With the news out of Ohio last night of a 57% to 43% victory over the attempt of a Republican-controlled legislature to change the rules for amending the state constitution in a rush to block any attempt to protect reproductive rights, a clear post-Dobbs pattern has taken shape. In states that Republicans have managed to control through drawing favorable electoral maps, in voting systems that already privilege less populated counties and regions, many of the more extreme or zealous positions that the GOP has been turning into law and regulation will be rejected by a significant majority if they’re given the opportunity to vote on them directly.
That’s even in states that are fairly conservative, that would likely have majority Republican legislatures even if the districts were drawn fairly. There are plenty of Americans who were anti-abortion in polls as a moral commentary on abortion for years, and supported candidates who took that line, but who turn out not to be in favor of making abortion illegal precisely because they understood that this was taking away rights from other people who didn’t agree, because they understood the likely complications in terms of making it difficult for medical professionals to look after maternal health generally, because they understood that there would be unbelievably cruel outcomes where ten-year old girls who were raped couldn’t get an abortion or women tried to induce the termination of a pregnancy in dangerous ways. Or they understood that despite their own moral view of abortion, they might not want to close the door even for themselves or their daughters. Because they understood that the zealous momentum that led to Dobbs might not stop there, that we might once again have limited access to birth control, or the government prying into bedrooms.
If you held a plebiscite on abortion in six months in every state in the U.S. where the proposition was “should abortion be completely illegal without exception,” which is where a lot of Republican lawmakers in those states want to end up, I think that proposition would lose by comfortable majorities in all but about ten states. And the longer that harsh restrictions remain in place and people have to actually witness what that means, the more those majorities would grow.
Reproductive rights aren’t the only example of public policy where solid national majorities and as much as 4/5 of the states would likely repudiate Republican policies—and likely for that matter even cautious Democratic policy. For example, if you put “free tuition at public universities” on the ballot, or “universal health care”, they’d likely win by solid majorities in many states. That’s even if all the private equity firms and Big Pharma and the insurers dumped billions in cash in trying to make people fearful, and even if these votes were on concrete well-designed actual implementation plans for those policies.
This is the paradox of Democratic politics from the era of Bill Clinton onward: the Democratic Party is timid or even oppositional about positions that polling shows strong majorities supporting. Only now are they really trying to attach themselves to post-Dobbs campaigning to protect reproductive rights—they had forty years to try and campaign for state-level constitutional protections as a bulwark against the possible overturning of Roe v Wade, often in political environments that would have been friendly to those efforts, and they simply didn’t do it.
There are a lot of ways to interpret the Democrats lagging behind majority-supported political preferences. One is just crude self-interest and corruption, that the party is connected to and dependent upon the powerful financial interests that have destroyed American health care and badly undercut public higher education.
Another is ideology: Clinton-Blair “Third Way-ism” thought there was a reliable, reproducible electoral majority available via solicitous endorsement of “communalist” moral preferences, friendly-to-business deregulation and tax reduction, globalization, military build-up and reducing social democracy to a kind of underfunded remnant. That turns out to have been profoundly wrong in almost every possible respect, and it fueled the Republican Party’s rocketing off to the outer reaches of the far right.
A third is just that the Democrats learned the wrong lessons from defeats and encoded those into the party’s DNA over time, or failed to understand the nature of their victories. That effect is magnified by the current gerentocratic death grip of leaders over 70, who are holding on to precisely the wrong lessons from their relative youth. Obama’s 2008 win was ascribed by many Democratic-favoring pundits as the triumph of some kind of magic demography, as if older white people dying off instantly meant “permanent Democratic majority” that never had to deliver anything, or that the nation was choosing sensible centrism and thus that would prevail. They didn’t notice that in gerrymandered legislative maps, especially at the state level, the nation was being forced towards choosing something else, and they didn’t notice that a lot of what put Obama over the top was not his pragmatic centrism but his messianic rhetoric about hope and change.
Obama’s voters—including those who might not normally vote Democratic—wanted those popular positions to become reality, and not in increments or half-measures. And what we got was a timid and convoluted health care reform that has been completely superceded in a hundred ways by health care as an industry and we got a Secretary of Education who thought the answer to expensive higher education was empowering consumer choice and subcontracting Big Tech to make it all go online. And we got no effective action at all on reproductive rights.
There are policies that some Democrats support or defend that likely wouldn’t survive an electoral test in many states. Substantial police reform would survive, but not if it dismissed crime as a serious issue. I think at least some policies aimed at securing trans rights might not survive electoral tests in most states. Some of the stricter approaches to covid-19 protocols might have lost majority elections in many states even during the pandemic and are likely even less popular in retrospect.
But public education, public health care, dramatically stronger gun control, reproductive rights, strong environmental regulation? I’m confident that they’d win majorities in 35 states, perhaps as many as 40 states, especially if the Republicans in state legislatures were pulling the blatantly anti-democratic crap that the folks in Ohio just tried to get away with. I think many of those positions might hold up enough to sustain popular votes in favor of Constitutional amendments in those states, where 38 is the magic number. The sleazier the attempt to defend zealous minority positions, the more that majorities harden behind their own preferences. And the more that people experience the consequences of bad public policy, the more desperate their yearning for the better policies that are plainly possible, most of which predominate across the EU and elsewhere in the world.
It might be that the Democratic leadership can slough off bad ancient history lessons about victory and defeat, and bad Clinton-Obama ideology. If the real issue is just that they’re too in hock to powerful interests that benefit from preventing popular positions from becoming policy realities—essentially, too willing to keep on losing as long as it benefits them—then I think the near-term political future really is dark, and that what a democracy wants is not what a democracy is going to get, no how many majority votes demand otherwise.
Image credit: "Ohio in United States" by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Free tuition is going to be very dependent on how it works, but I think the experience of Vermont shows that universal health insurance would not pass a ballot measure almost anywhere, let alone someplace like Ohio.