FOR OVER A CENTURY, referendum questions have been placed on the ballot in states across the nation – and they often impact the outcome of races between candidates. Some, such as Proposition 13 in California capping local property taxes, were high profile national news. Others, such as same-sex marriage questions on the ballot in many states in 2004, can impact races at the top of the ballot. That year, some observers believe the increased turnout from voters opposed to gay marriage cost John Kerry the presidential election, with some speculating that it was an intentional strategy used to tilt the presidential contest.
More recently, in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, pro-choice forces have taken to the ballot to protect abortion rights. They have largely been victorious, most notably in Kansas, one of the more traditionally conservative states in the nation. Some women in Kansas who cast ballots on that 2022 referendum were likely not regular, or even typically liberal, voters. Arizona and Florida will have questions to overturn their states’ abortion bans on this week’s ballot, as will other states.
Here in Massachusetts, we have our own tradition of referendum questions being placed on the ballot that have influenced major elections. Along with Maine, the Commonwealth is one of only two states in the Northeast to provide for citizen-initiated referendum questions.
In 1949, the New Boston Committee, led by a young Harvard Law School graduate, Jerome Rappaport, successfully collected signatures to place a question on the ballot to reorganize city government. The New Boston Committee included many returning World War II veterans. The movement for change increased voter turnout in the 1949 election and probably contributed to the defeat of James Michael Curley, who was seeking reelection as mayor.
While one of us (DiCara) was serving on the Boston City Council in the 1970s, he worked with then-state Rep. Bill Galvin and a coalition of citizens to place a referendum question on the 1977 municipal ballot to reorganize the school committee and the city council, which both elected all their members citywide, to include district-based as well as at-large seats. Although the effort did not succeed on the first try, that year saw a far higher turnout than in the most recent off-year election with no mayor’s race, in 1973.
Although the ballot question was defeated, under the higher turnout generated by the reform-focused campaign its supporters waged, conservative anti-busing leader Louise Day Hicks – who topped the city council ticket in 1969, 1973, and 1975 – was defeated, as was her conservative colleague John Kerrigan. In the same election, John D. O’Bryant became the first Black member elected to the Boston School Committee.
Four years later, in 1981, the ballot question revamping the structure of the city council and school committee prevailed, with the help of funding from the leaders of the business community, who agreed with the proponents that something was really wrong with a city council and a school committee in a rapidly diversifying city in which almost all the people elected were either Irish or Italian Americans.
The granddaddy of all Massachusetts examples of ballot questions affecting other races came in 1948. State Rep. Tip O’Neill of Cambridge – years before he would go on to become speaker of the US House of Representatives – was hoping to become the first Democratic speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Two questions on that year’s ballot proved to be instrumental to his effort. One would have put limits on unionizing efforts in the workplace; another would have legalized the distribution of birth control advice to married women by doctors.
The two ballot questions were a natural draw for the state’s heavily Catholic, working-class Democratic voters, who were strongly pro-labor and being encouraged by parish priests to oppose the loosening of laws governing information on contraception. Not only did the questions energize organized labor and anti-contraception voters, it was also the first presidential election in which World War II servicemen were back in Massachusetts.
Turnout was extraordinarily high – a remarkable 87 percent statewide – and both the questions were defeated by wide margins. Meanwhile, many Democrats, most of them Catholic, who sought seats in the Legislature defeated long-standing Republican members of the House, which then had 240 members.
Democrats flipped a 48-seat deficit in the Massachusetts House into a narrow 4 seat margin, and made Tip O’Neill the 73rd speaker of Massachusetts House of Representatives. It was the first time in history that Democrats had control of the Massachusetts House. They also managed to defeat the incumbent Republican governor.
O’Neill credited the ballot questions for the Democrats’ sweeping victory. “We were lucky that in 1948 just about everything was going our way,” he later wrote.
Referendum questions do not exist in a vacuum. Voters expect their candidates to take a position. In 1948, while the Democratic Party came out in favor of the pro-labor and anti-contraception positions, the Republican Party, with few exceptions, aligned closely with business interests opposed to the union questions, and refused to take a position on the contraception question at their state convention. These ballot questions also did not just move voters who normally wouldn’t turn out, but impacted voters’ decisions at the ballot box for other races. Referendums have both a turnout effect and a persuasion effect on other contests.
As voters prepare to tackle referendums protecting abortion this fall, political observers should keep in mind not only how issue campaigns can motivate voters and affect partisan contests, but also how these questions will frame the narrative of the election this fall. Politicians should heed that not taking a clear position on these issues can sink them almost as much as taking the wrong one. For example, former president Donald Trump, after seesawing on this important issue for many months, finally said he will vote no on Florida’s Amendment 4, which would lift that state’s abortion ban.
Although the nation’s, and Massachusetts’ view toward the subject has swung dramatically in the other direction since 1948, the intensity of the issue has not. Voters turning out to protect abortion rights in certain states could decide the presidential election.
Lawrence S. DiCara is an attorney and former Boston City Council president. James Nichols-Worley is a student at Georgetown University.
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