At least on paper, Democrats face a bleak outlook for the 2024 election in increasingly red Ohio.
The party’s U.S. Senate majority relies on Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) pulling out another improbable victory. Their chances for a U.S. House majority will rise or fall on whether three battleground incumbents can defend their seats. And for the first time in decades, the state will not be a presidential election battleground, leaving Ohio Democrats on their own.
But it’s now clear that Democrats have a unique and powerful political edge in Ohio that will ensure they are competitive: abortion rights—and Ohio Republicans’ determination to restrict them no matter how clearly the state’s voters tell them not to.
In last week’s elections, 56 percent of Ohioans voted to approve a ballot referendum called Issue One, which enshrined a right to an abortion in the state’s constitution and effectively overturned the state’s GOP-backed “heartbeat bill” banning abortions after six weeks.
Despite the fact that the state GOP establishment campaigned heavily against Issue One, the right to an abortion won majority support from voters in 18 counties that went for Donald Trump in 2020.
Unchastened by the result, anti-abortion Ohio Republicans are vowing to continue the fight against abortion rights. In particular, a hard-right squad of state lawmakers is scheming to block the implementation of Issue One, and subvert the will of the electorate, through the legislature.
Their moves ensure that abortion—and the state GOP’s resoundingly unpopular stance against it—will become perhaps the defining theme of the 2024 elections in Ohio.
“The national debate will be about a national abortion ban, but the fact that we just had this decisive election here—and that the Republicans are trying to get around it all of a sudden—makes it front and center in the 2024 cycle,” said David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party from 2015 to 2020.
Some Ohio Republicans, Pepper told The Daily Beast, are insisting on “not just on embracing a position Ohioans don’t agree with, but embracing a position of, we don't care how Ohio voters voted.”
In Ohio, Democrats and allied campaign organizations are planning to make abortion a focal point of their messaging next year. And they could spend millions blanketing the airwaves with ads centered on the GOP’s anti-abortion positions and rhetoric.
For other Republicans, the electoral risks of their abortion push are obvious—or at least should be.
“Looking at the result of Issue One, we have to sound the alarm,” said a longtime Ohio GOP operative, who requested anonymity to share their thoughts candidly. “Republicans are bleeding out in the Ohio suburbs. The Senate race is not gerrymandered like the legislature or the congressional delegation.”
“Ohio Democrats have found their silver bullet to run 10 points ahead of Joe Biden in the Ohio suburbs,” the operative continued. “Their silver bullet is Republicans being dumb enough to nominate undisciplined, gaffe-prone abortion extremists who will spend the general election on the defensive. It gives Sherrod Brown a fighting chance.”
Indeed, the Republicans running for Ohio’s most competitive federal races at least campaigned hard against Issue One. Some have long records of hardline anti-abortion rhetoric and positions. Many will face pressure from the party base—particularly those in primary battles—to support efforts to undo the new abortion law.
Already, some leading Ohio Republicans have indicated they do not plan to stray far from the party’s anti-abortion messaging. “Giving up on the unborn is not an option,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) in a lengthy Twitter thread. “It’s politically dumb and morally repugnant. Instead, we need to understand why we lost this battle so we can win the war.”
Ohio’s abortion battle has clear national implications. With Sen. Joe Manchin not running for re-election in deep-red West Virginia, Brown will be one of the top two Democratic targets for Senate Republicans, along with Sen. Jon Tester of Montana. If Republicans win the presidency in 2024, defeating Brown and Tester will win them a 50-50 Senate majority, if they also defend incumbents in Texas and Florida.
In 2022, Ohio was an unexpected bright spot for House Democrats. Rep. Greg Landsman flipped the Cincinnati seat held by former Rep. Steve Chabot, while Rep. Emilia Sykes won in a tough Cleveland-area district and Rep. Marcy Kaptur defended one of the most Trump-friendly seats of any Democrat. With a House majority just four seats out of Democrats’ reach, holding these three Ohio seats will be crucial to their hopes for victory in 2024.
For Democrats, majorities in either or both chambers of Congress ensures they will have a powerful check against whatever anti-abortion policies are pushed by GOP lawmakers in Congress—or by a GOP president, should they lose the White House in 2024.
Republicans already see how the party’s embrace of an unpopular abortion stance could end in electoral disaster.
“If we’re sitting here and we have not won the Senate, or the House for another two years is going to be under a narrow majority,” said the Ohio GOP operative, “it’s probably going to be because the Ohio suburbs in November of 2024 said, ‘Enough.’”
Three Republicans are vying for the GOP nomination to take on Brown: businessman Bernie Moreno, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, and state Sen. Matt Dolan. In the 2022 Senate race, Moreno and Dolan both ran for the GOP nomination that Vance ultimately won. For 2024, Vance has endorsed and is campaigning with Moreno.
All three candidates opposed Issue One and campaigned against it. Of the group, Moreno has been the clearest in his support for a national 15-week abortion ban with some exceptions, though in the 2022 primary he opposed any exceptions for rape or incest. Dolan has said abortion law should be left to the states, increasingly mirroring the position of congressional Republicans. LaRose has supported a national ban but has not specified how many weeks, and in Ohio, he is closely associated with efforts to thwart Issue One through his role as the official responsible for running state elections.
The Daily Beast asked all three campaigns about Issue One, GOP attempts to circumvent it, and Democratic arguments on the issue.
“To the extent that Sherrod Brown and Democrats want to make 2024 about abortion, they will be forced to explain to Ohioans why they believe tax dollars should go toward funding abortions at 7, 8 or 9 months into pregnancy,” said Dolan campaign manager Kathi Paroska. “Supporting taxpayer funded late-term abortion, with no prescribed federal limits, is just too extreme and Matt Dolan will call them out on it.” (The comment is in reference to Brown’s vote against a 2019 bill to prohibit taxpayer funding for abortion, which is already largely prohibited.)
Ben Kindel, spokesperson for LaRose, said the secretary of state “will always fight for the rights of the unborn and healthcare for women.” He downplayed abortion as an animating issue, adding that “the complete and total failure of President Biden and Senator Sherrod Brown on the economy and protecting the border will be the main issues of the campaign.“
The Moreno campaign did not return a request for comment.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Brown campaign manager Rachel Petri said that the three GOP candidates “have made it clear they would ignore Ohioans and overrule them by voting for a national abortion ban.”
“Sherrod has always fought to protect women’s reproductive rights and Ohioans know how out-of-step his opponents are with the widely held belief that these are personal decisions that should be between women and their doctors,” Petri said.
In Ohio’s three battleground House districts, Democratic incumbents are likely to face opponents with similar abortion records—or in some cases, more hardline records.
Kaptur, who represents a northern Ohio district Trump won in 2020, is being challenged by JR Majewski, the far-right Trump acolyte she defeated in 2022, and by former state Rep. Craig Reidel.
In the 2022 campaign, Majewski suggested that any politician that wasn’t working to defund Planned Parenthood was complicit in its operation. This year, he pushed debunked claims about Issue One which relied on sensational invocations of child abuse to generate opposition. Majewski once shared a post on Twitter which baselessly argued Issue One “replaces parents with predators.”
In the Ohio legislature, Reidel voted for the six-week abortion ban which Issue One displaced, calling the day he cast that vote the “proudest day” he had served in office. In 2018, he cosponsored an abortion ban without exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother, which garnered national headlines. “You can’t get any more anti-abortion than this bill,” he said at the time. After the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision last year, he called it “proof that God does love America!”
In an interview in the Capitol, Kaptur told The Daily Beast that she viewed abortion as one of several issues that would decide the 2024 campaign, but said that “I don't think any politician should be interfering in a family's personal decision… that’s what the public voted for the most part in Ohio.”
Of her opponents, Kaptur said, “you can be guaranteed not a single one of them has ever been pregnant.”
GOP challengers are still developing their campaigns against Landsman and Sykes in Ohio’s 1st and 13th Districts; Landsman’s 2022 opponent, Orlando Sonza, is running again, and has already said Issue One went “too far.”
Democrats are already prepared to press the issue hard in 2024. “We should take these Republicans at their word,” said Aidan Johnson, a regional spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “They won’t stop trying to restrict women’s reproductive freedoms, so we won’t stop calling them out for it.”
The Republican operative who spoke to The Daily Beast noted the huge spreads of victory for Issue One in key Ohio battleground counties as well as places where Republicans traditionally do very well.
Summit County, home to Akron, is fully inside Sykes’ district. Issue One passed there by 30 points. “How are you going to defeat Emilia Sykes if Issue One wins in Summit County by 30 points?” asked the GOP operative.
Delaware County, in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, is partially inside archconservative Rep. Jim Jordan’s district, and Vance carried it by six points in 2022. Issue One passed there last week by 18 points.
Looking at those results, Democrats seem just as baffled that Republicans continue to wed themselves to a widely rejected abortion position.
“Why they can’t let go of this, and focus on the economy or any number of big issues that Ohio is facing, I don’t know,” Landsman told The Daily Beast.
“The more extreme and the more they double down, the worse it will be for sure,” he continued. “But no matter what they do at this point, voters are pretty clear about their position, and these more extreme Republicans are really clear about theirs—which is ultimately a national abortion ban.”
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