A pro-choice rally in Tucson, Arizona.
Photo: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images
Alongside (and in some states adding to) the drama of the 2024 presidential contest is a grim fight between Republican legislators looking to enact abortion bans and citizen groups seeking to overturn them by ballot initiative. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, pro-choice ballot initiatives have prevailed in seven states (Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, California, Vermont, Montana, and Ohio). Abortion-rights advocates have pushed for new ballot measures in 12 more states in this election cycle with proponents of abortion restrictions pushing a couple of their own.
So far, seven initiatives protecting the right to an abortion at least up until fetal viability have been certified for the November general-election ballot, and two of the most recent are in the presidential and Senate battleground states of Arizona and Nevada. Both are expected to pass (Nevada will need to do this twice — the second time presumably in 2026 — to amend its constitution to add abortion protections), and Democrats are hoping to benefit from heavy turnout by voters leaning their way while attacking GOP candidates up and down the ballot for favoring or enabling abortion restrictions. That will include Donald Trump and his intensely anti-feminist running mate, J.D. Vance, along with Republican Senate candidates Kari Lake in Arizona and Sam Brown in Nevada.
Ballot measures in the blue states of Colorado (where a ban on abortion funding would be repealed), Maryland, and New York (where abortion protections are framed as anti-discrimination measures) are certain to pass; they could have an impact on down-ballot political contests. Initiatives in the red states of Missouri and South Dakota are favored to pass as well, though neither state is a presidential or Senate battleground and the South Dakota measure is not being backed by national abortion-rights groups because it only protects procedures during the first trimester of pregnancy. A Florida initiative restoring the right to abortion prior to fetal viability has a couple of notable features: It must meet a supermajority (60 percent) threshold for passage, and it has become a problem for Donald Trump, whose efforts to take the abortion issue out of the presidential contest are being undermined by demands that he disclose his own vote on his state’s ballot measure (most recently, he’s said he will hold a future “press conference” to reveal his position, which seems very unlikely).
There remain three states where the ballot status of abortion initiatives is unclear. In Montana, where voters rejected a restrictive ballot measure in 2022, backers of an initiative to protect pre-viability abortions claim to have submitted enough petitions to achieve a November vote, but it hasn’t been certified, though a Republican effort to strike petitions from “inactive voters” was stopped by the courts. In Arkansas, sponsors of a modest initiative (also not backed by many national abortion-rights groups) to protect abortions up to 18 weeks into pregnancy submitted what appeared to be enough petitions to achieve ballot access, but it was declared disqualified by the hostile Republican state attorney general on grounds of missed paperwork without any chance to fix the error. The dispute is now playing out in court.
Finally, Nebraska voters are likely to encounter dueling abortion ballot initiatives, though neither has been certified. One is much like the pro-choice measures at play in other states, enshrining a right to pre-viability abortions in the state constitution. The other would allegedly protect first-trimester pregnancy but would create a constitutional ban on second- or third-trimester abortions. There could be some voter confusion over the implications of the two measures, and while Nebraska is a deep-red state, it allows electoral votes to be cast by congressional district, and Democrats are counting on winning one of them (as Joe Biden did in 2020).
There’s not much question that when the dust has cleared, more states will have instituted abortion rights measures, some against the will of Republican legislatures. And it’s also clear Democrats will try to “own” the issue (particularly now that the Biden’s administration’s chief abortion-rights spokesperson is the presidential nominee) and Republicans will try to avoid it and disguise their intentions.
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