Amid a decisive rejection of the Democratic Party, a small glimmer of hope for the next four years emerged Tuesday within the Bible Belt.

In Missouria majority of voters chose to consecrate the right to a abortion in their state constitution, overturning a total ban on abortion – one of the harshest bans in the country – imposed by their state’s Republican lawmakers.

Not to mention the fact that these Republican lawmakers maintained their supermajority in the state legislature this week. The success of Amendment 3 represented both a huge victory for Missouri women – basically 11,600 of whom sought abortion care in neighboring states in 2023 — and a plan to advance progressive goals even when the party that supports those goals is locked out of power.

“Hostile” barely begins to describe Missouri’s climate when it comes to abortion: From the start, Republicans in all branches of state government did everything they could to stifle citizen initiative.

It started before organizers even began collecting signatures: Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey disputed Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s assessment that there would be “no costs or savings” associated with the measure, instead insisting that legalizing abortion would cost the state an absurd amount of money. $51 billion dollars in tax revenue lost per year. (Or as he put it in a letter to Fitzpatrick: “aborting unborn Missourians will have a deleterious impact on the future tax base.”)

It took more than two months, as well as the intervention of the state Supreme Court, to resolve this dispute, which delayed the advocates’ collection of signatures and effectively shortened the time frame in which they could do so . But Republican Party officials weren’t done: After the fiscal impact was approved, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft took the liberty of rewriting the ballot summary in an effort to disadvantage the measure , so brazenly that one judge called it “unfair, inaccurate, insufficient.” and misleading.

After Ashcroft was ordered by the court to replace the misleading summary with a more accurate summary, he attempted to remove the measure from the ballot entirely – an attempt that was blocked, again, by the Missouri Supreme Court just weeks before voters go to the polls. .

“It was one obstacle after another,” says Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, an organization dedicated to achieving progressive goals through the ballot measure process and a partner of organizers on the ground in the Missouri. After organizers overcame the GOP challenge, Hall says, “They went to extraordinary lengths to go from town to town, door to door, talking to their neighbors about how this amendment was consistent with the values ​​of the Missouri. »

They were successful and now Missouri women will be able to access reproductive care in the state. It wasn’t just abortion that voters in Missouri — one of the country’s reddest states — supported: They also voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and to require businesses to provide paid sick leave to their employees. (In 2020, Missouri voters also expanded Medicaid in the state through a ballot measure, overruling Republican officials who refused to do so.) All this progress, even as the state’s voters appear to agree to allow Republicans to retain control of the state legislature, and voted 3 to 2 in favor of sending Donald Trump return to the White House.

Ballot measures like Missouri’s — and another in Arizona, where voters chose to overturn a 15-week ban and protect abortion rights by an even wider margin — are just one tool that liberals and progressives can use in the years to come. political era, but they are particularly effective.

“We face a federal landscape that will make no progress for working families, and ballot measures are one of our best tools,” Hall says. The Fairness Project successfully passed measures not only to raise the minimum wage, protect abortion, and expand Medicaid, but also to curb predatory debt collection, limit interest rates on medical debt, limit predatory payday lending and passing police reform. The organization is exploring the possibility of placing a measure on the ballot that would also address the cost of child care. “We believe progress is still possible, and we will work on it in the very near term to fill the 2025 and 2026 ballots with the priorities of working families,” Hall said.

Citizen initiatives are not viable everywhere: 24 states do not allow state-level citizen ballot measures, and efforts are being made in others, such as Mississippito actively prevent their ballot measure process from being used specifically to restore reproductive rights.

For now, defenders are looking to advance goals where they can. Hall cites states like Oklahoma, Arkansas and North Dakota as places where it might be possible to protect or restore access to abortion through the ballot box in the coming years. They are also meeting with their partners in states where initiatives failed this year to discuss trying again.

In Floridaan amendment that would have restored abortion rights for millions of women won more than 57 percent of the vote, but failed due to the state’s 60 percent threshold for ballot measures – after a brazen state-sponsored campaign to defeat the measure, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Nearly 1.5 million more people voted for relegalizing abortion than for DeSantis in 2022.)

Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, who supported Amendment 4called it a “temporary loss,” pledging to continue fighting to restore access to the state.