Louisiana is considered the most anti-abortion state in the nation, yet a whole lot of Louisiana voters think the state’s near-absolute ban on the procedure goes too far, according to a new poll.
Half of those who responded to the survey by Faucheux Strategies for The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and its partners want fewer restrictions, compared to 42% who don’t. Other surveys taken since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year have found similar results.
So then the question is this: What can all those Louisianans do about it?
And here’s the depressing answer: not much.
That’s especially frustrating in light of what’s happened in a handful of other states where voters have successfully pushed back against political establishments bent on imposing minority opinion by law.
After a decisive vote in apparent support for abortion rights on a complicated ballot measure in Ohio this summer, some readers contacted me and asked how they could get the abortion question directly before the voters here.
And I had to tell them that they can’t. Louisiana, along with about half the states around the country, has no mechanism for putting citizen-led questions of policy and governance on the ballot.
Instead, all proposed constitutional amendments must originate in the Louisiana Legislature — yes, the same Legislature that adopted the unpopular abortion policy by a wide margin in the first place. Fat chance of that happening.
Recent events elsewhere hint at just how game-changing putting matters directly in voters’ hands can be.
In Ohio, citizens didn’t vote specifically on abortion, but they did defeat a ballot measure aimed at making future ballot measures harder to pass by raising the threshold for passage from a simple majority to 60%. This was a ham-handed attempt to put new, harder rules in place — in an under-radar August election no less — ahead of a fall ballot measure that actually will be about abortion. Voters there saw through the cynicism, turned out in force and rejected the proposal by a 14-point landslide.
The victory has energized groups looking to put abortion-rights measures on ballots in other conservative states that allow them, from Florida to Arizona. So did a public vote last year in Kansas against a constitutional amendment that would have declared that there’s no right to an abortion in that state.
Abortion rights aren’t the only priority that’s proven popular among voters in some unexpected places. More than 90% of ballot measures to increase the minimum wage over the past few decades have passed, and such a proposal would likely succeed here too, given poll numbers showing wide approval. Without citizen initiative, the idea has died repeatedly in the business-dominated Louisiana Legislature, despite Gov. John Bel Edwards’ advocacy.
Other priorities that have been adopted this way in other states include legalized recreational marijuana, which is not permitted here, and Medicaid expansion, which Edwards adopted by executive order. And in 2018, 65% of Florida voters backed an amendment to give convicted felons who’ve completed their sentences the right to vote.
Often, the most dramatic results happen in places where the political leadership is out of sync with certain popular preferences — where conservative electorates elect conservative leaders, for example, but many voters are less ideologically rigid, or less aligned with powerful interests, than those they put in office.
That’s what makes one argument against citizen initiatives, that they would open the door to special interests, frankly ridiculous. The special interests are already in the house, and they flex their muscles every day.
As to the argument that the people we elect to represent us are supposed to do just that: Well, sometimes they don’t, and focusing on electing better candidates only gets voters so far when about half of lawmakers win without opposition, when districts are drawn to keep seats safely in the hands of one party or another, and when structural barriers such as insultingly low pay keep too many people from being able to run and serve.
Of course, changing the system would have to start in the Legislature, where most members surely have no interest in giving their constituents the tools to overrule them. Attempts to allow for citizen initiatives have been failing for decades, dating back to the days of Republican Gov. Mike Foster and up to this year, when state Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans, tried again and got nowhere.
Results like the one in Ohio are only likely to solidify official resistance. Abortion rights may have been indirectly on the ballot, but direct democracy was explicitly there, and the idea of making it harder for regular people to affect policy — in effect, making Ohio at least a little more like Louisiana — turned out to be pretty darn unpopular.
It's not hard to see why.