Last year, when J.B. Pritzker was looking for the best way to deploy his considerable personal fortune ahead of the 2024 election cycle, he had a wide array of choices at his disposal and no shortage of pitches filling his inbox. The Illinois governor, a billionaire and longtime Democratic mega-donor, had no interest in building a campaign apparatus of his own, so he wanted to find where on-the-ground organizers had clear plans to help voters while also making national waves. He saw a clear best option to the east.
That summer, Ohioans were organizing ballot measures to protect abortion rights and he sent them $750,000. By October, sensing obvious momentum, he scaled up, both founding and funding a group called Think Big America that promptly sent the organizers another $250,000. He duplicated that donation in Virginia, earmarking the cash for the state Democratic party and legislative candidates who sought to prevent Republicans from passing a 15-week abortion ban. Democrats took back the state house and Ohioans voted to protect abortion access by a large margin.
This year, he is looking west. In Arizona and Nevada, organizers are gathering signatures to put abortion protections on the ballot in November and Pritzker has so far given them $1.25 million, on top of sending advice and helping hire aides on the ground. The logic is straightforward: Ballot measures to amend state constitutions are the most durable ways to codify abortion rights under threat by Republicans in politically divided states where there is no long-term guarantee of sympathetic leadership. But the nationwide political reality that Democrats like Pritzker have recognized is also inescapable: Pro-abortion-rights campaigns have been winning consistently since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, often helping drive unexpectedly high turnout in races that benefit Democrats.
“We’re committed to moving state by state to support state constitutional amendments and candidates protecting a woman’s right to choose,” Pritzker told Virginia Democrats earlier this month. “Since Republicans have now made abortion a state issue, well fine, we’ll make it a state issue.”
Arizona and Nevada were already going to be top-tier battlegrounds in a presidential election year, with the swing states likely to be pivotal not just for Joe Biden — some close to the White House believe they may be key in keeping him in office — but also in the tug-of-war over Senate control, with Democrats Jacky Rosen running for re-election in Nevada and Ruben Gallego running to replace Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona. As a result, national Democrats see the campaigns to get these ballot measures in place as opportunities to both protect abortion rights and force Republicans to go on-record opposing them.
“When you’re looking at opposing right-wing extremism, there’s a lot of bang for your buck in these states. First of all, we support the policy on the ground of making sure women are not second-class citizens in these states,” says Mike Ollen, the former Pritzker campaign manager who is now helping lead Think Big America. Further, he says, “if you make that the topic of the day, and you remind voters — especially persuadable and swing voters — that these threats are very, very real, you can have real impact up and down the ballot.”
While Arizona and Nevada are the most closely divided states to feature abortion referendums, they are hardly alone. Both Maryland and New York will see such votes in November, the latter over barring discrimination on the basis of pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes. Other measures could be on ballots in Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota. In Florida, a campaign to legalize abortion until the point of fetal viability (essentially restoring Roe) has already gotten the signatures it needs to make the ballot, but the Republican attorney general has argued it should be disqualified due to its wording. (The state supreme court is now considering whether the language is indeed too complicated for voters to understand.) Though much of Think Big’s resources are now trained on Nevada and Arizona, Pritzker and his lieutenants have not ruled out expanding the investments to include some of these other states, especially Florida and possibly Montana, where a referendum would coincide with a competitive race for incumbent Democratic senator Jon Tester’s seat.
“I always hesitate to say ballot initiatives are silver bullets to restoring rights around the country,” says Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All, which has staff on the ground in both Arizona and Nevada. “This isn’t going to get us out of the national crisis, because it’s not an avenue we have in every state. But we look at it as one of the crucial tools.”
In many cases, leaders within the states refuse to frame the referenda in political terms beyond noting that it’s always Republicans who have rejected legislative efforts to expand or protect abortion rights. “People often say to us, ‘You’re doing this to drive turnout,’ implying that because we are Democrats it’s going to drive turnout for Democratic voters,’” but that’s not necessarily the case, said Nicole Cannizzaro, the majority leader of the Nevada senate, who last year introduced a constitutional amendment to enshrine abortion rights. She pointed to a 1990 statutory initiative to formalize abortion care protections in the state, which passed easily, not just with liberal votes. “Honestly, for me, it’s a little offensive when it keeps getting thrown in our face that we’re doing this for an overtly political reason. For anybody who has tried to have a family or has gone through that, or has even tried to access basic OB-GYN care, that can be a very difficult path to navigate, and now we’re seeing in these last two years very sweeping efforts to strip away healthcare to women. So this is very much not about turnout.” When I asked Cheryl Bruce, the manager of the Arizona campaign to get a referendum on the ballot, whether it would be helpful to have the explicit support of Kamala Harris, who was about to visit the state, she demurred, arguing that they were looking to build as broad a coalition of signatories as possible. (Harris, predictably, cheered the signature-collecting effort in a south Phoenix event focused on abortion rights.)
Those concerned with the national strategy agree not to let the talk on the ground be primarily about turnout, but have been more explicit about a political upside that bubbles up from the clear voter intensity on the issue. There is some precedent to thinking about ballot initiatives in swing states as powerful turnout tools. In 2004, George W. Bush allies made sure referenda about same-sex marriage were on the ballot in influential states where they wanted to increase conservative turnout. There is still a debate over the results; though political scientists aren’t sure the tactic had much of an effect, many strategists nonetheless have seen it as a model. And in some states, local liberals in particular believe ballot measures have been central to boosting their candidates: Florida Democrats, for example, point to initiatives on medical marijuana (2016), felon rights (2018), and the minimum wage (2020) as having been clearly helpful for them in local races.
Pritzker hasn’t just been sending money. Before addressing the Virginia Democrats, he spoke to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Congressional Leadership Conference in Washington. “No democracy worthy of the designation should contemplate jailing healthcare providers for doing their jobs. No country should make the most intimate decisions by a patient, decisions about their own reproductive destiny, illegal,” said Pritzker, who grew up knocking doors and stuffing envelopes alongside his abortion-rights activist mother. “I worry a great deal about the moment that we’re in, because things that felt untouchable and sacred are suddenly vulnerable. First it was abortion and emergency contraception. Now it’s IVF. Tomorrow it will be birth control. A few days ago, conservative activist Chris Rufo suggested it was time to ban recreational sex. I do truly invite Republicans to attempt to make that illegal. As a policy plank, I believe that will rank right up there in popularity with killing puppies and outlawing Disney World.”
He also joined Nevada Democrats in kicking off their signature drive in Las Vegas in late February. He’d seeded Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom with $1 million — much of the group’s early money — and helped hire senior advisors on the ground. In Nevada, the ballot measure joins an ongoing effort in the state legislature, which is primarily made up of women, driven by Cannizzaro to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution. It already passed the legislature once; it must pass again in 2025 to find a place on the 2026 ballot.
In Arizona, meanwhile, campaign backers are waiting for a ruling from the state’s supreme court over whether Arizonans will be subject to a total abortion ban from 1864 or a 15-week restriction passed in 2022. “Our campaign contends that neither is acceptable, but obviously the 1864 ban would be absolutely devastating. That decision soon is going to be at the forefront of voters’ minds no matter what the outcome, because regardless, it’s a ban,” says Bruce, the campaign’s manager. Organizers have leaned into the effort in large part because of the state’s battleground nature. “A group of us representing reproductive rights-leaning organizations got together before the election last November and said we needed to do something, recognizing that Arizona is a state where our government is divided and our legislature feels a little bit dysfunctional because of those divisions,” says Chris Love, a senior advisor to the Arizona for Abortion Access campaign and to the Arizona chapter of Planned Parenthood’s political wing. “This is the only way to enshrine the right in our constitution.” Pritzker’s group established an Arizona chapter of its own and sent the central signature-gathering effort $250,000.
Pritzker is the deepest-pocketed and most politically aggressive, but he is, of course, far from the only Democrat with national ambitions putting abortion rights at the top of their priorities list. Just among other possible 2028 presidential candidates running their own states, California’s Gavin Newsom has run ads and billboards in red states, most recently airing a spot in Tennessee pegged to a legislator’s proposal to charge adults who help pregnant minors leave the state to receive abortions. (The ad, which drew national attention, features a young woman handcuffed to a hospital bed.) Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, in particular, has been vocal about encouraging Democrats around the country to run on abortion rights, using her own 2022 re-election campaign — which ran alongside a ballot measure codifying abortion as a constitutional right — as a case study in how to drive up turnout and to force opponents to take a stance on the record.
“What we say to candidates where for sure it’s going to be on the ballot is: You can’t just rest on the laurel that people are going to turn out for the abortion ballot. Candidates have to run on their full-throated support for abortion to connect those dots,” says Stitzlein of Reproductive Freedom for All. “In 2022, we saw some candidates try to talk around ballot initiatives in their states, but an example we like to point to is Michigan. We had a ballot initiative, you had Governor Whitmer and Democrats running for state legislature and Congress on their support for abortion front and center, open about supporting the ballot initiative. And we saw success across the board. That’s the model.”
Back in Washington, there is still a distinct sense among top Democrats that work remains to be done to remind voters of Trump’s culpability for Dobbs. The White House has long since gotten the message. (Whitmer is a co-chair of Biden’s campaign; Pritzker and Newsom are on its national advisory board.) Harris has been the face of the administration’s response ever since the Dobbs ruling, often visiting campuses and meeting with advocates to talk about restoring and protecting abortion rights. The campaign itself has been relying heavily on clips of Trump claiming credit for Dobbs, and it recently ran a 60-second ad featuring Austin Dennard, a Texas OB-GYN who was herself forced to leave the state for an abortion because of potentially fatal pregnancy complications. “In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v Wade,” she says to the camera. At the State of the Union, in which Biden promised to restore Roe and predicted a flood of women voting on the issue in 2024, Jill Biden hosted both Kate Cox, a Texas woman who sued to be able to end a nonviable pregnancy, and Latorya Beasley, an Alabama mother who used IVF to have a child and was going through another round before her state’s supreme court’s recent ruling that disrupted IVF procedures across the state.
Republicans and Alabamans in particular have scrambled to contain the political fallout of that decision, but that ruling has only intensified the signature drives in states like Arizona and Nevada. “The decision in Alabama is a direct result of the overturning of Roe at the end of the day, so you can point the blame squarely at Donald Trump there. He appointed the justices that delivered that decision,” says Stitzlein. “Since that ruling came out, it’s been really similar to the awakening folks had post-leak of the Dobbs decision, and then obviously after the Dobbs decision was formally handed down. There’d been a bit of a believability gap — people couldn’t fathom that the Supreme Court was actually going to overturn Roe, people couldn’t fathom that Republicans were actually going to go after IVF, or contraception.”
In Nevada, for one, Cannizzarro says she’s been getting new questions from voters and IVF practitioners by the day, amplifying a level of voter engagement around reproductive health unlike any she’s seen before, on any issue. For one thing, she pointed out, much of the IVF process and related procedures can happen across state lines, so her constituents are concerned about what might happen even outside of their home state and how it might affect them. “I have a friend who is looking for a surrogate, and their surrogate was out of state. There’s an additional layer of: What happens if the surrogate they’re getting matched with is in a state where IVF is not accessible, or they’re susceptible to criminal penalties?” Cannizzaro says. It’s clear now, she continued, that “IVF is not going to be the last thing to fall in the wake of Dobbs. There are going to be other restrictions we see.”
For many activists, the hope is that such intensity in the states can make up for the dismay some still feel with how Biden himself talks about abortion even as his party fights to maintain the right. This angst resurfaced in recent days with the publication of a New Yorker profile in which the Catholic president said, ‘I’ve never been supportive of, you know, ‘It’s my body, I can do what I want with it.’ But I have been supportive of the notion that this is probably the most rational allocation of responsibility that all the major religions have signed on and debated over the last thousand years.” A few days later, at the State of the Union, which had an extended section on protecting reproductive rights, he skipped over the word “abortion” altogether, despite its presence in his prepared remarks.
I called a very senior Democrat involved in the effort to center abortion rights shortly after the quote was published in the New Yorker. She sounded exasperated, but sure of one thing: “If Biden ends up winning, it’s going to be because of this issue, and nothing else.”
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