Some people don’t know when to quit. Like today’s MAGA Party (there is no more Republican Party). 

For 50 years, they worked every possible political angle to kill Roe v. Wade. 

Last year, they finally succeeded when the Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-3, announced its Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and turning abortion politics over to the states.

But for the anti-abortion zealots, that still wasn’t enough. They immediately embarked on a two-pronged attempt to ban abortion altogether, either by getting Congress to enact a national ban or by pressuring state legislatures, starting in red states, to adopt tougher and tougher anti-abortion measures.

Now here’s the good news: the more MAGA Republicans beat the anti-abortion drum, the more ground they lost — starting in the red state of Kansas. 

In August 2022, Kansas became the first state following the Dobbs decision to vote on abortion rights. Voters overwhelmingly defeated, 59 percent to 40 percent, an initiative that said there was no right to an abortion in that state.

And that was just the beginning. In November 2022, abortion measures were on the ballot in five more states — and anti-abortion forces lost all five. California, Michigan, and Vermont voted to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. Voters in the red states of Montana and Kentucky rejected tougher limits on abortion access. 

Adverse reaction to the Dobbs decision is also generally recognized as the main reason Republicans fared so poorly in the 2022 midterms, barely winning the House and losing control of the Senate. 

And in April 2023, Wisconsin voters elected Janet Prostasiewicz, running as an abortion rights advocate, to the Supreme Court.

Yet MAGA Republicans didn’t learn anything. They still pressed ahead in state after state with draconian anti-abortion measures — which led to this week’s debacle in Ohio. Nowhere is it more clear that anti-abortion politics is a losing issue for Republicans than what happened in the red state of Ohio. It turned out to be one of the worst political miscalculations ever.

To counter anticipated attempts by the state legislature to ban or severely limit access to abortion, abortion activists had already qualified a measure for the November ballot protecting abortion rights: an initiative which, under the existing Ohio constitution, would have required only a simple majority, 50 percent plus 1, to pass.

At which point, knowing they might well lose that vote, after what happened in Kansas, anti-abortion extremists in the legislature panicked. 

They decided to play games. They called a special statewide election on August 8 (when everybody would be on vacation) for one purpose only: amending the constitution to raise the minimum requirement for passing an initiative from 50 percent to 60 percent.

Republican legislative leaders insisted it was a move to protect the state from “special interests.” But voters of Ohio weren’t fooled. They saw it for what it was: a cynical  attempt to change the rules in the middle of the game and make it harder for the abortion rights measure to pass in November — and they rejected it bigtime.

It was an amazing show of force. On a sleepy day in the middle of summer, Ohio voters turned out in record numbers to vote on only one issue — and they turned it down by 14 points, 57 to 43, a winning margin of 430,000 votes. And this, remember, in Ohio — a red state that Donald Trump won in 2020 by eight points.

The message from Ohio is clear. One, the pro-abortion rights initiative in November is now bound to pass. Two, severe anti-abortion efforts, by legislation or initiative, are a losing issue for Republicans. Since the Dobbs decision, times have changed dramatically. The issue that used to motivate conservative voters is now the main force driving liberal, moderate, and independent voters.

Ohio proves the enduring power of abortion rights on the ballot. And that’s good news for Democrats, heading into 2024. 

As Aidan Johnson, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Committee warned after the Ohio vote, “Republicans’ deeply unpopular war on women’s rights will cost them district after district, and we will remind voters of their toxic anti-abortion agenda every day until November.”

Ironically, Dobbs has backfired on conservatives. According to an April 2023 PBS NewsHour poll, support for abortion rights has actually gone up, not down, since the Dobbs decision: 61 percent of Americans now support abortion rights.

By that measure, we can only hope that Republicans put an anti-abortion initiative on the November 2024 ballot in all 50 states.