Tag Archives: kentucky

Republicans can’t sugarcoat their losses on abortion rights anymore

Originally published in Vox on November 8, 2023.

Even before Tuesday’s elections, many progressives insisted the question of whether protecting abortion rights wins elections was already asked and answered. Democrats made abortion rights the centerpiece of their campaign advertising during the 2022 midterms, a cycle where Democrats outperformed expectations, kept control of the US Senate, and staved off a red wave. Polls last year also found abortion rights to be a significantly motivating issue for both independent and Democratic voters.

Abortion rights ballot measures won in all six states where they appeared in 2022, including states like Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas that otherwise elected Republican candidates. Democrats have been winning in special elections where they ran on abortion rights, and surveys suggested voters have grown even more supportive of abortion rights since the repeal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Anti-abortion groups argued in turn that liberals were mistaking correlation for causation; they maintained that confidence in abortion rights messaging was misplaced, and voters would ultimately punish Democrats for their maximalist positions. They pointed out that Democrats tried and failed to unseat anti-abortion governors in the midterms, and applauded winning federal candidates who “went on offense” on abortion, like Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. The lost referendums, anti-abortion groups insisted, stemmed largely from Republican leaders failing to campaign hard enough and from being outspent, something they promised to never let happen again.

The polling on abortion rights, meanwhile, could be complicated and seem contradictory: Voters sometimes express support for second- and third-trimester bans while signaling strong opposition to restricting access to abortion.

The 2023 election cycle represented a big test: Were abortion rights activists right? Or were anti-abortion leaders correct that the earlier post-Roe losses stemmed from insufficient investment and mealy-mouthed campaigning?

A decisive 13-point victory for protecting abortion rights in red Ohio, wins for Democrats in the Virginia legislature where GOP candidates campaigned on rolling back abortion access to 15 weeks, and the decisive reelection of Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who made protecting abortion rights in his red state central to his campaign, provide the clearest evidence to date that voters of all political persuasions do not support the nationwide attack on reproductive freedom and are voting accordingly.

Anti-abortion leaders tested a host of new tactics this cycle — from rebranding abortion bans as “limits” to claiming the Ohio abortion rights ballot measure was really about curtailing parents’ rights. None of them worked. Republican strategists had been banking on November 7 providing them with proof that voters were sick of Democrats talking about abortion. Virginia was supposed to be a proof of concept that would let Republicans run on a “consensus” position on 15-week bans next year while changing the subject to other topics like crime and immigration.

So Tuesday’s results really were a resounding victory for Democrats and abortion rights supporters — but there are still some caveats and reasons for caution in 2024.

How abortion rights won in Ohio

Anti-abortion leaders recognized how important a win in Ohio would be to changing the narrative ahead of 2024. “A win here would show those other states that will have these ballot measures in the years to come, ‘Hey, these battles can be won,’” Peter Range, the executive director of Ohio Right to Life, told the 19th News in October. The anti-abortion movement threw everything they had at the campaign and still fell far short.

Instead, last night 57 percent of Ohio voters cast their ballot in favor of the constitutional amendment to codify abortion access, despite a significant array of obstacles in a solidly Republican state where Republican elected officials had come out uniformly against the measure.

“Generally speaking, ballot measures in Ohio don’t tend to win,” said Jonathan Robinson, the director of research at Catalist, a liberal voter data analytics firm.

Passing affirmative ballot measures is even harder. In the other conservative states where ballot measures won, abortion rights campaigners organized voters against anti-abortion proposals. Political scientists find it can be easier to be on the “no” side of ballot measure campaigns, since voters have a bias toward maintaining the status quo.

“The reality is Ohio is among the tougher states that we have worked in,” said Joey Teitelbaum, a pollster involved with the Ohio abortion rights campaign, who also worked on winning ballot measures in Colorado, Kansas, and Kentucky. “We stayed focused on a broad values-based message that went beyond partisan politics.”

Though polls indicated Ohio voters were broadly supportive of the proposed amendment, abortion rights advocates were dealing with new hurdles, including an expensive August special election that sought to raise the ballot measure threshold to 60 percent, voter roll purges led by the anti-abortion secretary of state, a misleading intervention from the state’s Republican attorney, and vocal campaigning from the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who urged Ohioans to vote no in a TV ad.

The Ohio Ballot Board also drafted its own summary language of the proposed ballot measure, using more politically objectionable terms like “unborn child” instead of “fetus” and refusing to state that the amendment would protect not just access to abortion but also to contraception, miscarriage care, fertility treatment, and continuing pregnancy. Researchers know that the specific language that appears on a ballot can have a significant impact on how voters vote, and a poll released in late October found support for the amendment dropped considerably when voters were presented with the edited language.

“I have never encountered such complete opposition by the state government,” said Ashley All, who served as communications director for the winning pro-abortion rights ballot measure campaign in Kansas and has since consulted on other post-Roe ballot referendums.

Anti-abortion advocates raised millions more dollars than they had in previous ballot measure campaigns, and worked to cast the Ohio amendment as an “anti-parent” measure that would effectively create a new right to gender-affirming surgery for minors. Legal scholars said the fear-mongering about parental consent was unjustified, given Ohio case law and the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court.​

That abortion rights won so decisively against all these odds — and that so many Trump voters proved willing to cross party lines to vote in favor of the amendment — is a sobering result that anti-abortion leaders will struggle to dismiss. For now, the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group is saying it lost because voters incorrectly believed pregnant patients could be denied life-saving medical care. But even in states with exceptions to abortion bans, doctors have been denying or delaying care, fearing funding cuts or criminal prosecution.

How abortion rights won in Virginia

Though Virginians were not casting votes on a ballot measure, it was no secret that the Virginia legislative elections were largely being fought over abortion.

“It almost feels like we’re running a single-issue campaign on this one,” J. Miles Coleman, of the UVA Center for Politics, said last week. Among women voters, who make up more than half of Virginia’s election, 70 percent rated abortion as a “very important” issue, up 47 percent from 2019.

All 140 seats in the Virginia General Assembly were up for grabs, and Democrats not only retained control of the state Senate but flipped control of the Virginia House.

Youngkin and anti-abortion groups bet that if they could win in Virginia by running emphatically on a 15-week abortion ban, something they cast as a “reasonable” and “consensus” position, then they could prove to Republicans nationwide that abortion need not be a political loser for their party. (The ban, which they called a “limit,” also would have exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.) They also hoped that staking out this position would allow them to more easily change the subject to topics they had advantages on, like crime and the economy.

Prior to the fall of Roe, national polls showed broad support for restricting abortion after 15 weeks, but since the Dobbs decision, voters have been signaling more opposition to the idea. A poll released in mid-October from Christopher Newport University found 54 percent of Virginians opposed the idea of a 15-week ban, and another October survey from the Washington Post-Schar School found 47 percent opposed and 46 percent approved.

Another way to understand the question in Virginia is whether voters would support lawmakers cutting short the window of legal abortion by 12 weeks, since abortion is currently permitted up to 26 weeks and 6 days of a pregnancy in the state.

Voters, though, had good reason to be suspicious Virginia Republicans really would stop at 15 weeks. In Florida, Republicans passed a 15-week ban on abortion in 2022, only to turn around and pass a six-week ban in 2023. Other GOP-led states like South Carolina, Georgia, and Ohio have passed six-week bans.

Multiple videos also emerged of Virginia Republicans admitting they’d likely push for more than they’ve publicly let on. In 2021, an activist secretly recorded Youngkin saying he’d go “on offense” if elected but needed to speak minimally about the topic during campaign season. Two months ago videos surfaced of a House of Delegates candidate saying he’d support a “100 percent” and “total” ban on abortion, and more recently a video of a candidate in a Virginia Senate race showed her saying she’d be interested in pushing beyond a 15-week ban.

A Washington Post-Schar School poll from October found that 51 percent of registered Virginia voters trusted Democrats to handle abortion, compared to 34 percent who trust Republicans.

There are real grounds for abortion rights optimism in 2024

The news out of Ohio is auspicious for those organizing abortion rights ballot measures next year in Arizona, Nevada, Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado. Abortion rights have had a 7-0 winning streak on the ballot since Roe v. Wade was overturned, and Republicans’ fear-mongering rhetoric about parents’ rights and abortion “up until birth” seemed to have failed. While Americans tend to be more uncomfortable with abortions later in pregnancy, voters seem to understand they are extremely rare, and typically associated with fetal anomalies, threats to a mother’s life, and barriers to care that delay access to the procedure.

Evidence continues to mount that voters are willing to cross party lines when it comes to protecting access to reproductive health care. If abortion rights campaigners can continue to frame the issue in a nonpartisan way, their odds of success in the next round of ballot measures look good. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s strong reelection in Kentucky is also an encouraging signal that Democrats can campaign openly on abortion rights in red states and still win.

It’s hard to overstate how much the loss in Virginia complicates’ Republicans’ 2024 campaign plans. Virginia was supposed to show that Republicans could cast Democrats as extremists, proactively pursue reductions in abortion access, and still win, even among Biden-leaning voters. The GOP wanted to show Republicans could “neutralize” the abortion issue, so that swing voters would feel more comfortable voting on other topics they trusted Republicans on. Youngkin insisted voters are “ready to move on and talk about topics besides abortion.”

The fact that Republicans failed so spectacularly doesn’t mean Republicans won’t try this strategy again next year, but it does represent a rather clarifying result — and one that should make GOP strategists pretty nervous, especially given that most voters think Republicans want to ban abortion in all or most cases.

How things could still go poorly for abortion rights in 2024

While things have gone well for abortion rights campaigners thus far, most will admit they were certainly not sure things would play out as they did. And, as anti-abortion leaders are quick to point out, Democrats tried and failed to unseat anti-abortion governors like Brian Kemp in Georgia, Kim Reynolds in Iowa, Mike DeWine in Ohio, and Ron DeSantis in Florida last year, showing that it’s not dispositive that politicians will pay a price for restricting access to abortion.

“In the midterms, yes, abortion mattered in certain places, and democracy issues mattered on certain races. But not all of them,” Ashley All told Vox. “Florida voted exactly as Florida does. Political observers and pundits want to make blanket statements about how things will impact an election, but everyone who works on campaigns knows it doesn’t work like that.”

Another concern is that Youngkin’s prediction was just premature and that voters will in fact grow more tired of hearing about attacks on abortion rights the further out from Dobbs the country gets. Republicans bet wrongly on that happening in 2022 and 2023, but experts admit it’s hard to know what will be animating voters a year from now, especially given how exhausted the electorate seems to be these days.

“Generally people seem a little burnt out,” said Robinson, of Catalist. “The level of political donations for Democrats and Republicans is down a lot, which suggests a sag in interest in politics. Interest in the Republican presidential primary is really low.” Though turnout on November 7 was high, the abortion rights measure in Ohio received nearly as many votes as Republican Sen. J.D. Vance did in 2022.

Reproductive rights campaigners also say the public should not underestimate how tough a fight they faced this year in Ohio compared to the previous six ballot measure campaigns in 2022. Anti-abortion politicians are likely to continue their efforts to curb access to the ballot, and invest heavily in TV and digital advertising aimed at confusing voters. This year abortion rights activists benefited from Ohio being the only ballot measure campaign in the country, helping them to raise three times as much money as their opponents, with most money coming from out of state.

Next year, when there are more expensive ballot measures competing for both media attention and political donations, on top of a surely consuming presidential contest and a bevy of congressional and gubernatorial elections, advocates say the fundraising landscape for abortion rights referendums may be much more difficult.

Politicized By Trump, Teachers Threaten to Shake Up Red-State Politics

Originally published in The Intercept on April 17, 2018.
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THE TEACHERS STRIKES that have roiled red states across the country burst onto the national scene seemingly out of nowhere. But a closer look at the people who make up this movement reveals the distinct Trump-era nature of the uprising.

In the four states where teachers movements have erupted over the past few months — Arizona, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma — educators and community members are encountering broadly similar circumstances. In all four states, residents are reacting to years of Republican-controlled legislatures, a decline in state funding for students and teachers, an expansion of private school vouchers and charter schools, and an increasingly galvanized electorate that is motivated by all sorts of other organizing efforts that have emerged since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

And while the ranks of the educators are stocked with progressives, the strikes would have flopped had they not been joined by conservative Republican teachers who are, in significant ways, manifestations of what Washington pundits have begun to believe are purely imaginary people outside of the Beltway: folks who remain ardently conservative but are rejecting the direction the party has taken in the White House, back home or both.

“This whole effort has helped shake people from a slumber, and more people are asking, ‘Well, how is my representative voting?’” said Noah Karvelis, a public school teacher in Phoenix and a #RedforEd organizer.“People are asking if they need to rethink their votes. On our Facebook page, we even have a lot conservative teachers writing about how frustrated they are with our Republican legislators.”

Adelina Clonts, an educator in Oklahoma for more than 20 years, marched with her ten-year-old daughter from Tulsa to her state capitol, more than a hundred miles, motivated by the chance to give her students with special needs a greater shot at life.

Clonts, a Republican, said when she arrived in Oklahoma City she was disappointed to learn what her legislators had been up to. “I physically went out there to do my own research, and I found out this was basically Republicans not wanting to do their jobs, not wanting to really represent us,” she said. “It really upset me because I’m an active political party person, and it just felt like they were not hearing us.”

Clonts said she and her colleagues are prepared to vote out both Republicans and Democrats. “Everyone wants these problems fixed, and the question for our leaders is, are you trying to do something about it?”

Another Tulsa-area teacher, Cyndi Ralston, went from the sidelines to the protest and now to the campaign trail, running to take on her incumbent state representative after his viral rant against the teachers.

Were it not for Trump, it might not be happening. Kathy Hoffman, who is in her fifth year of teaching in Arizona public schools, decided to run for state superintendent after watching Betsy DeVos’s shambolic Senate confirmation hearing. “That was really the tipping point, the day it hit me [that] we really need more educators to run,” she told The Intercept. “I’m sick of people who never taught in schools leading them, and that’s also what we have in Arizona.”

Over the past year and a half, Hoffman has marched for science, for women, for DREAMers, for gun control, and, she said, for “everything.” Most recently, she’s been rallying with the newly formed #RedForEd movement, a grass-roots effort in Arizona to better fund public schools.

Edwina Howard-Jack, a high school English teacher in Upshur County, West Virginia, has spent the past 18 years in the classroom. When West Virginia teachers walked off their jobs in late February, Howard-Jack made the two-hour drive to her state Capitol on eight of the nine strike days to protest in solidarity. “The labor organizing went right along with what I was already doing,” she explained, calling the election of Trump “a wake-up call” for her. Howard-Jack marched for women in January 2017, and, soon after, decided to found an Indivisible chapter in her hometown. “There have just been so many people who were apathetic before, but now want to get involved, and the teachers strike took it all to a whole new level,” she said.

Sarah Gump, a 33-year-old teacher in Kentucky, has taught for six years in the public school system. About two years ago, she got involved with Save Our Schools Kentucky, a grass-roots effort to protest the entrance of charters into their state. (Kentucky became the 44th state to allow the formation of charter schools in 2017.) This year, as Gump has taken some time off to care for her young daughter, she’s continued to organize for public education, but has also gotten more involved with the BlueGrass Activist Alliance, a hybrid Indivisible and Together We Will chapter.

In West Virginia, educators who went on strike won a 5 percent pay raise, the first pay increase in four years. In Oklahoma, teachers won raises of about $6,000, and more in education spending, though most of their other strike demands were not met. Last week in Arizona, after more than 1,000 schools participated in a statewide “walk-in” to call for more education money, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey announced that he could give teachers a 19 percent pay increase by 2020. Ducey’s offer revealed the pressure he faced to avoid a full-blown teachers strike, but so far, educators have voiced skepticism about the governor’s proposal. And in Kentucky, where teachers have been protesting pension and education cuts, activists convinced their legislators this weekend to halt spending on new charter schools through June 2020.

AS THE FOUR teachers movements all progress at different speeds — though summer vacation looms ahead for them all — educators and activists say they are under no illusion that the battles will end with the school year. Leaders have been urging for more attention to be paid to the upcoming midterm elections. “We’ll remember in November” has become the teachers’ rallying cry and warning to politicians.

“The teachers in West Virginia are happy because they won this fight, but they know it’s not over,” said Richard Ojeda, a progressive state senator running for West Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District seat. “If you talk to any teacher out there, they’ll tell you 5 percent is not enough, and they’re absolutely planning on removing these people in our state leadership who fought their efforts.”

“Teachers are definitely getting more engaged in the upcoming election,” said Howard-Jack. “They’re really looking at who supports unions, who supports education, and our Indivisible chapter is the same. We’re holding candidate forums, endorsing candidates, writing op-eds. I haven’t seen anything like this energy in the past.”

In a statement released Thursday, Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, declared that as classes resume, educators “must turn our attention towards the election season. Instead of making our case at the steps of the Capitol, we have the opportunity to make our voices heard at the ballot box. The state didn’t find itself in this school funding crisis overnight. We got here by electing the wrong people to office. No more. … This fight is not over just because the school bell rings once more and our members walk back into schools. We have created a movement and there’s no stopping us now.”

Liberals across the country are hoping for a massive “blue wave” this November. In deep red states, progressives are similarly hopeful, but they are also trying to temper expectations and promote some more modest electoral objectives.

“Our goal is balance,” said Anna Langthorn, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, in a recent interview with The Oklahoman. “We know that when our legislature is balanced, when our statewide offices are balanced, that we see more moderate governance and more effective governance, and so that’s what we’re aiming for. We want to break the supermajority in the House. … We want to win the governor’s race. And we want to pick up some seats in the Senate, too. The exact number may not be more than 10 in each house, but we saw that having 28 [Democratic] members made a real difference in budget negotiations, and if we can get to 34 members, that would make an even bigger difference.”

Christine Porter Marsh, a first-time candidate for office in Arizona and the state’s 2016 Teacher of the Year, says she also hopes her candidacy can bring some balance to her state’s red-leaning legislature.

“The Democrats are only two seats down from creating a tie in the Arizona Senate, and in our state, there is no tiebreaker,” she explained. “A tie loses. The seat I’m running for, against an incumbent Republican, is the most purple one in our state. If we can create a tie in the senate, not even a majority, it will be a game-changer for Arizona, because then everyone at the Capitol will have to negotiate compromises, and, to me, that is really motivating.”

Marsh, who has taught for 26 years in the classroom, says she decided to run for office after realizing a little less than a year ago that her lobbying efforts at the state Capitol just weren’t having much of an effect. “My generation of teachers, the ones who have been in it for a long time, we kind of dropped the ball,” she told The Intercept. “We were too focused on staying within the walls of our own classroom — which is so noble and wonderful and that’s what kids deserve — but so many years of doing that has created the situation in which we find ourselves, where students are directly and indirectly harmed by these bad policies.”

John Waldron, who has spent the past 20 years teaching high school social studies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, ran for office for the first time in 2016. He says his race was motivated by what he felt were terrible anti-education policies coming out of his state’s legislature. Waldron lost his race, but he feels more optimistic this time around, not only because he has increased name recognition, but also because of how much more progressive organizing there’s been in his state since Trump took office.

“Our county party has been revitalized as people got back into politics after the 2016 election, and I think if there was a Democrat in the White House, the mood in Oklahoma would be very different,” he told The Intercept. “With Trump, a lot of people who would be voting are staying home out of frustration, and a lot of people who would not be so active are now being quite active.”

Waldron knows his state is conservative, but says his legislature leans even more conservative than its voters, due to special interests funding far-right candidates in uncompetitive districts. While he doesn’t really expect a blue wave that wholly flips his state’s political balance this November, he says he’s optimistic about a decade-long process where voters “move the conversation from the far right, where it is now — where politicians want to arm teachers and to get government out of everything except a woman’s uterus — back to the center.”

According to Waldron, the highly covered Oklahoma teachers strike has “given a lot of oxygen” to his political campaign, because voters, he says, are now well familiar with the demands and frustrations of educators across the state. He says he’s been offering mentorship to other first-time teacher candidates running in Oklahoma.

“I think most of us would rather stay in the classroom, but what we’ve learned from the Oklahoma experience is that teaching is a political act,” said Waldron. “I think us teachers feel ready to handle the legislature, because we deal with teen-aged kids all the time.”

In Kentucky, 40 educators have also recently filed to run for office, organizing under the banner of A Few Good Women (And Men). David Allen, former Kentucky Education Association president, told The Intercept that the majority of these educator candidates are classroom teachers, but some work in higher education, and some have retired. “It’s a statewide kind of movement, if you will,” he said. “I’ve been pleased. We’re nothing without public education. Nothing.”