More than 20 Ohio counties rejected Issue 1 on Tuesday and most of them were suburban and exurban counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
More than 20 Ohio counties rejected Issue 1 on Tuesday and most of them were suburban and exurban counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
Issue one wasn’t about abortion, no matter how much people want it to be. Convoluting it with the November abortion rights issue will only give false confidence for the November vote. It’s going to be a much tighter vote than what this was. Plenty of people across the political spectrum saw the long reaching implications passing issue one would have and voted it down for being a power grab.
As an Ohio resident it’s extremely frustrating that every national news outlet is trying to equate the issue 1 vote with abortion rights. Issue 1 would have fundamentally changed how citizens can interact with our constitution by making voter initiatives almost impossible to pass.
Yes, our farcical GOP government went on record saying this issue was in response to the November initiative about abortion rights, but this vote if passed would have made every other future voter initiative all but impossible to pass. It would have consolidated power into the hands of the minority. I’m so thankful people turned out to vote it down.
Honestly - I think it was about both, but the November ballot initiative was absolutely the catalyst. Why else would lawmakers call an August election (something recently abolished), out of a seemingly new concern about ballot initiatives? A power grab was absolutely the goal, but there’s a reason they tried for it now.