big corporations getting rich at the expense of our kids and society. That’s why people from all walks of life are coming together to vote ‘NO’ this November.”
Apparently they did not.
And that they did not is what makes the results of Issue 2 significant, perhaps even more so than Issue 1. If, as the results suggest, a slew of conservative voters ignored their state’s leadership and supported a liberal ballot measure in which the emotional stakes were far less, some may not be impervious to Democratic initiatives if they are reasonable, middle of the road, and will improve the lives of ordinary people. This will be especially true if Republican candidates rely excessively on culture war issues, which they have recently shown an inability to resist.
While all this is good news for President Biden, who can use all the good news he can get, it may be even better news for moderate Democrats running in red states, such as Senators Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, and even Joe Manchin. (Alas, for Manchin, not any more.)
This is not to say, of course, that hundreds of thousands of voters will suddenly decide to abandon the Republican Party and vote for centrist Democrats. But in close elections, which many of the most important 2024 races promise to be, just a small segment of those voters who may focus on issues in a slightly different way can make the difference.