How to Build Political Power When You Have None
Amid a decisive rejection of the Democratic Party, there was, on Tuesday, a small glimmer of hope for the next four years emanating from the heart of the Bible Belt.
In Missouri, a majority of voters chose to enshrine the right to an abortion in their state’s constitution, overturning a total ban on abortion — one of the more severe bans in the nation — imposed on them by their Republican state lawmakers.
Nevermind the fact that those Republican lawmakers maintained their supermajority in the state legislature this week. The success of Amendment 3 represented both an enormous victory for women in Missouri— roughly 11,600 of whom sought abortion care in neighboring states in 2023 — and a blueprint for advancing progressive goals even when the party that supports those goals is shut out of power.
“Hostile” hardly begins to describe the climate in Missouri as it relates to abortion: From the very start, Republicans in all branches of government in the state pulled out every stop to quash the citizen-led initiative.
It started before organizers even began gathering signatures: Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey challenged state auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s assessment that there would be “no costs or savings” associated with the measure, insisting instead that legalizing abortion would cost the state an absurd $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 deleterious impact on the future tax base.”)
It took more than two months, and intervention by the state’s Supreme Court, to resolve that dispute, which in turn, delayed advocates from collecting signatures and effectively shortened the window in which they could do so. But GOP officials were not done: after the fiscal impact was approved, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft took the liberty of rewriting the ballot summary in an effort to disadvantage the measure so brazen that a judge described it as “unfair, inaccurate, insufficient, and misleading.”
After Ashcroft was court-ordered to replace the misleading summary with a more accurate one, he tried to pull the measure from the ballot entirely — an attempt that was blocked, again, by the Missouri Supreme Court just weeks before voters went to the ballot box.
“It was hurdle after hurdle,” says Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, an organization devoted to achieving progressive goals through the ballot measure process, and a partner of the organizers on the ground in Missouri. After organizers made it through the GOP’s gauntlet, Hall says, “They spent an extraordinary amount of effort going city to city, door to door, talking to their neighbors about just how aligned with Missouri values this amendment was.”
They succeeded, and now, women in Missouri will be able to access reproductive care in the state. It isn’t just abortion that voters in Missouri — one of the reddest states in the nation — supported: They also voted to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour and to require businesses to offer paid sick leave to their employees. (In 2020, Missouri voters also expanded Medicaid in the state through a ballot measure, overruling Republican officials who refused to do so.) All this progress, even as voters in the state seem fine with allowing Republicans to retain control of state legislature, and voted 3-to-2 in favor of sending 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 the right to abortion by an even wider margin — are just one instrument that liberals and progressives can make use of in the coming political era, but they are a particularly effective one.
“We’re staring down the barrel of a federal landscape that is not going to make progress for working families, and ballot measures are one of our best tools,” Hall says. The Fairness Project has had success passing measures not just to increase the minimum wage, protect abortion, and expand Medicaid, but also to curb predatory debt collection, limit interest rates on medical debt, limit predatory payday lending, and pass police reform. The organization is exploring the possibility of placing a measure that would address the cost of childcare on ballots as well. “We do think progress is still possible, and we will be digging into it in the very near term to fill up the 2025 and 2026 ballots with the priorities of working families,” Hall says.
Citizen-led initiatives are not viable everywhere — 24 states don’t allow citizen-led ballot measures at the state level, and there are efforts in others, like Mississippi, to actively prevent their ballot measure process from being used specifically to restore reproductive rights.
For now, advocates are looking to advance goals where they can. Hall points to states like Oklahoma, Arkansas, and North Dakota, as places where it might be possible to protect or restore abortion access via the ballot box in the coming years. They’re also huddling with their partners in states where initiatives fell short this year to discuss trying again.
In Florida, an amendment that would have restored the right to abortion for millions of women won more than 57 percent of the vote, but failed due to the state’s 60 percent threshold for ballot measures — after a brazen state-sponsored campaign to defeat the measure, spearheaded by Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Almost 1.5 million more people voted to relegalize abortion than voted for DeSantis in 2022.)
Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, which supported Amendment 4, called it a “temporary loss,” vowing to continue fighting to restore access in the state.
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