Ten days ago, we started a weekly Political News Items feature that we’re calling “All The Polls in One Place.” The idea is that we’ll scour the internets for the latest polls and put together a short brief of the ones we think are most interesting or important (or both). Tom Smith oversees this work and is very good at it.
There’s only one problem: there will be weeks without polls that are interesting or particularly important. Last week was Exhibit A. We hope this week provides us with better material.
There was, however, a special election in Ohio last Tuesday. What follows is our take on what happened there.
1. Issue One (as it appeared on the ballot in Ohio):
The proposed amendment would:
Require that any proposed amendment to the Constitution of the State of Ohio receive the approval of at least 60 percent of eligible voters voting on the proposed amendment.
Require that any initiative petition filed on or after January 1, 2024 with the Secretary of State proposing to amend the Constitution of the State of Ohio be signed by at least five percent of the electors of each county based on the total vote in the county for governor in the last preceding election.
Specify that additional signatures may not be added to an initiative petition proposing to amend the Constitution of the State of Ohio that is filed with the Secretary of State on or after January 1, 2024 proposing to amend the Constitution of the State of Ohio. If passed, the amendment will be effective immediately.
SHALL THE AMENDMENT BE APPROVED? Yes/No
This from Politico:
Ohioans on Tuesday soundly defeated a proposal that would have made it more difficult to alter the state’s Constitution.
The move is a lightning-rod moment for abortion rights, even if the issue wasn’t directly on the ballot. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year, the issue motivated voters to storm the polls. But this measure, which didn’t directly take on abortion, was a closely watched measure of if the issue still resonates with voters.
Voters had the answer. They overwhelmingly rejected Issue 1, an amendment that would have raised the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent, as well as complicate the process to bring citizen-initiated ballot measures to voters in the first place. Though it had profound implications for a number of issues, it was widely seen in the state as a way to thwart November’s measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.
3. What happened?
Turnout was higher than expected and much higher than the Ohio Republican Party ever imagined. There are ~8 million registered voters in Ohio. Roughly 4 million voted in the 2022 mid-term elections. For a special, one-issue, nothing-else-on-the-ballot election in August of an odd-numbered year, Ohio Republican “strategists” expected that, at most, 20% of registered voters would vote. That would have produced ~1.6 million votes. In the event, roughly 3 million votes were counted, so the “strategists” were only off by ~1.4 million votes. The party may want to find itself some new “strategists.”
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