Tuesday's Ballot Initiatives Pose Real Trouble for Conservatives

Across ten states, campaigns to liberalize abortion restrictions have spent ten dollars on ballot initiatives for one spent by pro-life forces

A very feast of All Saints to those who celebrate, especially to readers in Los Angeles, who are probably just about ready to canonize Freddy Freeman. Welcome to Family Matters. On tap:

• The Main Event: What to Expect Next Tuesday

• It’s Me, Hi: Family Studies, Washington Post, and more

• Kinder Care: Lessons from Germany’s child care scheme

• Quick Slants

The Main Event

My poor, unfortunate friends in swing states tell me their recycling bins are overflowing with mailers for Vice-President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump. The good news, for them, is that the voting will all be over next Tuesday. The vote-counting, alas…

But beyond the race for the White House, and even the Senate and the House, the down-ballot initiatives and referenda will offer a sense of where America is heading.¹ The most notable, of course, are the eleven abortion-related measures across ten different states (Nebraska just had to double-dip).

The pro-life side has gone 0 for 7 at the ballot box since Dobbs, and another seven losses — at minimum — seem likely next week. Polling in Florida suggests the Sunshine State might be the most promising state for pro-lifers, thanks to the state’s supermajority requirement and a begrudging endorsement from President Trump. Elsewhere, polling has tended to be sparse, but every indication is that the reproductive rights campaigns will have a very good night.

For those keeping score at home, which you all should be, we can break the ten up into three broad categories:

• Pro-life laws under threat

  • Arizona (Prop. 139) would repeal the state’s current 15-week ban on abortion and establish abortion as a state constitutional right

  • Florida (Amend. 4) would repeal the state’s current 6-week ban on abortion and establish abortion as a state constitutional right (60% supermajority required)

  • Missouri (Amend. 3) would repeal the state’s near-total ban on abortion and establish abortion as a state constitutional right

  • South Dakota (Amend. G) would repeal the state’s near-total ban on abortion, establishing an individual right to abortion up to the end of the first trimester, and with limited restrictions during the second trimester

• Pro-choice states codifying protections

  • Colorado (Amend. 79) would establish an individual right to abortion and repeal an existing provision banning the use of public dollars to fund abortion (55% supermajority required)

  • Maryland (Question 1) would amend to state constitution to establish an individual right to reproductive freedom

  • Montana (CI 128) would codify into the state constitution an existing Supreme Court decision allowing abortion until fetal viability

  • Nevada (Question 6) would amend the state’s constitution to create an individual right to abortion

  • New York (Prop. 1) would create an equal protection amendment in the state constitution, protecting “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare” as individual rights, among other things

• The Cornhusker Conundrum

  • In Nebraska, competing ballot amendments will face voters — whichever initiatives get the largest number of votes (not necessarily the highest percentage) will be enshrined into the state constitution:

    • Initiative 434 would amend the state constitution to enact the current restrictions on abortion after the first trimester

    • Intiative 439 would amend the state constitution to establish a right to abortion until fetal viability

Photo via Flickr

As is to be expected — a quick tally of available fundraising data through Ballotpedia.com shows the tremendous imbalance in dollars spent. Across the ten states, as of the most recent data we have, $200 million has been spent for and against these ballot initiatives.² Of that, the side pushing liberalized abortion rights had spent $182 million, or 91 percent of all dollars spent. The pro-life side has recorded a total of $18 million across the ten states.

With 51 million registered voters at play, pro-abortion rights efforts have spent at least $3.63 per hypothetical voter around the ballot questions this fall. The pro-life side is massively outgunned, having spent just 37 cents per voter so far, barring last-minute infusions of cash. In other words, according to the data we currently have available, for every dollar pro-life campaigns have spent, pro-choice activists have spent ten.

It’s a vivid, unwelcome reminder that for all the discussion about the messaging, or lack there-of, in a post-Dobbs world, pro-lifers remain tremendous underdogs in both elite circles and popular culture — as the battleground has shifted from the courtroom to the ballot box, that disparity has been too hard to overcome. As EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson noted in the October 2024 issue of First Things, big-money donors on the right tend not to be driven by socially conservative causes in the way the grassroots is, and this cashes out in a lack of cash on hand for pro-life, pro-family forces.

This chart shows the mammoth disparity across states — South Dakota is the only state in which pro-life spending has outstripped the reproductive rights side, thanks partly due to disagreement on the left about the strategy of only pushing for partial, rather than full, legalization.

But those aren't the only notable ballot initiatives out there this year. And a quick tour of the states suggests that Tuesday night (or beyond) will give a valuable pulse check for where Americans stand on a number of social and economic issues, apart from the questions on citizenship and voting systems that may pick up some headlines.

On the economic policy front, proponents of raising the minimum wage haven't lost at the ballot box since 1996, and they'll look to extended their winning streak in Alaska ($15/hour), Arizona (adjusting tipped wage exemptions), California ($18/hour), and Massachusetts (eliminating tipped wage exemption). Washington state will test the limits of economic progressivism, giving voters the option to repeal the state’s capital gains tax (which is earmarked for education and child care funds), carbon tax, and give employees the ability to opt out of the state’s long-term care fund.

Nebraska voters will be asked whether or not employers will be required to provide paid sick leave for their employees. Missouri will be asked about the minimum wage ($15/hour), required paid leave, and also whether sports betting should be legalized within the state. Those, plus the two aforementioned abortion questions, make the Show Me State and the Cornhusker State two of the most intriguing returns to watch of the night.

Nevada voters will be asked whether to provide a sales tax exemption for child and adult diapers. South Dakota voters will be asked whether to amend the state Constitution to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. If past performance is any predictor, I expect the economically progressive side to do fairly well across these states, which might give old-guard economic conservatives heartburn but could augur an opportunity for more working-class friendly policies from the right.

Efforts to liberalize abortion laws have spent least $3.63 per hypothetical voter around the ballot questions this fall; pro-life campaigns, as of the latest data publicly available, spent just 37 cents per voter.

In non-abortion social policy issues, Illinois has an advisory question on whether health insurance plans should be required to cover IVF and other assisted reproduction technologies. Colorado, Hawaii, and California will be voting on whether to remove their traditional, and, thanks to Obergefell, now-defunct marriage constitutional provisions. West Virginia will vote on whether to prohibit medically assisted suicide. Marijuana legalization will be on the ballot in both Dakotas, Florida, and Nebraska, and Massachusetts will vote on whether to permit personal growth and use of natural psychedelics.

In the education policy realm, Florida will be asked whether to make school board elections partisan, and Kentucky voters will choose whether to wipe their Blaine amendment, which bars state funding to private schools, off the books. Colorado will vote on whether to make “school choice” an individual right. The Massachusetts Teachers Association is the top donor to an effort to repeal the state’s standardized testing graduation requirement for high schoolers. Nebraska voters will have a busy night, deciding whether or not to repeal the tax credits for its education scholarship program.

And, last but not least, Maine will vote on replacing its state flag with a minimalist design. Save ‘Dirigo'!

Family Matters will never tell you how to vote (though if you want recommendations, don’t hesitate to ask!) But beyond the headlines of the race for the White House, the lessons learned from next week’s ballot amendments will, I suspect, be interpreted as evidence for a secularizing, increasingly socially progressive country, with perhaps some backlash on the drugs and crime front (though referenda have been known to surprise before!) As Yuval Levin’s latest book “American Covenant” beautifully lays out, the American constitutional order is ill-suited to governance by popular referendum — but here we are, and conservatives will have to adapt themselves to the reality put on display next Tuesday night rather wishing in vain to dissolve the people and elect another.

It’s Me, Hi

For Family Studies, I fired off one last pre-election salvo about the different focus on family-related tax benefits each campaign might bring to the White House:

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to look at the Republican Party of a decade or more ago and not see how the GOP is actively undergoing a slow but meaningful evolution in a pro-family direction. 

But policy specifics matter a lot. And the difference between the Trump-Vance campaign’s statements on family policy and where Harris-Walz would put their energies illustrate real differences of opinion on what authentic pro-family efforts might consist of. 

In the Washington Post, Annie Gowen highlighted the efforts of pro-lifers in Missouri, Florida, and elsewhere to combat the abortion-related initiatives on top for next Tuesday:

“If you have a truly red state like Missouri vote for a pretty expansive abortion amendment, that’s going to cause a lot of soul-searching, and it should,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. […]

National antiabortion groups are focusing hard on Florida, he noted, thinking that the state’s tough threshold — with passage for Amendment 4 requiring 60 percent of votes cast — might give the movement the “shot in the arm we need.” Brown is not optimistic: “The deck is stacked against us.”

Nick Sentovich spotlights some of the hesitation Leah Libresco Sargeant and I brought to the 'Make Birth Free' conversation. (Relevant Radio)

Kinder Care

Rachel Cohen at Vox consistently writes some of the most in-depth longform pieces on family policy around, and her exploration of Germany child care policy this week is no exception. You should read the whole piece, but here are some key excerpts:

Beginning in 2013, lawmakers established that every child over the age of 1 is legally entitled to a [day care] spot, a policy rooted in a broader European-wide push to boost women’s participation in the workforce…

On paper, Germany’s child care offerings seem ideal for helping women balance work and parenting. In practice, this promise of universal child care is more complicated — partly due to factors unique to Germany and partly due to other reasons that would likely pose challenges for adoption in the US and countries all over…

Driven by factors such as unfriendly tax policies, significant penalties for extended employment gaps after childbirth, gendered cultural expectations, and uneven access to child care, most partnered moms just do not ever make the leap back to full-time work. “There was a public debate that part-time would be a bridge to full time, but this is not true,” Friederike Maier, the former director of the Berlin-based Harriet Taylor Mill Institute for Economic and Gender Studies, told me. “Part-time is not a bridge, it’s a threat.”…

While the number of children under 3 cared for in a publicly funded setting has risen 20 percent since 2015, the shortage of kita spots also increased about 60 percent in the last five years. According to federal data, there are only enough slots for a little over a third of children under 3, but demand currently hovers around 50 percent.

Two things should jump out at you: First, the “mini-jobs” German moms often find are not dissimilar to what many Americans moms often say they want; more flexibility, fewer full-time commitments, and a more casual relationship with work, at least when kids are older. But that comes with the apparent downside of finding it harder to scale back up to full-time once the kids are grown. I’d be interested to explore how much of that might be mitigated by a thriving U.S. labor market, in which major employers offer “mom-ternships” to help ease women whose kids are in school back into the labor force, rather a culture that seems to assume women are going to work part-time indefinitely.

The other is that the German is notorious (or should be) for having originally at an at-home care benefit for parents who wanted to watch young kids at home. When Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party instituted a legal right to free child care in 2012, it was designed to be accompanied by a betreuungsgeld (literally “care benefit”) of around $200 per month to stay-at-home parents who opted out of the child-care system. A German court declared the federal payments unconstitutional two years later, but a couple of states within Germany continue paying them at the local level. Any similar approach in the U.S. should model itself off the original, not the modified, design.

But there’s way more going on in the piece — including how no-fault divorce makes leaning out of the workforce more risky — than I have space to devote to. Give it a read.

Quick Slants

• A new brief from Brad Wilcox, Wendy Wang, and Sam Herrin finds that Republicans remains more likely to be married than Democrats across various sub-groups (Institute for Family Studies)

• Ben Casselman does a deep dive into the complex question of how many Americans have suffered a pay cut in real terms since the end of 2019 — more than some might think, but fewer than others would suspect, and low-wage workers have done the best (New York Times)

• Ralph Reed, John Shelton, Michael Wear, and others are quoted in a piece by Adam Wren that looks at Trump's efforts to weave together a "Barstool and Bible-study" coalition (Politico)

• Part of what makes European cities more amenable to family life is the presence of courtyards, writes Alexandra Lange. This jibes with my pre-existing sense that making urban design more parent-friendly include spaces for family and community life to happen organically (Bloomberg)

• Rachel Cohen (again!) profiles D.C.s "Pay Equity Fund," which provides wage supplements to child care workers. To the degree blue states want to explicitly embrace the idea that child care work is more socially valuable than other types of low-wage work, it’s an intriguing approach (Vox)

• A new policy paper from Carrie Lukas and Heather Madden suggest reforming the au pair model, in which guest workers live with host families to provide child care, and broadening it to include elder care too. Given that older Americans tend to have more resources but will face thinner labor pools, this is worth exploring (Independent Women's Forum)

• Going beyond even the state level, Harriet Torry looks at local initiatives to raise taxes to pay for child care in Travis County, Tex., Sonoma County, Calif., and St. Paul, Minn. (Wall Street Journal)

• Home team bias: EPPC’s Carl Trueman writes about the moral problems in IVF for First Things, Clare Morell examines tech’s impact on childhood for American Compass, and Natalie Dodson and Natural Womanhood editor-in-chief Grace Emily Stark oppose the Biden administration’s recent move on contraception for Newsweek

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1. I’m on the record as predicting a 275-263 Trump victory (though the race really does seem to be tightening, hope you weren’t planning on getting any work done next week!) But let’s really go all in and predict a 52-47-2 GOP Senate and a 218-217 Democratic House. This prediction is, of course, for entertainment purposes only.

2. The cutoff date for campaign finance disclosures varies from state to state, so the good people at Ballotpedia only have expenditure data for periods with end dates ranging from Aug. 25 to Oct. 19. But 80 percent of the dollars shown in the figure above have reporting dates from October, so the general pattern appears pretty trustworthy.