How to build political power when you don’t have it

Amid a decisive rejection of the Democratic Party, a small glimmer of hope for the next four years came Tuesday from the heart of the Bible Belt.

In Missouria majority of voters have chosen to extend the right to a abortion into their state’s constitution, overturning a total ban on abortion — one of the strictest bans in the country — imposed on them by their Republican state legislatures.

Remember, these Republican lawmakers retained their supermajority in the state legislature this week. The success of Amendment 3 both roughly represented a huge victory for women in Missouri 11,600 of them sought abortion care in neighboring states by 2023 — and a blueprint for advancing progressive causes even if the party supporting those causes is locked out of power.

“Hostile” hardly describes the climate in Missouri when it comes to abortion: From the very beginning, Republicans in all branches of government in the state have pulled out all the stops to destroy the citizen-led initiative.

It started before organizers even started collecting signatures: Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey disputed State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s assessment that there would be “no costs or savings” associated with the measure, emphasizing instead that legalizing abortion would cost the state an absurd amount of money. $51 billion dollars in lost tax revenue per year. (Or as he put it in a letter to Fitzpatrick, “aborting unborn Missourians will have a detrimental impact on the future tax base.”)

It took more than two months and state Supreme Court intervention to resolve that dispute, which in turn prevented attorneys from collecting signatures and effectively shortened the period in which they could do so. But Republican officials weren’t done yet: After the budget impact was approved, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft took the liberty of rewriting the ballot summary in an attempt to so brazenly damage the measure that a judge described it as “unfair , inaccurate, insufficient’. and misleading.”

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After Ashcroft was ordered by the court to replace the misleading summary with a more accurate summary, he attempted to remove the measure from the ballot entirely — an effort that was again blocked by the Missouri Supreme Court just weeks before voters went to the polls went. .

“It was hurdle after hurdle,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, an organization dedicated to advancing progressive causes through the voting process, and a partner of organizers on the ground in Missouri. After organizers ran the gauntlet from the Republican Party, Hall says, “They went to extraordinary lengths to go from city to city, door to door, talking to their neighbors about how much this amendment was consistent with the Missouri values.”

We succeeded, and now women in Missouri have access to reproductive care in the state. It’s not just abortion that voters in Missouri — one of the reddest states in the country — supported: They also voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and require companies to offer paid sick leave to their workers. (In 2020, Missouri voters also expanded Medicaid in the state through a ballot measure, overriding Republican officials who refused to do so.) All this progress, even as the state’s voters appear to be fine with letting Republicans to retain control of the state legislature, and voted 3-2 to transmit Donald Trump back to the White House.

Ballot measures like the one in Missouri — and another in Arizona, where voters chose to overturn a 15-week ban and protect abortion rights by an even wider margin — are just one tool liberals and progressives will use in the near future. can make of. political era, but they are extremely effective.

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“We are staring down the barrel of a federal landscape that will not make progress for working families, and ballot measures are one of our best tools,” Hall said. The Fairness Project has successfully taken action to not only raise the minimum wage, protect abortion, and expand Medicaid, but also to curb predatory debt collections, limit interest on medical debt, limit predatory payday lending, and implement police reforms . The organization is exploring the possibility of also placing a measure on the ballot that would address childcare costs. “We believe progress is still possible, and we will move very quickly to fill the 2025 and 2026 ballots with the priorities of working families,” Hall said.

Citizen-led initiatives are not viable everywhere – 24 states do not allow citizen-led ballot measures at the state level, and there are attempts in others, such as Mississippito actively prevent their voting process from being used specifically to restore reproductive rights.

For now, advocates are trying to achieve goals where they can. Hall points to states like Oklahoma, Arkansas and North Dakota as places where it could be possible to protect or restore access to abortion through the ballot box in the coming years. They are also working with their partners in states where initiatives fell short this year to try again.

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In Floridaan amendment that would have restored the right to abortion to millions of women received more than 57 percent of the vote, but failed due to the state’s 60 percent threshold for ballot measures – after a brutal state-sponsored campaign to defeat the measure, led by Governor Ron DeSantis. (Nearly 1.5 million more people voted to re-legalize abortion than voted for DeSantis in 2022.)

Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, who supported this Amendment 4called it a “temporary loss” and vowed to continue fighting to restore access to the state.