Rural voters in Ohio shift from Republican party policies; many who favored Trump supported abortion rights

Graph compares the vote by county type for Trump in 2020 to the 'no' vote on the
constitutional amendment. (The Daily Yonder graph, created with Datawrapper)

Republicans' strict anti-abortion position had wide-reaching ramifications in Tuesday's Ohio referendum vote, with rural voters pivoting away from the party's hard-line reproductive policies. "Rural voters in Ohio were part of a general shift away from Republican Party priorities, resulting in a victory for a state constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights," reports Tim Marema of The Daily Yonder. "Statewide, the measure protecting access to abortion and other reproductive rights passed 56% to 44%."

The outcome suggests that voters are paying attention to the abortion rights debate and weighing in. Tuesday's outcome in Ohio "represents a dramatic departure from Republican performance in the 2020 presidential election," Marema notes. "That year, former President Donald Trump won the Ohio vote by a margin of 8 points. This week, the constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, which the Republican Party opposed, won by nearly 13 points.

"Rural voters were part of that shift. In 2020, Ohio voters in rural counties supported Trump 72% to 28%, a margin of over 40 points," Marema adds. "In Tuesday's referendum, rural voters opposed the abortion-rights amendment. But they did so by a margin of 18 points, less than half the margin that Trump racked up in the 2020 presidential election."

The graph shows that "in every county type, opposition to the amendment (the Republican position) trailed support for Trump in 2020," Marema explains, "Rural voters were the group with the second-biggest shift from 2020. The biggest shift occurred in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas such as Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus. Those counties shifted 15 points from supporting Trump in 2020 to supporting the abortion-rights amendment in 2023."