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HOW RED-STATE REPUBLICANS THWART THE LEFT-WING DESIRES OF THEIR
VOTERS  
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Monica Potts
August 18, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Voters in GOP-controlled states are passing progressive policies at
the ballot—only to watch Republican legislators repeal them. Will it
change how voters choose candidates? _

Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe, (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

 

Last November, Missouri voters approved
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a ballot measure guaranteeing paid sick leave to workers in the state
and raising the minimum wage, which will reach $15 an hour in 2026. It
passed by a solid 58 percent.

But last month the Missouri legislature, where Republicans have a
supermajority in both chambers, overturned the paid sick leave part of
the law, as well as a provision that would have continued to
automatically increase the minimum wage in the future. “Today, we
are protecting the people who make Missouri work—families, job
creators, and small business owners—by cutting taxes, rolling back
overreach, and eliminating costly mandates,” Republican Governor
Mike Kehoe said in a statement
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That’s disingenuous, to say the least. They simply disagreed with
the majority of voters—and were under pressure
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from industry groups like the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and
Industry that called the law a “job killer
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Completely overturning a ballot measure passed by a substantial margin
is fairly new and bold, but it’s part of a more recent trend in red
states to undermine the will of voters who have passed progressive
initiatives at the polls. Increasingly, these approved initiatives are
being challenged and weakened by their state legislatures, which may
blunt ballot initiatives in general as a progressive policy tool. What
happened in Missouri also illustrates the unusual nature of our
current state of politics: We’re in the midst of a huge disconnect
between what voters want and who they’re voting for to get it.
Ballot initiatives make voters feel like they can have it all,
choosing policies they like à la carte while voting for candidates
based on completely unrelated criteria. It lets legislators off the
hook while giving voters a false sense of control. But what’s
happening to ballot initiatives in Missouri and other states could be
a wake-up call for voters about how they choose candidates.

Twenty-six states allow some kind of ballot referendum process,
usually either to amend the state’s constitution or pass new laws,
or both. In the recent past, conservative ballot initiatives, like the
same-sex marriage ban that passed in California in 2008 (and was
overturned by the courts in 2013), were used to drive Republican
turnout in an otherwise blue state and try to sway the presidential
election. More recently, organizers have focused on passing popular
progressive initiatives that legislatures were reluctant to take up,
like increasing minimum wages
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and recreational marijuana legalization
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and expanding Medicaid
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Many of these measures have proven popular even in majority-Republican
states like Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, and Ohio. Last year, Nebraska
and Alaska joined Missouri in passing referenda on paid sick leave and
the minimum wage.

After the success of those initiatives, states with Republican
legislatures hostile to those changes have been trying to find ways to
undermine direct democracy. Most often, they pare back statutes so
that the laws are less powerful than voters perhaps intended, as
Florida has done with felon enfranchisement
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and gerrymandering initiatives
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and Nebraska
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did with its own paid sick leave law. Other times, states try to
revamp the ballot referendum process to make it more difficult to get
through. The Arkansas legislature has tried
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in the past to require a supermajority of 60 percent to pass
initiatives, and this year groups in the state are working to enshrine
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direct democracy rights into the state constitution to prevent more of
these efforts. Florida voters passed a ballot initiative requiring a
supermajority
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of 60 percent to amend the constitution in 2006, making a lot of
popular changes harder to enact. (Notably, this initiative got 58
percent and wouldn’t have passed under the new rules).

“We’re in a phase of pushback against the process right now,
because the policies have been responding to one direction that the
state legislatures have been going for about 15 years, which is in a
more conservative direction,” said Craig Burnett, the chair of
Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. Responding to the
moment may limit conservative lawmakers’ tools in the future,
though. “That does swing. You may think this is a good idea today,
but you know, tomorrow it may work against you.”

Constitutional amendments are more resilient than new laws passed by
referenda because state legislatures can’t tinker with them, and
they’ve recently become a battleground over state-level abortion
rights
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When states try to implement voter-passed statutes, though, the
legislatures generally have some authority to decide how they should
be implemented, but it’s not always clear what the limits are.
Efforts by Republicans to change a referendum that passed in Michigan
raising the minimum wage, eliminating the tipped minimum wage, and
requiring paid sick leave were overturned
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by the state’s Supreme Court, and there are questions
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about how some of those laws will be implemented.

This isn’t always nefarious. Deciding how to implement laws is the
job of the legislature, and voters are essentially hiring legislators
to do that job for them when they elect candidates. In some cases,
asking voters to consider too many referenda, or overly complicated
ones, could be seen as shirking their responsibility. In California,
for example, voters are asked to weigh in
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on dozens of initiatives, some of them redundant and
counterproductive. Many of these are complicated questions that are
better left to legislators.

There’s also a lot of evidence
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voters don’t always know about the initiatives before they vote on
them. That doesn’t mean they don’t realize what they’re voting
for—protections like paid sick leave and even longer-term family
leave are extremely popular
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for example—but they’re not always researching how their elected
officials feel about them or what the policies are in their states
before Election Day. Practically, that means they might be casting
votes in favor of measures while also voting for candidates who
wouldn’t support them.

Initiatives also require organized campaigns to collect the signatures
and other qualifiers necessary to make it to the ballot, which means
the process can be hijacked
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by millionaires and billionaires who back those campaigns. State
officials and campaigns also often wrangle over the language used on
the ballot itself, leading to court fights
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and sometimes to language that is unnecessarily confusing
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overwhelm voters, turning what is supposed to be direct democracy into
another area of politics where big money can distort the process.

Outright repealing popular provisions, however, is new. “Missouri is
very pro economic policy, and to see that, it definitely shows that
there’s like a new resolve from Republicans to really dismiss the
will of the voters and really not care about who they represent,”
said Caitlyn Adams, executive director at Missouri Jobs With Justice,
which supported the initiative. She said there were some districts
where the initiative passed with more votes than the Republican
candidates in those districts who later voted to overturn it had. The
initiative also had support from small businesses in the state, but
the state’s Chamber of Commerce lobbied against it anyway, she said.

Still, ballot initiatives give voters only limited power. Voters
approve initiatives they support, but that doesn’t always mean they
care enough about the issue they voted for—like paid sick leave—to
later vote against a politician who helped to overturn it. Typically,
voters have felt more strongly motivated by culture-war issues like
abortion than by things like minimum wage laws. Missouri Jobs With
Justice is in the early stages of trying to get a constitutional
amendment guaranteeing paid sick leave, which would not be vulnerable
to legislative tinkering, on the ballot next year. “Ballot
initiatives were never a silver bullet,” Adams said. Referencing the
Republicans who overturned paid leave, she added, “I think we are
going to be spending time telling voters who did this to them; making
sure they know who took this away.”

Voters will be impacted by the repeal in varying ways, of course. Many
workers already have sick days and paid family leave available from
their employers, and since the law had kicked in and some workers were
already accruing sick days before its repeal, some businesses may
decide to keep the benefits in place. It’s the lowest-paid
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most vulnerable workers in the economy who are the least likely to
have sick leave and are probably the most vulnerable without laws to
enforce. And since the repeal also scrapped a provision that would
have protected Missouri workers who actually used their sick leave
from being retaliated against, the most vulnerable workers might be
unable to actually use any leave they technically have.

We are in the middle of a huge partisan reshuffling. In the past three
election cycles, non–college educated voters have shifted to the
Republican Party, while the Democratic base, once full of blue-collar
and union rank-and-file workers, is now full of college-educated,
relatively well-paid white-collar workers. These are workers who
already have access to benefits through work, but they are voting for
the party with a platform that supports increasing the same benefits
for others. At the same time, Republicans seem to have successfully
painted Democrats as elite and culturally remote, even while they’re
the ones passing tax cuts for the wealthy and generally catering to
the whims of business interest groups.

It means that the values that drive people to vote aren’t neatly
aligned with personal economic interests—though the degree of this
disconnect is still in flux. “We’re not going to be marching to
one side of the spectrum and staying there,” Burnett said. “It’s
probably more likely to be how it’s been for the last hundreds of
years in American politics, which is, we kind of go back and forth,
but there is a reasonable expectation that we are going to reshuffle
people.” We just don’t know what issue will be the big one that
will make that reshuffling settle down a bit, at least until the next
major issue upends politics again.

This is the big question hanging over the Democratic Party. For now,
however, it’s clear that many of the people who benefited from
Biden’s populist economic agenda
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had no hesitation in voting against him. Adams said future campaigns
will also focus on educating voters on candidates who support the
initiatives and those who don’t. “We do have to be able to do
multiple things at the same time—pass really great statewide
policies, and create consequences for elected officials who go against
the will of the voters,” Adams said.

But given the Republican assault on ballot initiatives, perhaps it’s
also time to educate voters on the problem with depending on these
initiatives in the first place. Voters need to decide what policies
they want from their political parties—and actually demand them, by
choosing candidates accordingly. That remains the surest path to
change in this rickety democracy.

_Monica Potts is a staff writer at The New Republic. She is the author
of The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in
Rural America [[link removed]]._

_The New Republic was founded in 1914 as a call to arms for
public-minded intellectuals advocating liberal reform in a new
industrial age. Now, two decades into a new century, TNR remains, if
anything, more committed than ever to its first principles—and, most
of all, to the need to rethink outworn assumptions and political
superstitions as radically changing conditions demand._

_Co-founder Herbert Croly declared that TNR was an
“experiment”—and today we rededicate that experiment, and our
magazine’s legacy, to the urgent challenges of reclaiming the
democratic faith amid dangerous, deranging new upheavals in our common
world._

* Republican governors
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* ballot initiatives
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* democracy
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* Missouri
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