The state of Ohio has just managed to push itself into the center of attention in US politics with a bang. And that with what at first glance seemed a banal referendum: On Tuesday, more than half of the voters rejected the need for future changes to the state’s constitution to be implemented with a 60 percent majority. The existing rule, according to which a simple majority is sufficient to bring about changes to the constitution, continues to apply.
This vote was only superficially about a simple constitutional question. Ohio Republicans suggested the change because another vote is scheduled for November to decide whether to include abortion rights in the state constitution.
The aim of the current vote was to make it much more difficult for the November vote to include the right to abortion in the constitution. All polls show that a slim majority of Ohioans support this right. According to the polls, support for the right to an abortion is just under 60 percent. That’s why the Republicans wanted to change the rules so that it would take more than 60 percent to enshrine this right in the constitution.
Ohio has long been considered an oracle in the US elections – whoever wins there moves into the White House
The state’s population has now rejected this request, with about 56.5 percent of the vote. It can be assumed that the majorities in November will be similar: that the right to abortion will be enshrined in the constitution of the Republican-governed state with a simple majority, although the state government has spoken out against it.
For the Republicans, this is another sign that they can score points with their base with the issue of abortion, but not with a majority of all voters. There is also the question of whether they could lose their majority in a state that they won over to their side just a few years ago because of the abortion issue.
For 60 years, there hasn’t been a single candidate for the US presidential election who hasn’t always had Ohio in his or her sights. Ohio was considered an oracle. It was a classic swing state, and whoever won Ohio won the election. That was the case from 1964 to 2016.
When 2008 was counted and everything looked as if Barack Obama could possibly become the first black president of the USA, most observers only believed it when the television stations announced: Ohio goes – Obama. At the election parties of the Democrats, the big cheers broke out only at this moment.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the state. At this point, the Democrats did not want to admit that the decision had been made. But Ohio did not err, as it had never erred in the previous half-century. Trump became president. It wasn’t until 2020 that Joe Biden managed to break the rule that had been in place for so long: he moved into the White House despite losing Ohio.
More recently, the Democrats have denied the state the role of oracle. What’s more, they abandoned him, they listed Ohio as a state lost to the Republicans. Just like Florida, which was also considered a swing state in the recent past, but now reliably votes Republican. But since this Tuesday, a rethinking should have started in the democratic strategy centers.
The fact that the Supreme Court declared the federal right to abortion in the summer of 2022 to be unconstitutional and gave the decision to the states is still celebrated by many conservatives as the biggest political victory in decades. Since then, however, it has become apparent that this issue has gained a lot of support from the Democrats, because a majority of voters believe that the decision on abortion should not lie with the states but with the women concerned.
In April of this year, the Wisconsin electorate elected a pro-abortion judge to the state Supreme Court. With this election, the Liberals took over the majority in the court. The Conservatives had previously held this position for 15 years, and the verdict was considered groundbreaking: The Democrats in Washington recognized that they could win elections across the country with the issue of abortion.
The result of the vote in Ohio should also raise new questions in Joe Biden’s team. The strategy so far has been to focus on traditionally contested states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and possibly Georgia in the 2024 presidential election. But as of this Tuesday, Ohio is definitely back on the Democratic map.