How Abortion Ballot Initiatives Impacted The Election
(ANALYSIS) This seems like a lifetime ago, but the 2004 election was actually a really interesting one in terms of religion and politics. George W. Bush was seeking a second term, and his Democratic challenger was John Kerry.
The Republicans devised a strategy to goose turnout in a bunch of battleground states. Same-sex marriage was an incredibly salient issue at the time, and the majority of the public was opposed to allowing gay couples to get married. So, Republican parties in 13 states managed to get the question put on the ballot.
In all 13 states, the ballot measures that would enshrine marriage between a man and a woman passed with a majority.
That was even true in the state of Oregon, where 57% of voters said yes to this statement, “Amends Constitution: Only Marriage Between One Man and One Woman Is Valid or Legally Recognized as Marriage.”
Did that strategy actually propel Bush to a victory in 2004? According to this paper from David Campbell and Quin Monson, it appears that White evangelical turnout increased in states with those amendments on the ballot.
But they also found that nonreligious voters turned out at much lower rates, and they argue this actually was more instrumental in Kerry’s loss.
An abortion rights demonstration in California, sponsored by Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monterey and East Bay Democratic Socialists of America. (Photo by Alex Chis)
Similarly, the 2024 election faced a situation that echoes the circumstances of 2004. In the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court essentially turned the question of abortion regulation back to the states. That means that the ballot initiative/referendum has become the instrument through which states can set limits (or not) on abortion access. And in total, 10 states had a ballot measure that directly dealt with the issue of abortion in 2024.
So, here’s my question: How much was Trump’s vote share correlated with those abortion measures?
In an effort to make this post more condensed, I won’t go into the nuances of each abortion measure. Some would have extended the window for access to a legal abortion; others removed any language about a specific week limitation.
They were all just a little bit different. This CNN page is really helpful in summarizing each of them. That’s also where I got the county-level data to perform this analysis.1
Let me start by just showing you the maps of a couple of states on their abortion access measures. This first one is Florida, which currently has a ban in place on the procedure after six weeks. Amendment 4 would have changed that to the point of fetal viability.
There’s this well worn saying about Florida politics - the farther north you go, the more south it gets. That’s most certainly the case when it came to Amendment 4. The panhandle of the state was the least supportive of expanding abortion access.
In fact, you hardly find any red at all when working your way down the peninsula. The areas that were the most supportive of expanding abortion were the counties around Tampa on the west side and then the area surrounding the Miami metro.
In total, about 57% of voters in the state cast a ballot in favor of Amendment 4. That means that it failed, as the threshold for passage is 60%. Here’s a fun fact: For decades the bar for passage was a simple majority. Then, in 2006, an initiative was placed on the ballot to increase it to 60%. It passed with 57.8% of the vote. I love democracy.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.