Early voting starts Wednesday for Nov. 7’s general election, at which Ohioans are being asked to (a) add a right to abortion to the Ohio Constitution and (b) pass a law legalizing marijuana.
Both proposals were placed on the ballot by voter petition, not by the legislature.
Will abortion and recreational marijuana issues win in Ohio?
This corner is not particularly distinguished for accurate predictions.
Still, here goes:
Voters, by a margin of at least 55% will ratify the proposed abortion amendment. But passage of the marijuana law may be iffy, though it shouldn’t be. The business crowd is amping up concerns about workplace safety, which after all, is a legitimate issue, as is toking-and-driving.
Predicting voter passage for the pro-abortion-rights amendment is partly based on the fact that every state whose voters have recently decided the question, including Kansas and Kentucky, has voted pro-choice.
Suddes:Is Ohio more conservative than Kansas, Kentucky when it comes to abortions rights?
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Of course, Ohio isn’t “every state” – it’s increasingly a museum of Statehouse horrors.
Still, while the pro-abortion-rights campaign is rolling better than one of Mr. Timken’s bearings, the foes of Issue 1, as the abortion amendment is known, seem to be scattershot in anti-Issue 1 campaign.
Yes, that’s impressionistic.
But it highlights an enduring truth about Ohio (and other states) and the anti-abortion issue.
From Roe vs. Wade (January 1973) through Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health (June 2022), anti-abortion lobbies could only try to tackle the edges of the issue, inside, say, the Columbus Outerbelt, at the Statehouse, with step-by-step tactics advancing state restrictions on specific abortion techniques and timing.
The complacent have are awake
But with Dobbs, the dog finally caught the car, totally changing the abortion debate’s terms of engagement.
People who otherwise dismissed the piecemeal approach in the 1973-2022 era as no real threat to abortion access came to realize that Dobbs put the whole abortion issue, A-to-Z, on Ohio’s table, stoking a ferocious pushback by women and their allies: That is, the days of procedure-by-procedure in-Statehouse skirmishing ended, and anti-abortion lobbies seemingly weren’t job-ready for a statewide war.
Lobbying that way, at the Statehouse, by medical procedure, had become what Ohio’s anti-abortion movement got used to. Then Dobbs made it impossible for pro-choice Ohioans to keep complacently assuming that, yeah, well, the antis can make all the Columbus moves they want, but when the sun sets, Roe would still guarantee general access to abortion.
Not now, it won’t. That’s the political imperative sparking Issue 1 — and energizing the campaign to pass it.
Dividing Athens
New Ohio House of Representatives districts the Redistricting Commission drew reveal twist after twist of the GOP’s knife. Consider Athens County. Depending on someone’s perspective, it’s a countercultural bazaar or a little bit of New England transplanted in Ohio 200 years ago.
Athens is the only one of Ohio’s officially designated Appalachian counties that voted for Joe Biden for president in 2020. And Athens was just one of two Ohio counties (the other: Lucas) that voted for George McGovern in 1972.
The “bipartisan” redistricting commission sawed Athens County in two. One part was combined with Meigs and Washington counties in District 94. Washington (Marietta) last voted for a Democrat for president in 1964 (Lyndon Johnson), Meigs (Pomeroy) in 1996 (Bill Clinton).
Athens County’s other part was crowbarred into District 95, lashed to Harrison (seat: Cadiz), Morgan (seat: McConnelsville) and Noble (seat: Caldwell) counties, and parts of Belmont (seat: St. Clairsville) and Guernsey (seat: Cambridge) counties – all safely Republican, at least presidentially.
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Driving-wise, it’s roughly 130 miles, southwest to northeast, from Athens (at the new district’s southerly end) to Harrison County, in its northern end. Sure, given population patterns, it might be exceedingly hard to find enough Democrats in the region to draw (a) an Athens-based district that (b) would likely send a Democrat to Ohio’s House. But it has been done before.
The sprawling district is the brazen opposite of compactness, another characteristic fair Ohio House districts should have – but won’t, unless Ohio voters reform General Assembly districting via a 2024 statewide ballot issue.
Waiting for the Redistricting Commission to do the right thing is like waiting for Godot.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com
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