Predicting voter passage for the pro-abortion-rights amendment is partly because every state whose voters have recently decided the question, including Kansas and Kentucky, has voted pro-choice.
The foes of Issue 1, as the Ohio abortion amendment is known, seem to be scattershot in their anti-Issue 1 campaigning.
From Roe vs. Wade (January 1973) through Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health (June 2022), anti-abortion lobbies could only tackle the edges of the issue, with step-by-step tactics advancing restrictions on specific procedures and timing.
With Dobbs, the dog finally caught the car. People who otherwise dismissed the piecemeal approach in the 1973-2022 era as no real threat to overall abortion access came to realize that Dobbs put the entire abortion issue, A-to-Z, on Ohio’s table, stoking a ferocious pushback by women and their allies. But with procedure-by-procedure skirmishing ending, anti-abortion lobbies seemingly weren’t job-ready for a statewide up or down war on abortion.
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.
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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.
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. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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