Democracy 1, Ohio GOP 0
If you're going to lose anyway, why not lie shamelessly and smear the transgender community?
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She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.
Joan Rivers
When you do everything you can to rig an election and still lose, you have a problem. Voters in Ohio told the state’s Republican Party on Tuesday that it has a big problem, and they sent that message to the GOP nationwide.
The Ohio GOP tried to pull a fast one on the state’s voters last week. They wanted to make it harder to eliminate the Buckeye State’s draconian abortion ban…and they lost, embarrassingly so. At this point, it seems reasonable to conclude a trend seems clear. Even in deep red states, abortion rights are popular. It turns out that people don’t like having rights taken away from them, even if they’re rights that don’t apply to them specifically. Men, f’rinstance, don’t like abortion bans, albeit perhaps for different reasons than women, but taking away rights doesn’t play well. Because once you begin taking rights away, it’s a slippery slope.
Since the Supreme Court ash-canned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Montana, Kansas, and, if memory serves, at least one other red state has approved measures to secure the right to a safe, legal abortion. Ohio will be voting on a similar referendum in November. When people are allowed to express themselves on the issue, they invariably come down on the side of women and their right to choose.
In Ohio, Republicans, ever the supporters of democracy (not), did everything they could to sneak one past voters. All they did was succeed in pissing them off.
Voters in Ohio…smacked down a constitutional amendment that would have made it harder for voters to pass ballot initiatives, overwhelmingly defeating the Republican-backed proposal. “Issue 1” would have increased the voting threshold for passing a constitutional amendment from a simple majority, as it’s been for over a century, to 60 percent. Republicans in the very gerrymandered Ohio Legislature saw the amendment as a chance to head off a planned initiative to protect abortion rights in the state, but too bad, so sad: Issue 1, the only thing on yesterday’s ballot, failed by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent, with 99 percent of votes counted.
Just to help goose the measure’s chances, Republicans tried to discourage turnout by scheduling the special election for August, when people usually stop paying attention to politics unless there’s some particularly awful fuckery afoot. To add to the absurdly transparent attempt at ratfucking the vote, yesterday’s special election required its very own exception to a law Republicans passed last year that ended August elections, because nobody votes in ‘em and they cost so much to administer.
Turns out that when people DO see Republicans trying to load the odds in their favor, particularly when it comes to trying to do an end-run around protecting abortion rights, they turn out like crazy. In fact, Ohioans cast around 2.8 million votes for this August off-year election, far surpassing the 1.66 million votes in 2022’s primary election, which chose candidates for both parties for governor, US Senate, and the US House.
Republicans weren’t even trying to hide their intent. They know they’ll likely lose their majority in the Ohio statehouse before long. So they wanted to do what they could to game the system in their favor and make it exceedingly difficult to pass any referendum that might undo their handiwork.
They figured that by holding a vote on Issue 1 in early August, no one would be paying attention, much less understand that fuckery was afoot. Republicans figured they could sneak one by voters at a time when they probably wouldn’t be paying attention.
Except that their trick attracted significant local and national media attention, which was the last thing the Ohio GOP wanted. They’d hoped to fly under the radar, get a low turnout, and secure a much-needed victory when their committed voters turned out for them.
But, when Ohio voters found out what Republicans were up to- THERE’S FUCKERY AFOOT!!- they were none too happy. There were reports that voting on college campuses, for example, was at near-record levels. That alone was probably enough to doom Issue 1.
The national GOP and state parties would be well-advised to pay attention to the message sent by this election; it’s a pretty clear one. Abortion rights are popular- and people don’t like having their rights taken away, especially when it involves medical care and potentially harming a woman's health and/or life.
Not that Republicans will learn this lesson, of course. They’re just arrogant enough to believe that they must only repackage their message and sell it better. If they try that, they’ll be missing the point entirely. Abortion isn’t going to win the 2024 election for the GOP, but it may well lose it for them.
That said, I don’t know if they’re intelligent or flexible enough to read the tea leaves and internalize the message. Many will still focus on culture war issues, primarily because the GOP has no policy ideas. They have no workable alternatives to what Democrats are doing. All they have is complaining about Joe Biden, but what the President is doing is working. Republicans can bitch and moan all they want, but economic trends are all positive, and Republicans have nothing to offer that would make things better.
Sure, Republicans can tinker around the margins, but in broader policy terms, they have nothing to offer voters. Their candidate in 2020 didn’t even have a party platform to run on. The GOP was so deeply in thrall to The Former Guy that their “platform” was whatever he wanted to do.
Abortion and other culture war issues are simply a way to keep reliably Republican voters angry and engaged when the party has nothing substantive to offer. When there are no policies to put forward, you can always flog hatred of the LGBTQ community, Liberals, perceived disrespect for the flag, fear of Communism, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Instead of Americans trying to find common ground, you have people screaming at each other and politicians trying to exploit that hatred and rage. The Former Guy didn’t win in 2016 by blowing sunshine up the backside of voters on the Far-Right. No, he convinced millions of Americans that this country was a decaying hellhole and that only he could restore it to its former greatness. Of course, none of his supporters noticed or cared that once he took office, he could hardly have cared less about restoring America’s greatness. It was all about his ego and lining his pockets.
Republicans across the country have taken a cue from their leader and decided that cheating in the pursuit of power is no sin. In fact, the pursuit of power, being a Machiavellian endeavor, requires that one do whatever is necessary, whether above board or not, to achieve success. There are no longer any rules. Republicans honor only the end; the means have no significance as long as they achieve the desired result.
Of course, The Former Guy couldn’t have spelled (or pronounced) Machiavelli if you’d held a gun to his head, but he understood cheating and doing whatever may be necessary to win. How else would you explain January 6th?
Republicans tried, occasionally, to pretend that the vote wasn’t about making sure the state’s strict abortion law stays in place, claiming from time to time that amending the state constitution shouldn’t be too easy, but voters saw it for what it was: not just a way to block November’s initiative on abortion, but also to throatcram minority rule even further in a state where Republicans usually get around 54 percent of the vote, but have gerrymandered themselves a 70 percent majority in both the state House and Senate.
Former congressman Tim Ryan (D) told the Washington Post (gift linky) that the open assault on democratic norms brought traditional, non-MAGA Republicans — both of them, perhaps — to the polls, too: “A lot of libertarian Republicans were turned off by this proposal that they saw as crafted by political hacks,” he told columnist EJ Dionne.
Dionne goes on:
The laughable sneakiness of Ohio Republicans should force a larger national debate over efforts to undercut majority rule. “This is a clear instance of a more general problem plaguing American democracy today, especially in the states: increased partisan efforts to take decisions out of the hands of popular majorities,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the forthcoming book Tyranny of the Minority with his colleague Steven Levitsky.
“Laughable sneakiness,” indeed. Ultimately, they were trying to pull a fast one in broad daylight. They knew it, everyone in the state of Ohio knew it, the national media knew it…and yet the Ohio GOP kept up the charade.
The emperor had no clothes, and yet….
Sadly, they kept lying instead of owning up to their skullduggery, making things exponentially worse. Ohio’s Republicans even tried smearing the state’s transgender community in a pathetic effort to gin up support for Issue 1, even though the referendum had nothing to do with transgender people.
In addition to trying to hide the referendum in a summertime election, supporters of Issue 1, perhaps recognizing that the big early vote numbers didn’t bode well, also lied about the measure to scare people. Why, if Ohio didn’t make voting harder, then terrifying out-of-state liberal groups would come for your children!
One TV ad from an anti-abortion group showed a parent tucking a sweet little girl into bed, as a female narrator warned,
“You promised you’d keep the bad guys away. Protect her. Now’s your chance. Out-of-state special interests that put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids are hiding behind slick ads. Don’t be fooled. You can keep this madness out of Ohio classrooms and protect your rights as a parent by voting ‘yes’ on August 8.”
We do feel compelled to add that absolutely nobody is encouraging “sex changes for kids,” no matter how many time rightwingers insist that’s the case. But it’s OK, they were lying to save the babies, except for how that too is a lie.
There was nothing in Issue 1 about “sex changes for kids.” It was a scare tactic by a desperate and degenerate state GOP with nothing positive to offer voters, so they went with their default- culture war fear and terror.
In the end, all Republicans had to offer were lies. Sad…but all too typical.
There are those, and the Ohio GOP is a pathetic example, who’d rather see America burn than turned over to Democratic governance. That’s utterly deplorable because America, ideally, is best served by the competition of ideas to be found in a capable two-party system. Then again, perhaps that’s the problem; there’s no longer a capable two-party system. There’s one party- the Democrats- who are interested in good governance, while the other- Republicans- seem to be primarily interested in what they can get out of it.
Right; power corrupts, but absolute power is fun…if you’re a Republican.
It is a measure of their state of denial (not just the state of Ohio) that the first thing the GOP started talking about was the unfair media and out of state money. All they need to do next time is the same thing, only harder.