Liberal Policies Without the Libs

A vote for a party's ideas ain't necessarily a vote for the party.

One of the predictably under-discussed outcomes of the 2024 elections were the ballot measures across several states. It’s worth briefly recapping how these results shook out because a number of them didn’t comport with how the politics of these states are often unidimensionally portrayed in national media.

In the 10 states with measures deregulating abortion access, eight passed either a constitutional amendment or some form of protection for abortion access. In three states, abortion access was already secure at the point of viability or beyond, like in Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, and New York. In Montana and Arizona, where abortion remains legal, constitutional amendments securing abortion access were passed. In Nebraska, voters denied a similar constitutional amendment and limited abortions to the first trimester except in cases of medical emergencies, sexual assault, or incest. In Florida, where a six-week ban is already on the books, and in South Dakota, where a total ban is in effect, voters declined constitutional protections. Missouri was the only state with a ban to approve an amendment protecting abortion access by 52-48 percent.

Missouri is an interesting case. Voters also passed a hike in the minimum wage to eventually $15 an hour and a requirement that employers provide paid sick leave for employees. That measure passed 58-42 percent in a state that re-elected populist conservative Josh Hawley to the Senate by 14 points and elected Donald Trump by 18 points. The candidate or issue position to receive the most votes was Trump at 1.73 million votes. To add some perspective to what share of Americans turned out for the winning down-ballot candidates/issues, Hawley received a number of votes equal to 94% of Trump’s raw votes, the pro-choice measure received 87%, but the minimum wage measure won over 96% of the same. The paid sick leave measure saw the lowest turnout, just a 37% equivalent share of the Trump vote. Harris received fewer votes than either side of the abortion or minimum wage measures. Some 336,000 more Missourians cast ballots protecting abortion than they did a vote for Harris, which buttresses one of the key takeaways emerging from the election: a vote for an item of the Democratic agenda doesn’t necessarily follow a vote for Democratic candidates.

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On the question of allowing non-citizens to vote — an act that is not explicitly illegal in every state — voters in all eight states where the question was on the ballot passed prohibitions by a minimum of 62 percent in Idaho and by as high a vote share as 86 percent in South Carolina. Wisconsin, among the most competitive states for Senate and president, passed a prohibition on non-citizen voting by 40 percentage points. On the flip side, voters in Burlington, Vermont, backed a measure allowing non-citizens who are legal residents to vote in municipal and school board elections, the same for parents in Oakland and San Francisco, California. Multnomah County, Oregon — where Portland is located — denied non-citizen voting in county elections by six points.

But it’s California that probably best exemplifies the spirit of direct democracy via ballot measure. The state tends to surprise conservative naysayers and staunch liberals alike. In a state that saw its largest swing toward a Republican presidential or Senate candidate in decades, the state backed up its heterodoxy with its voters passing measures for increased penalties for certain drug crimes and theft convictions (+38 points), declining a lower threshold for raising more funding for public infrastructure (+10 points), and opposing the legalization of rent control (+20 points). Results for the proposition to raise the state minimum wage to $18 an hour are still being counted with “No” leading by just 1.5 percent as of this writing.

Whether it’s Missouri or California, though, it’s worth asking why states that so reliably vote for members of one party support policies associated with the out-party. One answer is fairly obvious, which is that voters contain multitudes, and their policy nor candidate preferences redound to the kind of neat, ideological uniformity implied in so much national political coverage. Independents, who make up the plurality of voters nationally and hold significant sway in many states, have been found in studies to lack strong ideological consistency, instead taking positions based on issue-specific considerations. So what might on paper be perceived as a “moderate” independent is in reality probably someone with views across the ideological spectrum that, in aggregate, get labeled as “moderate.”

Others point to money. With enough money raised, any movement can out-gun the opposition — but that explanation, too, has its limitations. In Florida, despite raising over nine times more than the anti-abortion messaging apparatus, the pro-choice position fell short by about 3 points of the 60 percent required to pass. Efforts by Missouri Republican lawmakers to overturn the will of the voters appears unlikely despite supermajorities in the senate and the general assembly.

In Missouri, Democrats chalk up the perceived dissonance in the public’s voting record to the ballot process itself, with the state’s Democratic Party chair telling Missouri Independent that a direct vote provides recourse for voters even as they prefer elected Republicans. The GOP chairman says the Democratic Party’s brand statewide has been damaged as it’s become tied to the national party.

The latter supports a trend that has been occurring over the last fifteen years — states where Democrats were competitive or even dominant across the Midwest and South flipping and staying Republican at the state level during an era where Democrats were banking their successes on presidential star power with Barack Obama and resistance to Donald Trump rather than investing in the work of retaining goodwill among voters stateside, something I previously touched on in The Wall Street Journal.

The dilemma is Democrats are, functionally, a much more nationalistic party — one that implicitly believes that any progress worth pursuing can primarily or perhaps only be realized at the federal level and that whatever policies depart from those within the margin of acceptable expertise need to be extinguished. Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, do have centralist impulses; when it comes to public policy, they largely still operate more so on the pretense of federal restraint.

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Federalism and the Split-Ticket Voter's Comeback

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The other obstacle for Democrats, perhaps also worth of an essay unto itself, is that major informational institutions like the media and academia (never mind the entertainment industry) are controlled by liberals. Liberal reporters either cite liberal sources or cite sources who probabilistically will arrive at flattering liberals’ priors. Echo chambers radicalize their members through an insularity from diverse viewpoints. Incubate that for long enough and you start to see the excesses that, while rarely if ever have any direct link to elected Democrats, fairly or unfairly tend to rub off on elected Democrats. So, after months and years, “the left” gets conflated with X normal Democrat representing the suburbs of Y small city. So the ideological consolidation within information institutions has, perhaps counterintuitively, not served Democrats well.

But Democrats have been in a similar position before. After losing three straight federal elections, they had a blockbuster victory in the 2006 elections which followed the party cobbling together a 50-state strategy, renewing the party’s mindset and setting the stage for their blowout victories in 2008. But after that, Democratic power in the states began to decline and accelerated as the culture wars started heating back up again.

The broader takeaway is something I wrote about some weeks back, which is how the denationalization of public policy can create bipartisan consensus on key issues at the state level. In other words, by detaching public policy from national party associations, the incentives change for state-level partisan lawmakers, making things like wind power in Texas or tougher crime laws in California possible.

When lawmakers have to shape policy around the people they actually serve rather than any national interest, the states can wind up making progress that just isn’t possible at the federal level, all while moderating the temperature of the political environment. This isn’t about “bridging divides” but rather acknowledging that divides exist and that Americans who disagree across state borders can pursue their own ideas of the good without having to bank every time on buy-in from people hundreds or even thousands of miles away from them.

Correction: This post has been updated to correctly convey the results in the Florida ballot measure on abortion. A previous version incorrectly stated that the measure lost by 15 percentage points when it fell short by roughly 3 points of the 60 percent required to pass.