Red wave crashes down on ballot measures

The red wave that helped propel Donald Trump into the White House and likely handed Republicans control of Congress left ripple effects on the slate of nearly 150 ballot measures across the country.

Abortion-rights activists suffered their first defeats at the ballot box since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, and other progressive priorities, too, faltered when put directly before voters.

Efforts to replace partisan nominating contests with open primaries and introduce ranked choice voting appeared to be failing in all but the District of Columbia. Measures to legalize cannabis went down in three of the four states in which they were on the ballot. Minimum-wage increases were on track to be rejected in California and Massachusetts — though, ironically, they succeeded in some conservative states. And in a year when crime and immigration played a major role in the national campaign, voters in states with ballot measures addressing those questions — including deep-blue California — opted for right-leaning positions.

“The average American voter is angry,” said Matthew Schweich, executive director of the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project and head of the Voter Defense Association, an organization committed to defeating efforts to place barriers around direct democracy. “And angry voters are not interested in new ideas. They want their problems fixed.”

Progressive groups have long seen direct democracy as a potent tool for bypassing reluctant state legislatures and taking issues like Medicaid expansion, minimum-wage increases and cannabis legalization directly to the voters. In the wake of 2022’s Dobbs decision, ballot measures have played a pivotal role in abortion-rights activists’ efforts to protect the procedure from Republican-led efforts to restrict it.

This year’s results raise questions about how Democrats and progressives shut out of power at the national level will use ballot measures to push back in the coming years, and how many of these issues will return to voters’ ballots in 2026 and beyond.

“Ballot measures are going to be a very important line of defense and front-line tool to fight back on what we will likely see as a harmful agenda at the federal and state level,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Elections and voting

More than a dozen states considered ballot measures on how elections are run, from using ranked choice voting and establishing open primaries to redistricting and banning noncitizens from voting.

With the exception of Washington, D.C., voters rejected efforts to overhaul the election process, and they overwhelmingly approved efforts to bar noncitizens from casting ballots.

Along with D.C., seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota — considered measures that would have either replaced the current partisan primary system with one single open primary for candidates from all parties, introduced ranked choice voting, or both.

But all of those measures failed, and two other states looked poised to prevent or roll back open-primary and ranked choice voting systems. Missouri approved Amendment 7, which bans the use of ranked choice voting, while early returns show Alaskans poised to repeal their current ranked choice and top-four open primary system by a narrow margin.

Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America, an organization that advocates on behalf of nonpartisan open primaries, said he had hoped for better results but that advocates for changes in how elections are run recognize they’re playing the “long game” and plan to bring the issue back to state-level ballots in the future.

“We are disappointed with these outcomes, but we are not in the least deterred from this mission,” he said. “We've started an important conversation, not just in those states but nationally, about how we can truly fix our political system in these very polarized times.”

Other election-related changes also suffered at the ballot box. Ohio’s Issue 1, which would have put an independent commission in charge of the state’s redistricting process, lost by an 8-point margin despite left-leaning backers putting tens of millions of dollars into the Yes campaign.

The year’s most successful democracy-related measures were not about reforming the way states run elections but rather aimed at explicitly limiting noncitizens from participating. (U.S. law already limits voting rights in federal elections to citizens and imposes harsh penalties on noncitizens who illegally cast ballots.)

Voters in eight states — Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin — approved constitutional amendments to explicitly ban noncitizen voting, most of them by wide double-digit margins.

Those amendments likely benefited from national Republicans’ focus on noncitizen voting as a pillar of their campaign rhetoric. President-elect Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and others asserted without evidence prior to the election that noncitizens could be voting in droves in key swing states.

A measure to introduce noncitizen voting in local elections in Santa Ana, California, which backers billed as an important counterweight to the national Republican narrative, appeared to be failing by more than 20 percentage points.

For backers of election reform measures, this year’s slate of ballot initiatives were just one part of a “multi-prong, multi-year strategy,” Troiano said. Outside of ballot measures, Unite America is pushing for reforms in state legislatures and in Congress, and working to educate voters about the impact and benefits these systems could have if implemented.

“Oftentimes movements take two steps forward, one step back,” said Troiano. “But it's only through sustained, incremental progress they ultimately achieve big things.”

Drug policy

Drug legalization measures had a poor showing at the ballot box on Election Day, with voters in four states rejecting proposals to liberalize their states’ narcotics laws.

Adult-use cannabis legalization measures failed in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota, while voters rejected a psychedelics decriminalization measure in Massachusetts. The outcome seemed to portend a shift in Americans’ attitudes towards cannabis. After decades of growth, support for marijuana legalization hit a record high last year of 70 percent, according to Gallup.

While efforts to liberalize laws around psychedelics are still in their infancy, the vote in Massachusetts marks the first time a state rejected a psychedelics measure. Voters in Colorado, Oregon and D.C. have passed either decriminalization or legalization measures for certain psychedelics.

But support for medical cannabis remains high, even in deeply conservative states. Nebraska voters overwhelmingly passed a pair of ballot initiatives to legalize and regulate a medical cannabis program.

Proponents of drug policy changes don't necessarily see a backsliding of public support for legalization initiatives. A strong majority of Florida voters approved the legalization measure, but it nevertheless fell four points short of the 60-percent threshold required to amend the state constitution.

South Dakota and North Dakota were each voting on recreational marijuana legalization for the third time, but the trendlines are moving in opposite directions. In 2020, 54 percent of South Dakotans backed legalization, only to have the ballot measure struck down by the state Supreme Court. Two years later, a similar initiative failed with 47 percent support, and this year just 44 percent of voters backed legalization. Meanwhile, support has increased each time North Dakota voters have weighed in, hitting 47.5 percent this year.

The legalization campaigns in North and South Dakota were underfunded, explained Schweich, whose Marijuana Policy Project has run legalization campaigns in South Dakota for the past three elections.

Legalization initiatives have historically been funded by ideologically motivated wealthy individuals, who have grown less interested in donating as the legal cannabis industry grows. South Dakota’s legalization campaign raised less than half of what it had in 2020, when voters approved a legalization measure that was subsequently struck by the courts.

“We’re victims of our own success,” Schweich said.

Blue states with ballot measures have already legalized marijuana. The remaining states that have a citizen petition ballot process are more conservative and less friendly to legalization proposals.

“As we’re encountering more headwinds, we don’t have the resources we used to have,” Schweich said.

Looking ahead, Schweich thinks that it makes sense for marijuana advocates to focus on medical cannabis initiatives.

“I don’t think there’s a single state where it makes sense to pursue [recreational legalization] on this upcoming midterm ballot,” he said.

And when it comes to future adult-use legalization efforts, “we need to be more disciplined about where we fight,” he said. “We need to acknowledge that we’re in tougher terrain.”

Minimum wage and paid sick leave

The usual politics of raising the minimum wage was turned on its head this election, with voters in a pair of the most liberal states in the nation rejecting initiatives to boost it while those in more conservative states moved in the opposite direction.

In some red states, voters tacked on paid leave benefits.

Voters in deep-blue Massachusetts turned aside a proposal to increase the minimum for service workers to $15 an hour. On the other side of the country, Californians are on pace to reject an initiative hiking the state’s pay floor to a nation-high $18 per hour.

But the wage equality group Raise the Wage AZ scored a win in Arizona after voters rejected a Republican-backed ballot measure that would have allowed workers to be paid 25 percent less than the state’s $11.35 minimum wage as long as their tipped pay is $2 more than the state’s pay floor.

Missouri voters approved a measure to boost workers’ earnings to a minimum of $13.75 an hour, up from the current $12.30. The change will take effect next year.

Alaska is also on track to embrace a package of labor-related items, including raising its minimum wage to $15 from $11.73 by 2027, providing workers with paid sick leave and prohibiting firms from requiring employees to attend so-called captive audience meetings where employers lay out their arguments against unionization.

Voters in Nebraska overwhelmingly approved a measure to require employers to provide paid sick leave.

In the states that voted down wage increases, ads paid for by restaurant groups were largely effective in arguing that raising the minimum wage would hurt small businesses, and also workers who’d suffer from customers choosing to tip them less. Polling suggested the measures in California and Massachusetts were lagging in public support weeks before voters went to the polls.

“It came down almost exclusively to a simple message towards the end, that was, just ask your servers and bartenders how they feel,” said Chris Keohan, a spokesperson for pro-restaurant group The Committee To Protect Tips. “And voters actually started doing that.”

Same-sex marriage

Voters in three states, California, Colorado and Hawaii, approved amendments to remove dormant language banning same-sex marriage from their state constitutions. But despite their success, the measures did not prove to be the show of strength that LGBTQ+ activists hoped to put forward.

The measures are largely symbolic since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nine years ago. But activists viewed them as a way to preemptively insulate states against any potential rollback of marriage rights under a more conservative Supreme Court.

In California, activists saw the Prop 3 campaign as a sort of test drive for their ability to push back against potential future attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender individuals, at the ballot. Its backers had hoped it could reach the 70-percent mark, but election returns showed it winning 62 percent of the vote.

Colorado’s amendment fared best out of the three, with 64 percent, but in all three liberal states the results came in below support levels for marriage equality reflected in national polling. The margin of victory for Hawaii’s amendment was just 12 points, far less than activists had expected.

“To be honest, the language was a bit confusing,” Kathleen O’Dell, who chairs the Hawaii State Commission on LGBTQ+ Affairs, told local media of the ballot measure. “I heard from many people about that, and we knew we had to work hard to make sure voters understood how to cast their votes.”

Polling released this year by Gallup shows Republican support for legal same-sex marriage among Republicans slipping under 50 percent after passing a majority for the first time in 2021.

School choice, crime and immigration

Other high-profile measures that were successful on state-level ballots this month addressed issues like crime, immigration, education policy and the initiative process. They presented mixed results ideologically.

With law-and-order issues playing an outsize role in the presidential campaign, voters in two states chose to move to the right on crime and immigration.

In California, voters overwhelmingly backed Prop 36, a tough-on-crime measure that will increase penalties on repeat offenders of theft- and drug-related crimes. The measure rolls back significant parts of Prop 47, a 2014 ballot initiative that loosened penalties, signaling voters are moving away from the state’s progressive criminal justice policies.

And as Trump outlined his plans for a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, Arizonans approved a measure to allow local law enforcement to arrest people suspected of crossing into the U.S. illegally. Prop 314, which is similar to border-enforcement laws passed in Texas, Iowa and Ohio, passed by a large margin but will likely face legal challenges.

On education policy, voters in three states rejected efforts to expand public funding for private schools, a top priority for Republicans.

Colorado’s Amendment 80 would have enshrined a right to school choice in the state constitution, but it failed narrowly. In Kentucky, voters said no to Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state legislature to allocate public funding to private schools. And public school advocates in Nebraska successfully repealed a law allowing taxpayer money to be used for private school tuition.

“It confirms what we knew, the majority of Nebraskans don’t want public dollars going to private schools,” Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, told local media after the repeal measure’s victory.

One other “glimmer” of hope for progressives on this year’s ballots, as Figueredo put it, were measures intended to curtail direct democracy itself — all of which failed.

North Dakotans voted down a measure to require initiatives to pass in both a primary and a general election before taking effect, while Arizonans rejected two measures that would have weakened the initiative process. Prop 134 that would have required campaigns to collect signatures from each of the state’s legislative districts, and Prop 136 would have allowed opponents of a proposed initiative to challenge its constitutionality before Election Day (currently, legal challenges take place after a measure has passed).

“People want the opportunity to have this tool,” said Figueredo of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “especially when they see their representatives in government not listening and acting on these issues that are so incredibly important.”

But Figueredo said organizations like BISC are preparing to push back against what they expect will be further efforts to restrict the initiative process, particularly in states with Republican-led state legislatures, in 2025 and beyond.

“There’s going to be important work ahead to prevent state legislatures and state governments from undermining the will of the people,” she said.