Decades ago, a wealthy lawyer running for a judgeship as a Democrat in New York was worried about his election chances. According to political legend, his name was missing from campaign posters promoting Franklin Roosevelt, who was leading the ticket. Party boss Hyman Schorenstein reassured him:
“Listen. Did you ever go down to the wharf to see the Staten Island Ferry come in? You ever watch it and look down in the water at all those chewing gum wrappers, and the banana peels and the garbage? When the ferryboat comes into the wharf, automatically it pulls all the garbage in too. The name of your ferryboat is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Stop worrying!”
In their bid to retain control of the White House and Senate, in addition to winning the House, Democrats are counting on some modern political ferryboats to boost turnout. Namely, a wide range of left-leaning ballot issues that voters in many states will be deciding on this fall. The issues range from protecting reproductive rights to raising the minimum wage and establishing paid family leave, as well as legalizing and decriminalizing marijuana.
“What we do know from past election years is that issues matter to voters that are going to impact their daily lives,” Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, tells The Progressive. “[Ballot initiatives] have transcended party lines and in many states have been the highest vote-getters.”
The Democratic Party certainly believes that ballot initiatives guaranteeing reproductive rights are a real opportunity to boost voter turnout and help them win races for federal office. Recent reports indicate that it is taking advantage of the swell of support behind abortion rights ballot initiatives, generating recent headlines such as “Biden Looks to Use Abortion Rights to Put Florida in Play in November” and “House Democratic PAC Launching $100 Million Effort on Abortion Rights.”
Indeed, since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, voters in seven states have cast ballots on reproductive rights-related issues. The measures either guaranteed a state constitutional right to reproductive rights or sought to curtail those rights. In every case, the pro-choice side won decisively in a range of states.
This year, reproductive rights are on the ballot in New York and Maryland. Democrats in both states are working to focus their House and Senate campaigns on the Republican candidates’ anti-choice records. They cite previous elections as proof of this strategy’s success. “A good example . . . was in 2022, when Kentuckians voted to stop the abortion ban [ballot initiative]. The next year [Democratic gubernatorial candidate] Andy Beshear ran on reproductive rights,” says Fields Figueredo. Beshear won by five points.
Yet there is some evidence that the public’s support for reproductive rights ballot measures will not automatically translate into more votes for Democratic candidates. A January Politico article compared two figures across three states: the percentage of the pro-choice vote on ballot initiatives and the percentage of the vote for the top-performing statewide Democratic candidate in 2022. The results indicated that ballot initiatives enjoyed broader voter support.
More analysis by Politico found that Democratic candidates running in 2022 in states where reproductive rights initiatives were on the ballot did not uniformly perform better with voters than in states where there were no such referendums.
On the same day the Florida Supreme Court gave the green light to place the reproductive rights initiative on the November 2024 ballot, they also upheld the draconian six-week abortion ban pushed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. That ban went into effect on May 1.
“When that became a reality, they [the public] were already seeing long wait times and the prospect of abortion clinics shutting down. People are seeing the direct impact of that legislation,” says Fields Figueredo.
Florida may not be unique. Maryland will be voting on a constitutional amendment to guarantee reproductive rights. The Republicans rightfully felt that when former Governor Larry Hogan, the most popular governor in the country, declared his run for U.S. Senate, they had caught a huge break. But Democrats have put him on the defensive, citing his generally anti-choice record. In fact, Hogan went so far as to come out in favor of the reproductive rights amendment, a real sign of the pressure exerted by the Democratic party, capitalizing on the power of voters.
Social issues such as reproductive rights will not be the only left-leaning measures before voters this fall. Voters in several states will be voting on measures to increase the minimum wage to $15 as well as establish paid family leave. Yet such economic policies that pinch the bottom lines of influential corporate donors generate only lukewarm support from state Democratic parties. In the Florida 2020 general election, while Biden lost decisively to Trump and state Democrats performed poorly, a ballot initiative raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour easily passed with 61 percent of the vote. Progressive Florida state Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat, said that the state Democratic party did not fully align itself behind the measure.
“I think there’s a difference between posting it on your website and aggressively using it as a messaging tool and also defining your opposition as being against it,” Eskamani told me in a 2020 interview.
“If more Democrats ran with increasing the minimum wage, we would have won more seats,” she said, and then elaborated on Twitter (now X): The Florida Democratic Party was “scared to stand with working people because then the corporations that fund @FlaDems and so many candidates will get mad and stop throwing crumbs at us while they throw a LOT more at [the] Republican Party and caucuses.”
In some cases, local Democrats have outright opposed progressive ballot initiatives. In 2018, District of Columbia voters passed an initiative phasing out the separate minimum wage for tipped workers, replacing it with a much higher general minimum wage. But shortly afterward, the almost all-Democratic D.C. Council voted to repeal the initiative and reinstate the lower wage rates for tipped workers. Several of the council members voting in favor of repeal received substantial campaign contributions from the restaurant industry. In 2022, D.C. voters once again passed an initiative repealing the lower wage rate for tipped workers by 3 to 1. This time, the D.C. Council did not overrule the will of the voters.
“The economic issues are wildly popular and democracy itself is wildly popular,” Erica Smiley, director of Jobs With Justice, tells The Progressive. Jobs With Justice is a nonprofit organization that advocates in favor of workers’ rights and raising their living standards.
The statistics bear that out. Since 1996, there have been twenty-eight minimum-wage-increase initiatives on state ballots. All but two of them have passed. Paid leave measures have also proven popular with the public. Voters in Colorado, Washington, and Arizona passed ballot measures requiring employers to provide workers with paid time off for medical or family issues.
But in contrast to some Democratic leaders in past election cycles, at least a few of the U.S. Senate Democrats running in red states are seen as potentially more supportive of these initiatives.
Missouri Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Lucas Kunce, running to unseat Republican incumbent Josh Hawley, has stressed his populist, anti-corporate agenda. His opening campaign tweet in early 2023 stated, “If you’re a politician who claims to be pro-worker, but you don’t support a $15 minimum wage, guaranteed paid family + medical leave, the right to form a union, AND breaking up giant monopoly corporations . . . Then you’re a liar.”
If petition gatherers have enough signatures to qualify the $15 minimum wage initiative to go before Missouri voters this fall, it would appear to dovetail with Kunce’s populist message.
In the neighboring state of Nebraska, independent U.S. Senate candidate Dan Osborn echoes many of Kunce’s populist positions on workers’ rights and curbing corporate power. He has come out in support of paid leave for railroad workers and bereavement leave for all workers. Osborn is seeking to oust incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer. There is no Democratic candidate in the race. Osborn has been running surprisingly strongly in the polls.
With these kinds of public statements, it seems likely that he would support the Nebraska ballot initiative requiring that state’s employers to guarantee paid sick leave days for their workers, should it qualify for the ballot.
These two U.S. Senate candidates, along with Ohio’s Senate incumbent Sherrod Brown, with their explicitly populist, pro-worker, and anti-corporate platforms, stand in stark contrast to the more cautious, centrist Democratic candidates who ran and mainly.
The Democratic Party has a real problem. The public is often skeptical about whether the Democrats are on their side.
“If [the two parties] are both receiving money from the same companies that are kicking a worker’s butt, it is hard to then say ‘I support you’ . . . .
People are very fatigued with . . . leaders whose actions are very much opposed to what voters have expressed their interests are . . . in a ballot initiative,” says Smiley.
In the past, state Democratic parties have had an easier time aligning themselves with popular social issues like reproductive rights than with equally popular economic issues like raising the minimum wage or raising taxes on the wealthy to fund public projects. But based on past voting patterns, Democrats can’t assume people who vote in favor of reproductive rights initiatives will also fall in line for their party’s candidates. Yet, asserts Smiley, “Given the current climate around economic issues . . . the candidates that best align themselves with working people . . . [are] the one[s] that will win.”