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WHY SOME VOTERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY BACKED PROGRESSIVE BALLOT
INITIATIVES—AND DONALD TRUMP  
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Glenn Daigon
November 25, 2024
The Progressive Magazine
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_ From abortion rights to minimum wage hikes to legal marijuana,
voters’ support for ballot issues didn’t correlate with their
support for candidates. _

Graphic by Christopher Cruz / The Progressive Magazine,

 

Earlier this month, a twenty-year-old University of
Wisconsin–Madison student named Mike Islami told NPR
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believes abortion is “a women’s right,” and that the issue was
“definitely in the back of my mind” when he cast his ballot.

Islami voted for Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court appointments
overturned _Roe v. Wade_.

These types of mixed political signals were not a fluke this November.
While the electorate largely voted in favor of progressive economic
and social initiatives placed on state ballots earlier this month,
they simultaneously voted for candidates who stood steadfastly against
those very policies.

This year, Democratic voters approved a range of ballot initiatives
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support of abortion rights, a $15 an hour minimum wage, and paid
leave In attempt to capitalize on public support, the Democratic
Party spent hundreds of millions of dollars
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state reproductive rights ballot initiatives
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measures in Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and
Maryland, where they passed. In Florida, some Democrats hoped that
a constitutional amendment
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the right to abortion up to the point of viability would help boost
their voter turnout and flip the state blue. The amendment garnered a
solid 57 percent majority (a higher percentage
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Trump garnered), but fell short of the 60 percent needed for a
constitutional amendment—a requirement enacted in 2006 with the help
of Florida Republicans and business interests
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Ballot measures to protect abortion rights also failed in South Dakota
and Nebraska.

Why didn’t this effort pay off? What seems to have happened is that
voters compartmentalized their support for popular ballot issues and
their support for candidates running for office.

“When voters go to the booths, they don’t see a ‘D’ or an
‘R’ next to a ballot measure,” Chris Melody Fields Figueredo,
director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center
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progressive economic and social ballot initiatives, tells _The
Progressive_. “They really just see the opportunity to take power
and agency into their own hands and raise the minimum wage in their
state, or offer paid sick leave.” 
 
Data from a Reuters School of Public Health analysis.
An analysis
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the Reuters School of Public Health compared support for reproductive
rights with support for Kamala Harris noted a trend of ticket
splitting on Election Day. More people voted for abortion rights
measures than for Democrats who appeared on the same ballots. 

This pattern was not just limited to reproductive rights, but economic
issues on the ballot as well. Voters in Missouri
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by decisive margins initiatives to raise the state minimum wage to $15
an hour and require employers to provide workers with paid leave.
Voters in Nebraska passed
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measure requiring employers to provide workers with paid sick leave by
an overwhelming margin of three-to-one. And voters in Kentucky and
Nebraska voted against
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to expand private school vouchers.

This pattern of red state voters endorsing progressive economic
measures is not limited to this election cycle. Over the last several
election cycles, for example, voters in Mountain West and Midwestern
states have largely voted in favor
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referendum expanding Medicaid coverage. Yet virtually none of that
support has translated into support for Democratic candidates running
for federal office in these states. 

In 2020, while more than 60 percent of the Florida electorate voted
in favor
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a state ballot initiative raising the state minimum wage to
$15-an-hour, only 48 percent voted in favor
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Florida State Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat, believes that
the opposition to the $15 minimum wage from the Democratic Party’s
big donors, concerned about their bottom line, compromised the
party’s public stance.

“There’s a difference between posting [support for the $15-an-hour
increase] on your website and aggressively using it as a messaging
tool and also defining your opposition as being against it,”
Eskamani told me in a December 2020 article
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by WhoWhatWhy. “Our state’s top Democrat, Agricultural
Commissioner Nikki Fried, was quoted
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NPR] as not supporting the effort—and then quickly backtracked once
there was a lot of backlash. That is pretty indicative of a lot of
Democrats that work really closely with corporations and receive
donations from corporations and their affiliated political
organizations.”

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project
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often when they are framed as nonpartisan. 

“The superpower of ballot measures is that they allow voters to
think about issues outside of a partisan context,” Hall says. “The
campaigns to pass these Medicaid expansion ballot measures, just like
the ones . . . on economic mobility issues and on reproductive rights,
are designed very strategically to be nonpartisan—to have Republican
spokespeople, to have a diversity of messengers say, ‘We don’t
care who you vote for at the top of the ticket, we share values around
this issue.’ ” 

Progressive economic and social positions are popular among the
general public, especially when they are not viewed through the lens
of partisan politics, according to a poll published
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October by YouGov. The poll surveyed voters about policy proposals
without stating which party or politician proposed them. The results
were startling: A majority of self-described Trump voters endorsed
most of the proposals for which Harris had advocated. 

Expanding Medicare to cover home care services for seniors,
investigating pharmaceutical companies that block competition, and
expanding Medicare drug price negotiations polled well among this
group.

“There is some real good news for Democrats and progressives
generally that the values we hold, the policies we support, are in
fact, popular,” Hall says.

While these policies are popular, Fields Figueredo of the Ballot
Initiative Strategy Center says translating this sentiment into
winning electoral campaigns won’t happen without effort by those
seeking higher office.

“There should not be an expectation that just simply putting a
progressive issue on a ballot will lead to victory,” Fields
Figueredo says. “You have to do the hard work of going into
communities, knocking on doors . . . listening to them, and talking to
them [about what you are going to do to] actually deliver on the
issues they care about.”

_[GLENN DAIGON is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter. He has worked in
the labor movement for over twenty-four years as an opposition
researcher and is a graduate of Oberlin College. Glenn’s writings
specialize in ongoing social issues.]_

* 2024 Elections
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* ballot initiatives
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* abortion rights
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* Minimum Wage
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* marijuana policy
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* Donald Trump
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* Kamala Harris
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* Democratic Party
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* social justice
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* economic justice
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* voting
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* voter empowerment
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