Yesterday morning, I took to Twitter (which I still refuse to call “X”) and predicted that Issue 1 in Ohio would fall short by a 55/45 margin.

Predicting that Issue 1 fails in Ohio today, probably with a 55/45 or so split. Opponents have made the debate entirely about abortion rights rather than the constitution and the huge early turnout suggests it's worked.https://t.co/kJgIRx67fS

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) August 8, 2023

It actually turned out to be around 57/43 (we’ll embed the final result widget below) but that was the general ballpark. That doesn’t make me some sort of clairvoyant. It was just how the polls and the early voting had played out. Twelve points isn’t really a “landslide” by any means, but you can learn a lot about the public impression of this battle from the way the legacy media portrayed it. Nobody was talking about a “loss for constitutional stability,” which is what it really was. The majority of headlines, including, of course, the Associated Press, described it as a victory for abortion rights.

Ohio voters on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a Republican-backed measure that would have made it more difficult to change the state’s constitution, setting up a fall campaign that will become the nation’s latest referendum on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned nationwide protections last year.

The defeat of Issue 1 keeps in place a simple majority threshold for passing future constitutional amendments, rather than the 60% supermajority that was proposed. Its supporters said the higher bar would protect the state’s foundational document from outside interest groups.

Voter opposition to the proposal was widespread, even spreading into traditionally Republican territory. In fact, in early returns, support for the measure fell far short of former President Donald Trump’s performance during the 2020 election in nearly every county.

The Washington Post handled it the same way. Countless other examples abound this morning. Of course, the word “abortion” appeared nowhere in the text of Issue 1. It was a proposal to raise the bar for amending the state constitution to 60 percent support rather than a simple majority. As we’ve discussed here previously, that’s something that’s already in place in several other states, so it wasn’t a particularly “radical” idea. In fact, the concept is very much in keeping with the Founders’ discussions regarding amending the federal Constitution. It should be hard to amend it, if only to keep such a foundational document from flipping and flopping every cycle as the winds of political opinions shift. And yet it was defeated in a fashion that defies the typical Left/Right divide percentages we normally see in the swing state of Ohio. Trump received more support there in 2020 than Issue 1 did yesterday.

And that should be telling us something important. This is a topic I attempted to address back in April in an opinion piece that wound up drawing a lot of fire from our conservative readers. But this week’s events in Ohio should be making this crucial issue crystal clear.

Even a quick glance at the national polls will tell the same story about the state of play in American politics today. Joe Biden is among the least popular presidents in modern American history. And recent investigations have made it increasingly clear that he is almost certainly among the most corrupt. Virtually nobody approves of his handling of the economy and a series of crises of his own making have much of the country up in arms. If we were living in a more “normal” time in political terms, the Republicans could nominate a rat carrying plague fleas next year and Joe Biden would still lose in a bloodbath like we haven’t seen since Nixon’s 1972 romp of 49 states over George McGovern.

But yesterday’s results in Ohio are all the proof you need that such a result is not going to happen and Biden (or whoever replaces him if he falls or drops out) could still hold on to the White House. That’s because, as I tried to point out in my aforementioned unpopular article from April, if we allow the Democrats to make next year’s election all about abortion, their voters and a number of moderates and independents will ignore the massive failures of this administration and the deplorable state of the country, hold their noses, and vote to keep the GOP out of power at any cost.

If you didn’t believe me four months ago, take a good look at the final numbers in the widget below and reconsider. I do not make light of the critical importance that pro-life support holds to the crucial conservative base of the GOP. But the sad reality is that support for a total or near-total ban on all abortions in America is now a minority position. A significant majority still oppose third-trimester abortions unless the life of the mother is at risk, but “heartbeat” bans pushing into the first trimester are a political loser at the polls. And it doesn’t help when we have Republicans in Congress pushing for sweeping bans at the federal level. This is the only thing that Democrats and their faithful transcriptionists in the mainstream media want to talk about because they certainly can’t run on Biden’s record. But it very well might be enough to get them over the finish line next year and the voters in Ohio demonstrated that yesterday in spades.

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