Portside

Earlier this month, a twenty-year-old University of Wisconsin–Madison student named Mike Islami told NPR he 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 in 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 towards backing ten state reproductive rights ballot initiatives, including measures in Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Maryland, where they passed. In Florida, some Democrats hoped that a constitutional amendment guaranteeing 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 than 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. 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, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing 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.” 
 

An analysis by 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 and Alaska passed 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 a 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 initiatives 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 of 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 of a state ballot initiative raising the state minimum wage to $15-an-hour, only 48 percent voted in favor of Biden. 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 published by WhoWhatWhy. “Our state’s top Democrat, Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Fried, was quoted [on 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, says ballot measures succeed more 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 in 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.]