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Notes -
[I've been in and out of the midwest over the last few months, so I've seen some of the coverage -- and lawn signs -- firsthand.]
I heard that one less often than the Farmers Growing Democracy version, but I don't think any of the Pro-Issue 1 coverage was willing to focus on the short-term abortion ramifications.
To steelman, though, there's a pretty widespread feeling among Red Tribe conservatives, where a lot of politically-charged matters have been started getting shoved through local direct democracy options, usually by a mix of obfuscating terminology and absolutely massive direct spending advocacy, kinda the flip side to the Prop 8 Discourse back in 2008.
This isn't a theoretical issue for Ohio, specifically: 2015 had a pair of conflicting constitutional amendment issues that were a confusing mess, followed by a 2018 constitutional initiative that was even more lopsided in terms of funding. These efforts hadn't succeeded yet, but they were getting increasingly close, for something that would have been very hard to reverse (and near-impossible to reverse quickly), despite often pretty stupid and badly-implemented targets.
There are pragmatic reasons to suspect trans stuff is likely to become a relevant topic in the near future, and that Ohio would be a relevant target for a variety of logistical reasons attracting coastal soft power (and maybe federal government funding), in ways where the sword would not cut both ways.
And there's special concerns that the Ohio GOP might want to get this change done before a potential 2024 general election that could be a landslide because of hefty turnout on one side of the aisle and decreased enthusiasm on the other, such as if the GOP Presidential candidate is a complete schmuck.
((Of course, the Ohio GOP is also filled with morons, so this might be a position that they hadn't considered.))
But, as you say, this also was very clearly trying to work the refs for the fall ballot, so even if it might have been a good idea in general a lot of people were not exactly impressed by it in this context. Which does not work well for a state with a lot of borderers. And the combination of removing signature cure time and of requiring signatures from every county near-guaranteed that this was eventually going to even bite the GOP in the tail down the road.
I think the steelman is that they thought it was a long shot, but that the quick turn around time would at least slow some of the conventional ways that out-of-state pressure applied. If so, it didn't work well: there was a very strong effort from teacher's unions and the conventional party affiliates, because "call phones and hand out signs" is pretty much their bread-and-butter. But the No on 1 campaign wasn't anywhere near as polished or coordinated in terms of advertising space as normal, didn't have time to start any serious cancellation efforts against supporters (yet), and didn't spend all that it raised, so to some extent it probably achieved part of the target goal.
On the other hand, they're pretty likely to bring that cash to the November election, so something something briar patch.
Having worked on paid local referendum campaigns, this is underselling both points.
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Good call on reminding me about that marijuana referendum clusterfuck. I can definitely see a principled concern arguing in favor of some referendum restrictions given the potential for problems you've described.
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