It was a pleasant election night on Tuesday for the American Democrats, even though their president’s values are not doing so well. In polls, Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump a year before the 2024 presidential election, but in votes in several states, Democratic candidates or their issues met with some sympathy – even in more Republican areas. Last but not least, it was about a dispute with which the Republicans wanted to make a name for themselves: abortion.
Last year, the Supreme Court with its conservative majority overturned the federal right to abortion that had been in effect for half a century. Since then, each state has had to decide what is allowed and what is not. Ohio became the seventh state to vote in favor of abortion rights. 56 percent of the vote was yes, which means that Ohio is moving away from the particularly restrictive camp in the South and turning towards liberal areas like California.
The reaction to the extremely controversial decision of the Supreme Court abortion from summer 2022 had already helped the Democrats in the US midterm elections in autumn 2022. Ohio now showed that the right wing and fundamental Christian wing can lose on social issues even in a predominantly Republican area. The parallel referendum to legalize marijuana also won 56-44 in Ohio. What is particularly politically significant is the clear victory of those who do not want to have abortions banned.
“Democracy has won”
Then the man from the White House congratulated. “Tonight, Americans once again voted to protect their fundamental freedoms,” praised Biden, “and democracy won.” In Ohio, voters “protected access to reproductive health care in their state constitution” and, like others before them, “rejected Republican MAGA voters’ attempts to impose extreme abortion bans.”
MAGA stands for Trump’s hardliners and his motto Make America Great Again. “This extreme and dangerous agenda,” Biden said, “is not consistent with the vast majority of Americans.” His administration, Biden promises, will “continue to protect access to reproductive health care” and call on Congress to enshrine abortion rights into federal law once and for all.
He also offered congratulations to Kentucky’s old and new governor, Andy Beshear, because the Democrat was re-elected by a clear margin. Kentucky is also an otherwise red area, i.e. dominated by Republicans. Beshear had led his way through the pandemic and campaigned for abortion rights – this obviously brought him more than his Republican challenger’s support from Trump, the front runner of the national Republicans. For Beshear, this is “a clear statement that angry politics should end here and now.”
The Republicans are also failing in Virginia
Trump’s party also failed in its attempt to take control of both chambers in Virginia. The opposite happened, in the future the Democrats will determine the Senate and House of Representatives in Richmond. This deprives Republicans there of the opportunity to further restrict access to abortions and slows the rise of Governor Glenn Youngkin, who was considered a promising Republican for a post-Trump era. On top of that, Virginia Democrat Danica Roem will become the first transgender senator in the southern United States. She defeated a former police officer who was supported by Youngkin and wanted to ban transgender athletes from school teams if he won.
Then in Pennsylvania, a vacant seat on the regional Supreme Court went to a Democrat, expanding their majority on the court. And Democrat Cherelle Parker will become mayor of Philadelphia, another US metropolis with Democratic leadership. It is one of the few successes of the Republicans on this Election Day, this small election day twelve months before the big election day, that their governor Tate Reeves in Mississippi kept his opponent Brandon Presley, a second cousin of Elvis Presley, at a distance.
After defeats in three states, the Republicans will now have to think about their strategy on the issue of abortion. They recently made a strong abortion opponent, the evangelical Trump admirer Mike Johnson, speaker of the US House of Representatives. When asked what he thought of the result in Ohio, the clear vote for legal abortion, Johnson replied only this: “no comment.”