Abortion is a democracy issue

Ohio and Wisconsin give some clues on how to defend American democracy

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Ohio gave the abortion rights movement a major victory this week, voting to reject a ballot measure which would have made it more difficult to amend the state constitution. What makes this story interesting is not just the outcome - a red state reaffirming abortion rights - but also the extent to which a vote on a seemingly technical piece of constitutional procedure produced blow-out turnout. This is usually the sort of vote which arouses little enthusiasm, which is actually what Republicans were counting on when they put it on the ballot.

What happened here is kind of complicated, but that’s actually my point, so please bear with me. Abortion is currently legal up to 22 weeks in Ohio but a six-week ban passed by the state legislature is being litigated in the courts, meaning it could eventually come into effect. In February, pro-choice groups started gathering signatures to hold a referendum on invalidating this law by enshrining a right to abortion in the state constitution. In response to polls showing support for this measure to be in the high 50s, the Republican-dominated state legislature decided to hold a referendum which would require a threshold of 60% to amend the state constitution. And they decided to hold that referendum in August, hoping that turnout would be low enough for them to push the measure through. As the cherry on top, they did this just months after they banned most August voting because they argued that turnout was usually so low that the votes were fundamentally undemocratic.

As an example of the sort of cartoon villainy that can often be found at the state level in American politics, this was pretty rich. But it’s also the sort of thing that political commentators typically argue that voters don’t really care about. Since 2016, one side in the debate over “American democracy” has argued that trying to get voters to care about questions of democratic procedure is pointless. Gerrymandering, campaign finance, the Electoral College, and chicanery over ballot initiatives might excite the attention of activists, but they will never be as persuasive to the ordinary voter as the state of the economy or the border. If you are a political force who wants to defend democracy, the argument goes, it’s best to just to shut up about it and try to grow the economy.

I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with this argument. “Democracy” is not some abstract issue that exists in the ether. The quality of a nation’s democracy is a measure of the extent to which healthy debate can happen and the will of the people can be expressed across all areas of life. Particularly in a country like America, where one party is increasingly dedicated to imposing a narrow set of economic, social and cultural values on a population the majority of whom do not accept them, democracy is inextricable from everything else. And as the Ohio result shows, voters are smart enough to understand that.

The task of defending and improving America’s democracy can only be successful if it is linked to concrete issues in people’s lives. It’s right to focus on these concrete issues, but it’s wrong to leave out the way democratic procedure influences them. Abortion is a perfect example, and provides a wedge issue for small-d democrats to hammer Republicans with. The GOP’s anti-abortion agenda is tremendously unpopular and has lost each of the seven times that it has been placed on state ballots since Roe was overturned. Even large numbers of Republican voters do not support it, and the party has lost ballot measures in deep red states such as Kansas and Kentucky. Democrats should be quick to make the argument that the fact they keep losing votes on these and other issues is precisely why Republicans are hostile to the very idea of American democracy itself.

There was another example of how successful this strategy can be in Wisconsin earlier this year. Wisconsin has one of the worst gerrymanders in America and is effectively not a democracy. Republicans are almost guaranteed to control the state legislature even if Democrats win a majority of the votes. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin Supreme Court election flipped control of the court from conservatives to liberals, finally opening the door to striking down the state’s gerrymander and bringing democratic regime change to the state capitol, Madison. The winning candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, prevailed by linking abortion access, voting rights and gerrymandering into a seamless message about the importance of defending democracy.

For the national Democratic Party, the lesson is that it must lean into the issue of abortion and link it to the fate of American democracy more broadly. Already activists are seeking ways to make the stakes clear in 2024, including by placing abortion referenda on the same ballot as the November presidential election in key swing states. The goal is to juice turnout by benefiting from the enthusiasm of the pro-choice movement and thereby channel it into a broader defense of American democracy by keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.

This might sound cynical. To an extent, it is. I dearly wish that calculations of this sort were not necessary at this point in American history. I dearly hope that my daughter will grow up to see an America which respects her fundamental rights. But for as long as it doesn’t, victories must be found wherever they can - and Republicans must be forced to own their unpopular policies and to justify them at every turn.