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Oct. 31, 2024 12:55-13:01 - CSPAN
05:57
Washington Journal Reid Wilson
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Vice President Harris will be joined by actress and singer Jennifer Lopez for an event near Las Vegas.
And on C-SPAN 2, we have more from the candidates.
At 2 p.m., former President Trump will be making a campaign stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We'll also bring you Vice President Harris at a rally in Reno, Nevada, before turning back to the Trump campaign, where the former president will hold a rally with Tucker Carlson in Phoenix.
A reminder: you can also watch our live coverage on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org.
And coming up, we'll take you to the discussion with the Washington Post Live, hosting two representatives from opposite sides of the aisle: Republican Don Bacon of Nebraska and Democrat Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey.
They'll be talking about efforts to safeguard the results of the presidential election, their outlook on bipartisanship among lawmakers, and the future of democracy.
We'll have that live when their conversation begins here on C-SPAN.
We are back discussing now ballot initiatives.
And according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, there are 147 ballot measures on the ballots next Tuesday in 41 states.
Here to talk more about that is Reed Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Pluribus News.
Let's begin with abortion ballot measures.
How many states have them, and what do most of them do?
Yeah, so there are 10 states that have abortion-related measures on the ballot.
In all 10 states, there is some version of a measure to protect abortion rights, to codify it either in state law or most of them in the state constitution.
There's one state, interestingly, that also has a ballot measure opposing, restricting abortion rights, and that's Nebraska.
So, Nebraska has dueling initiatives there: one to codify abortion rights, one to restrict them further.
And the Secretary of State there has said that if they both pass, which is a distinct possibility, the one that gets the most affirmative votes will supersede the other one.
But these abortion measures are interesting because in the two years since Roe was struck down, every time abortion rights or restrictions have been on the ballot, the pro-abortion rights side of the question has won.
So, I'm not just talking about blue states like California and Vermont.
We're also talking about formerly swing states like Ohio, which passed a measure to codify abortion rights, and then some even some very conservative states like Kansas and Kentucky that rejected initiatives last year that would have rolled back or restricted abortion rights.
This year, some of the key states could be our presidential battleground states, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Florida is sort of iffy on the battleground category, but those states all have abortion rights measures on the ballot.
Also, some bluer states, Colorado, Maryland, and then some red states, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, as I said, New York and South Dakota, New York on the blue state side.
Could when you have these ballot initiatives related to abortion as they've had since Roe, which party do they tend to help?
So, there's not a lot of research about whether or not ballot measures actually pull people out to the polls.
There's really only one good example that we can look to historically, and that was in 2004 when I think it was 11 states had measures on the ballot to ban same-sex marriage across the country in George W. Bush's re-election term.
There's a political scientist at Western Washington University named Todd Donovan who studied that and found that those initiatives didn't pull out a ton of people who might have otherwise stayed home to vote, but they might have pulled out a few tens of thousands in some swing states like Ohio.
And remember that Ohio was the key to Bush's re-election and he only won it by, I think it was 100,000 votes that year.
This year though, we're going to have a lot of states that are closer than that 100,000 votes in Ohio.
And so if abortion rights measures pull out, say, 5,000 young women who might not have showed up to vote, or young men for that matter, who might not have showed up to vote, who are probably disposed to vote for a Democratic candidate, that 5,000 votes could very well make the difference in the presidency.
Well, here's an interesting article front page of the Washington Post related to this.
The women backing abortion referendums and Trump splitting their ticket.
Yeah, there's some interesting sort of game theory happening here that, and that I know a few Democrats who are worried about it, that if you show up to the polls and you support abortion rights, well, one of these amendments is a great way to make sure that your elected official can't restrict abortion rights.
So it sort of offers a permission structure, if you will, to vote in favor of abortion rights, but also in favor of, say, a Republican candidate who might not favor abortion rights.
You're saving it in the Constitution, and then you can vote for whomever you like.
What about the prospects of this impacting the Senate race in Montana?
And explain the importance of this Montana Senate race.
Right.
So the U.S. Senate right now is split 51-49 for Democrats.
Democrats are likely to lose a seat in West Virginia, so make that a 50-50 Senate.
If Senator John Tester loses his reelection race in Montana, that's pretty much the ballgame.
That means Republicans would control the next U.S. Senate.
If this abortion rights measure is able to bring out a whole bunch of voters who might not have showed up otherwise, then it might help John Tester.
Tester, though, has never crossed 50% of the vote in any of his elections, and he's usually been helped by a third-party candidate, a Libertarian or something, siphoning votes from the Republican side.
There is no such third-party candidate this time around.
So he faces a really tough road to reelection, even with something like this, like an abortion rights measure on the ballot.
Because he's in a red state.
He is the Democrat in the reddest state, with the exception of Joe Manchin, who I guess is no longer a Democrat.
So now I can say that Tester is.
After the abortion initiatives, what other initiatives are high-profile that you're watching that could have an impact?
Yeah, well, let's start with marijuana.
That's been a prominent issue on ballots in a lot of the country over the years.
There are three states where it'll be up this year: Florida, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
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