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Abortion rights protesters march through the streets of San Francisco, May 14, 2022.
In many states with clear pro-choice majorities, or at minimum clear majorities opposed to the Court’s revocation of Roe v. Wade, voters have a way both to ensure their state remains pro-choice and to elect more pro-choice Democrats in November: ballot measures.
In some of those states, voters won’t even have to collect the signatures required to place such a measure on the ballot. In California, for instance, both Gov. Gavin Newsom and leading legislators have said they’ll go the referendum route by having the heavily Democratic legislature vote to place a state constitutional amendment ensuring women’s right to choose before voters in November. (California has had a pro-choice statute since then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1967, but this measure would enshrine that right in the state’s constitution.) In other states, including such key swing states as Arizona, Florida, Michigan, and Nevada, voters, through gathering sufficient signatures, can have their state’s ballots include propositions that would create either a pro-choice law or a pro-choice constitutional amendment. In Arizona, Florida, and Michigan, where such changes have no chance being enacted by Republican legislatures, the initiative process is the only way choice can win legal standing (though Arizona Democrats have some hopes of winning control of the legislature in November).
Such measures are also likely to help any number of Democratic candidates in November as well. Once a measure on so fundamental an issue qualifies for the ballot, there’s really no way a candidate can plausibly refuse to take a position. And in swing states and districts with pro-choice majorities, that dynamic will surely boost the prospects of Democratic candidates. By my estimate, there are quite a number of districts now held by Republicans in California and Nevada, at minimum, where Republican candidates would be put in a bind by such measures. At the level of statewide offices, the same dynamic is likely to play out in the swing states I listed above.
Only about half the states (26, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures) have enacted laws creating the initiative or referendum process, however. A number of states where such measures could help Democrats statewide (for instance, Pennsylvania) or in district races (for instance, New York) have no such options. But in states that do, pro-choice and Democratic strategists tell me they’re either looking hard at what it would take to mount such campaigns or are already laying the groundwork for them. In a year when both the pro-choice movement and the Democratic Party need all the help they can get, the initiative and referendum may be their best friends.
