Jay LaPrete/AP Photo
People celebrate the defeat of Issue 1 during a watch party, August 8, 2023, in Columbus, Ohio.
Tuesday’s referendum in Ohio, which went down to a resounding defeat, told us something that we already know: The vast majority of Americans support a woman’s right to abortion. The measure, which would have raised the bar to pass a ballot measure from a simple majority to 60 percent, was clearly intended to thwart Ohioans from passing a referendum on the upcoming November ballot that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
(I note in passing that the common sense of Ohioans in their preference for majority rule over a 60 percent threshold that enables minorities to thwart majorities might profitably be applied to the United States Senate.)
But there was one other aspect to Tuesday’s vote that also tells us what we already know, but more graphically and decisively than we’ve known it before. It’s the political difference between cities, suburbs, and rural areas; it’s that in America today, more often than not, population density is political destiny.
Ohio has 88 counties. The three largest are Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Franklin (Columbus), and Hamilton (Cincinnati). In that order, they’re also the three counties in which more votes were cast in this election. And also in that order, they’re the three counties that saw the highest percentage of No votes on the referendum: 76 percent in Cuyahoga, 75 percent in Franklin, and 67 percent in Hamilton. (OK, there was one exception: tiny Athens County, which is home to Ohio University and apparently not much else, had a No vote of 71 percent.) They’re followed by suburban counties that abut them, and the counties that are home to every other Ohio city big enough so that their names are familiar: Dayton, Toledo, Akron, Youngstown, and Canton.
Ranked in order of how many people voted on the referendum, the seven biggest-turnout counties all voted No. Every one of the smallest 42 voted Yes. Turnout ranged from 331,055 voters in Cuyahoga to 2,529 in Vinton. The break point between Yes and No counties is roughly 35,000 voters. In the 22 counties where more than 35,000 ballots were cast, 17 of those counties voted No. Of the 66 counties where fewer than 35,000 residents voted, 61 of those counties voted Yes.
From which, a few hypotheses. In a state like Ohio, the bigger the county, the greater the racial diversity, the higher the share of jobs demanding college degrees, and, correspondingly, the higher the share of college-educated workers and professionals. The smaller the county, the lower the likelihood that college-educated workers have moved in from more cosmopolitan centers. And whatever the level of patriarchal primitivism in those smaller counties, their experience of economic modernity—which has been chiefly defined by the shuttering of factories, the complete absence of capital investment, the out-migration of young people, and the surge in drug dependency and deaths of despair—has strengthened the perception that modernity ranks somewhere between problematic and mortally dangerous. The vote in rural Ohio, I suspect, is less about abortion per se than about its linkage to modern nonpatriarchal values. Evangelical Protestants and Southern Baptists, after all, didn’t get around to opposing abortion until the 1970s—that is, in reaction to the emergence of a significant feminist movement.
So, is density destiny? It sure is in Ohio.
