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Yesterday, voters in Ohio rejected a ballot measure that would have raised the threshold for amending the state constitution. Though the proposal, Issue 1, wasn’t explicitly about abortion, the higher threshold likely would have served as a way to prevent the passage of an abortion-rights initiative in November. I spoke with Russell Berman, who has been covering the Ohio story, about what the result means for supporters of reproductive rights, and for the 2024 election.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The anti-California Why you should worry about China’s missing minister Welcome to the age of “foomscrolling.”

All About the Timing

Lora Kelley: What, if anything, surprised you about the outcome of this special election?

Russell Berman: The outcome of this election actually wasn’t a big surprise. Democrats have had a long losing streak in Ohio, but abortion rights have been having a winning streak at the polls. Last year, in every state where there was an abortion-rights-related amendment on the ballot, the abortion-rights side won. That happened both in blue states like Vermont and California, and in red states like Kansas and Kentucky.

In Ohio, in retrospect, the fact that the Republicans even put this on the ballot was surprising, knowing what has happened elsewhere, especially in Kansas. A year ago in Kansas, the abortion-rights side defeated an anti-abortion ballot measure by an even larger margin than in Ohio. At that time, that was a big surprise. But now, having seen how potent the abortion issue is for mobilizing supporters of abortion rights, what happened last night in Ohio wasn’t too big of a surprise.

Lora: What did this outcome tell us about the energy of voters around abortion, just over a year after the Dobbs decision?

Russell: It told us very clearly that there is still a lot of energy around abortion rights. That gives Democrats a lot more hope heading into 2024. This election showed that Democrats can still rely on abortion as an issue, especially in states where access to abortion and abortion rights are under threat. In 2022, Democratic candidates performed much better in red or purple states where there was a palpable sense that the election could determine access to abortion.

In Ohio, you still saw that energy—just look at the turnout. The only thing on the ballot in Ohio yesterday was Issue 1. There were no primaries; there were no candidate races. People were going to the polls in Ohio yesterday only to vote on this constitutional amendment. The turnout was nearly double that of the statewide primaries in May 2022. And this is in August! Going back to your first question, if anything surprised me about this election, it wasn’t the outcome so much as the turnout. It really exceeded even the most expansive projections.

Lora: The word abortion didn’t appear anywhere in the text of the Ohio ballot measure. How did voters get the message that this special election was linked to the November abortion initiative?

Russell: It was all about the timing. For months, there had been a petition effort to get the abortion question on the fall ballot. The voters in Ohio know that. The Republican-dominated legislature kept trying to put Issue 1 on the ballot to intercept the abortion amendment and were finally able to pass a bill scheduling this election for August.

Republicans never really denied that the measure was at least partially—really, entirely—about the amendment on abortion coming up this November, though they highlighted that amending the state constitution would affect other issues. Their messaging noted that “special interest” money could come into the state and try to sway votes on the legalization of marijuana, raising the minimum wage, and passing gun-control laws. But voters understood that this was really about abortion. Opponents of this amendment were ready to make that clear to them.

Lora: What does this election tell us about abortion-rights battles in other states? Where are you looking next?

Russell: This is certainly going to continue to embolden the Democratic side, the abortion-rights side, which is basically looking anywhere that a citizen-led ballot initiative could change the constitution, because Republicans control the legislatures in a majority of states and they have a very tight grip on red states, particularly in the South.

Specifically, we’re looking to Florida and Arizona. In Florida, supporters of abortion rights are now gathering petitions to try to put a constitutional amendment protecting access to abortion on the ballot for 2024. That’s important, because the legislature and Governor Ron DeSantis just passed a law that bans abortion after six weeks. In Arizona, where Republicans also control the legislature, supporters of abortion rights are also planning to gather petitions to put an amendment on the ballot.

Related:

The abortion backlash reaches Ohio The next big abortion fight

Today’s News

Unprecedented wildfires and powerful winds in Hawaii have caused widespread evacuations and killed at least six people. A newly unsealed court filing revealed that Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant for Donald Trump’s Twitter account. An estimated 41 migrants attempting to reach Europe from Tunisia have died after their boat capsized.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Despite his actions and indictments, Donad Trump remains Republican primary voters’ top choice. Conor Friedersdorf gathers reader views on why.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Danielle del Plato

I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings

By Jill Filipovic

In 2008, when I was a writer for the blog Feministe, commenters began requesting warnings at the top of posts discussing distressing topics, most commonly sexual assault. Violence is, unfortunately and inevitably, central to feminist writing. Rape, domestic violence, racist violence, misogyny—these events indelibly shape women’s lives, whether we experience them directly or adjust our behavior in fear of them.

Back then, I was convinced that such warnings were sometimes necessary to convey the seriousness of the topics at hand (the term deeply problematic appears a mortifying number of times under my byline). Even so, I chafed at the demands to add ever more trigger warnings, especially when the headline already made clear what the post was about. But warnings were becoming the norm in online feminist spaces, and four words at the top of a post—“Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault”—seemed like an easy accommodation to make for the sake of our community’s well-being. We thought we were making the world just a little bit better. It didn’t occur to me until much later that we might have been part of the problem.

Read the full article.

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Read. In her new book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Blair LM Kelley breaks down the political myth that working class is synonymous with white, Ibram X. Kendi writes.

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There’s no such thing as a smart sports bet, but the first one I ever made was, by any measure, particularly stupid. It was late January 2022, and mobile-gaming apps had become legal in New York only a few weeks earlier. I had successfully ignored all of them until I saw Joe Burrow, the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, walk into Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City for the AFC Championship game wearing a sherpa coat, black turtleneck, huge gold chain, and rimless sunglasses. That man is not losing a football game today, I thought to myself.

When I saw Burrow’s outfit, I knew what to do immediately, even though I’d never really contemplated betting on sports before. Signing up for a new DraftKings account got me a $100 free bet, and I put it on the Bengals moneyline. Advertisements for gaming apps had blanketed virtually every surface of the city as soon as their use had become legal. Much of the same is true in the dozens of other states that have legalized mobile sports betting, and gambling is even inescapable in the places where you can’t do it: Frank discussion of betting odds and point spreads has become a marquee feature of sports media, where the topic had long been forbidden.

The sports-betting boom shows few signs of slowing. Yesterday afternoon, ESPN made an announcement that was both unprecedented and expected. This fall, in a 10-year, $2 billion deal with the gaming company Penn Entertainment, the most powerful sports-media company in the United States by a wide margin will launch its own digital sportsbook, ESPN Bet. The partnership, which will lead ESPN and its talent to promote the sportsbook on its television networks, website, and smartphone apps, cements a transformation that would have seemed all but impossible even five years ago. Betting, once completely excluded from mainstream sports, is now inextricable from nearly every level of the business. Gaming companies sponsor television coverage, put their names on arenas, operate sportsbooks in stadiums, and partner with teams. The game is over. Betting won.

For much of the modern history of professional sports, even the vaguest acknowledgments that some viewers might be interested in games for reasons other than a pure-hearted love were largely verboten. For decades, the NFL forbade the networks airing its games from even discussing point spreads. The convention slowly began to erode as fantasy sports became popular in the 2000s, but the real turning point came in 2018, when a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to legalize sports gambling. Five years and one ferocious gaming-industry lobbying push later, 36 states and Washington, D.C., have joined Nevada in doing exactly that. Most disruptive of all have been those that now allow bets to be placed in mobile apps, moving the sportsbook into America’s pockets.

When done with even a modicum of skill, bookmaking is an extremely profitable venture; people are, by and large, very bad at gambling. Suddenly, millions of new bettors who might have never sought out casinos can make impromptu bets on their phone while at a sports bar or on their couch, including wagers on moment-to-moment minutiae in live games, such as the outcome of the next play or at-bat. Companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel, which already had robust apps and large pools of existing users playing fantasy sports, were the first to capitalize on the gaming gold rush, along with well-known casino operators such as Caesars and MGM. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one in five Americans had gambled on sports in the previous year—a huge proportion of the population, considering that some of the country’s most populous states, including California and Texas, have so far resisted legalization.

Betting has become inescapable for even casual fans with no interest in it—app commercials are ubiquitous during game broadcasts, gaming jargon is a standard part of the sportscaster lexicon, and players and coaches now regularly get in very high-profile trouble for their own gambling exploits. Some less traditional sports-media outlets were quick to partner with gaming companies once legalization began, funneling readers toward existing services or opening their own. Now even powerful broadcast networks have fewer incentives than ever to stick to their hard-line stance on the topic. They can argue that viewer demands have changed, and that failing to get into the betting business would actually be a disservice to their audience. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said as much about betting coverage and partnerships in an interview with The Athletic last year: “It’s something that our fans are expecting from us,” he said. “So it’s not a ‘nice to have,’ it’s pretty much at this point a must-have.”

Regardless of demand, all that gaming cash has caught broadcasters at an especially weak moment. Although ESPN in particular is still enormously profitable—to the tune of billions of dollars a year—the decline of cable has made continued growth look difficult, and growth is what shareholders want. No matter how creatively you do the math, streaming subscriptions are unlikely to make up the difference. Media executives go where the money is, and right now, the biggest piles of new money are available to those who encourage viewers to gamble. If even ESPN can’t hold out, and apparently has no desire to try, then no one can.

Those piles of money are not guaranteed to save the business, or even be around for very long. The lavish, years-long marketing and promotional campaigns that have filled sports media’s pockets are designed to onboard new bettors in new markets en masse, and their huge expense means that many of the mobile betting apps are not yet profitable. Pressure on sportsbooks to make money has begun to increase, and it’s already killed Fox Bet, the closest existing analog to what ESPN plans to launch this fall.

But in entering this market, ESPN has more advantages than any of its putative competitors—and more conflicts of interest. ESPN owns some or all of the broadcast rights to nearly every major sport in America, which means that it has enormous influence over how the entire business is conducted. It’s also the country’s biggest source of sports news, and how ESPN covers the industry already affects how unaffiliated sportsbooks set odds and how regular people make bets. Now ESPN will have its thumb on all three scales: influencing the leagues, informing the public, and setting the betting lines. (ESPN says that it will maintain a strict demarcation between its journalists and its betting operation.)

If you’re one of the (many, many) fans who find it irritating to now get much of your sports news filtered through the lens of what it means for bettors, the situation can only get worse as ESPN gets more centrally involved in gaming. Or maybe it’ll just turn you into a gambler against your better judgment, precisely as intended.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I put this question to readers: “Donald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes, and yet remains the most popular candidate with voters in the Republican Party’s presidential primary. Why do you think he is still their first choice?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Randall R. argues that Trump supporters earnestly desire national greatness:

The reason many support Trump (if you have the decency to listen to them) is because they want to make America great again, and there’s no one else close to matching Trump in both prominence and apparent ability to make what they’d say is the most promising and important part of America great, in the face of the internal conflicts that currently exist.

That’s an illusion spread by a politician, offering an addictive thrill that disconnects people from parts of reality. It doesn’t make America great. But making America great, recognizing how it has long been great and how it can be more great, remains important.

Listen to the Trump voters: the neglected, the deplored, the doomscrollers, the people who want to make something of themselves, those who want to raise their family in a better world. Those who vote against Trump fit these same descriptions. It’s essential, for people on opposing sides of what’s become Trump’s divide, to listen to each other with respect, so we can build our way out of America’s problems without being exploited by political operators. You or I have no shortage of illusions in our parts of the political spectrum; shouldn’t we be reexamining those illusions instead of looking down on Trump’s followers?

Bob puts forth a theory of populism:

Populist movements arise from widespread dissatisfaction with cultural and economic conditions and the inability of the government to deal with public concerns. This is fertile ground for charismatic and authoritarian leaders offering quick and simple solutions. Though Trump may be a person of low character, to many of his supporters, he seems like the sort of fighter that is needed—someone who does not follow the rules because the rules are believed to be the problem. James Madison would be sad and disappointed.

Jaleelah analyzes what she sees as the incentives of Trump supporters:

Trump’s supporters sincerely believe that he is being framed, not only because he has been priming them for his conviction for years, but because they have to believe it lest they become severely depressed. Imagine dedicating yourself to a false religion or an unfulfilling career or a bad partner. Imagine losing relationships with your lifelong friends and your adult children who strongly disagree with your choices. When you’ve committed to something at a great cost, it is hard to admit that your commitment was all for nothing.

I don’t think it is strange that so many people insist Trump is innocent. I do, of course, believe he is a fraud who is corrupt enough to have committed the crimes he is accused of. But genuine revolutionary figures get locked up on fake charges all the time. Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were charged, convicted, and imprisoned. Most reasonable people alive today believe their imprisonments were unjust and that states are capable of fabricating evidence against popular figures who threaten the social order. Trump’s supporters are simply applying a reasonable idea in an unreasonable context.

Liberals and progressives do not seem keen to accept repentant Trump supporters. There is little benefit to switching teams. There is a very high cost. Towns that have unified behind Trump are just as keen on cancel culture as their liberal counterparts. No one wants to be confronted by a horde of their neighbors at church or accused of supporting degeneracy at the grocery store. Peer pressure is probably keeping a lot of people in line.

Dan argues that “most people assume that voters look at a candidate’s record and personality,” but “what really matters is whether a candidate gives a voter an identity.” He explains:

The voters are, because of their support for a candidate, a “somebody.” Trump has done this better than any candidate in 50 years. To voters whose worlds have been destroyed by elites, Trump says: You matter. Become a part of this movement and you are standing up to the elites. You can get your life back with me, and be a SOMEBODY again. Trump’s legal cases are easily rationalized as the price he has been willing to pay, personally, to represent all of the people who see him as validating their lives and giving them identities once again. To his supporters, he is sacrificing for “the cause.”

Christopher scolds Trump’s critics for what he sees as a failure to understand their country:

Trump supporters believe that the economic and cultural game is rigged. Trump supporters disagree with teaching little children about gender or allowing gender-reassignment care to impressionable minors and are branded with a pejorative label for it. They see branding that Florida law as “Don’t say gay”––despite the fact that a majority of Americans would likely support the content and intent of Florida’s efforts to ensure age-appropriate instruction––is wrong. Similarly, when someone supports law enforcement or opposes affirmative action, they are labeled “racists,” even though there are principled reasons to take issue. Trump has tapped into the frustration that comes from playing a rigged game. Trump supporters see Trump as challenging the cultural and economic system that excludes them and their views.

The elites and media need to stop dismissing Trump supporters as some fringe group. Trump received more votes in 2020 than did Obama [in 2008] and came in second in 2020 only to Biden. The 2024 election is likely to be close. The issues Trump has tapped into are not fleeting.

Geoff describes a type of voter he has observed as a retail manager in Colorado, in a store that catered to a Trump-voting demographic:

They are white, working-class, and very knowledgeable about stuff and fixing it, but they don’t value education as it is systematized in America. They are very transgressive in their everyday language but are model citizens overall. The most notable sentiment, for me, was commonly phrased as, “Wouldn’t it be great to vote for a POTUS sitting in prison?!” They defend him out of reaction: It’s “unpopular,” and they are raging against the machine. Think if supporting Nixon was the most “punk rock” thing you could do.

Patricia shares how she became a Democrat and describes some Trump supporters she has observed:

I’m 90 years old, a retired hospital administrator. My late husband and I were brought up in Republican families in California and voted that way until we watched Bill Clinton’s impeachment and witnessed the mean streak and hypocrisy of the Republicans.

We have voted for Democrats ever since.

My co-grandma is currently 89. She immigrated from Argentina at the age of 22, so you’d think she’d recognize authoritarians when she smells them, but no, she likes Trump. She loved watching The Apprentice and watches Fox. And her friends email around crazy stuff they find online. She has a Ph.D. in education and taught at a university for years.

I have a 65-year-old in-law who lives in Orange County, California, and has a successful business. A smart man, but not formally educated. He is a Trump supporter because of taxes mostly.

My granddaughter and her husband recently moved to northern Idaho from the Seattle area because they don’t like the regulations in Washington State. They think Trump is not a nice man but are pretty well aligned with libertarianism—they don’t want government interfering in their freedom, so they think Trump is the only choice. Both are college graduates.

And beyond them, I’ve observed that there are people with a seemingly “genetic” trait who simply enjoy seeing a person “stick it” to others. Trump is exceptionally good at ridicule.

Nick thinks his experience of being young and right-leaning helped him understand support for Trump:

Pre-2016, I identified as a conservative. While in college, if I tried to offer a different opinion on topics such as immigration, I felt ridiculed and looked down upon. I decided my two options were to be met with scorn or to hold my tongue. I know I wasn’t the only one. My good friend started a club to bring liberals and conservatives together to talk about major issues. He did everything he could to get conservatives to show up but just couldn’t get it to happen. I am not surprised because I don’t think I was the only conservative who felt like they couldn’t share out of fear of being “canceled” or called a racist or bigot for not going along with the mainstream liberal line. Perhaps Republicans are rallying around Trump despite his egregious undemocratic and immoral acts because they see themselves in him, a conservative being constantly ridiculed by liberals for his beliefs, except he actually speaks up. I don’t think all conservatives are power-hungry autocrats like Trump, and I don’t think most of them share his views. But I do think that we tend to support someone when we see ourselves in them. Identity politics play in both parties; maybe we’re just seeing the conservative version.    

T. argues that we’re witnessing a reaction to cultural change:

I’m an architect in a progressive city out west. I abhor Donald Trump, but I understand why my in-laws in Tennessee support him without reservation. What’s mystifying to me is that so many bright, liberal folks of my acquaintance don’t grasp it. Do you recall the deafening silence after the 2016 election, when Hillary lost to the worst presidential candidate in American history? There were a couple of months of serious self-examination among Democrats, but it quickly cooled, and I haven’t heard anything like it since.

I think our lack of understanding is due to the inability of most of us to put ourselves into the shoes of disadvantaged Trump voters. What you’d see coming your way is an all-consuming political, economic, and cultural wave––one that represents not only change, but also disdain for your way of life and destruction of your sense of who you are. I’m not saying that’s true, but the impression is very real. It’s cultural imperialism, which we understand very well when we talk about gentrification, but we miss completely when the encroaching force comes from our side of the fence. After all, how would we feel if confronted by a way of life that mocks our religion, siphons up our brightest young people and convinces them we’re hopelessly ignorant, sells us out to the global economy, promotes behavior that’s been taboo for thousands of years, and cancels us if we disagree? It fits with the experience of Indigenous cultures that were overrun by modern industrial society during the past 250 years. Those Tennesseans are being sold a bill of goods by a flimflam man, but we set them up for it.

JP describes the Trump support of his loved ones:

They do not go to Trump rallies, nor do they look or sound like those abhorrent Trump supporters you see in interview-reel compilations. They are compassionate, kind to strangers, and even have friends in people of all political stripes. We are a racially diverse bunch: Black, Hispanic, and white. And yet, these same people believe in their bones that for every lie Donald Trump has told, the liberal media has told more. For every crime Donald Trump has committed, the liberal elites in our politics and culture have committed more.

And regarding his claims of election fraud, despite lack of hard evidence, they feel in their gut that he is right on some level. I doubt I could do or say anything to convince them otherwise.

Paul describes the pull of tribes:

Part of being a human being is wanting to belong. One way we do that is to identify with someone or something. Passionate sports fans are a good example. And once we link our identity, our sense of who we are, to those teams, we look at everything about those teams through a positive perspective. People have identified with Trump and now their well-being and self-image are tied to him. That prevents them from viewing any reality other than the one that he creates. It will take some sort of disruption to break up with him, but it doesn’t look like that will occur. When their identity is at risk, the most comfortable path is to stay with Trump and distort new data to fit their views.

Michael believes that demographic insecurity is a factor:

I suspect that support for Trump is rooted in people’s fears of becoming a minority and suffering economic demise due to competition from immigration by humans who are unlike them.

Tim believes that Trump’s appeal is even simpler:

Give someone a reason to feel good about their anger and resentment and you can gain their loyalty.

In 2015, a physical therapist named Nathan Dugan moved to Whitefish, Montana, and fell in love with the place. How could you not? The glaciers, the pine air, the small-town feel. Whitefish was always expensive: When he first got there, Dugan camped on and off for a month before he found an affordable home. But it got far more expensive during the pandemic, when wealthy retirees and digital nomads flooded the tiny town’s tiny housing market. Out-of-staters were making cash offers on homes, sight unseen. Airbnbs started going for Bay Area prices. Rentals dried up. This has become a familiar story across America, where the housing crisis has gotten so severe that even rural communities in northern Montana are feeling the pinch.

Here’s another familiar story: Seeking to capitalize on the real-estate gold rush, a developer proposed building a handsome 318-unit community just north of downtown, on Whitefish Lake. The property would include a series of low-slung apartment buildings and townhomes, including units reserved for low-income families. Whitefish’s residents freaked. Hundreds submitted letters to the town’s planning committee. Local philanthropists, some billionaires, reportedly threatened to pull their support from local nonprofits if city officials did not nix the proposal. Nearly 200 people showed up at a marathon public meeting, one of several, to argue about, and mostly against, the project: It would look too tall, pollute the lake, pollute the night sky with light, change the neighborhood’s character, stress the community’s schools and medical services, destroy wildlife habitats, and increase traffic, which would interrupt snow plows and endanger families fleeing from forest fires. The town rejected the proposal.

Dugan was at that meeting and left incensed. “There’s a gut reaction in places like this: All development is bad, and we need to stop any development to maintain what we have,” he told me. “But the people who showed up to that meeting were all older and generally very wealthy.” They made it sound like the new development would ruin their lives, he said. But those people were doing fine. They already had a home in Whitefish.

Here’s where things get different. NIMBYs have throttled the supply of homes across the country. In Montana, the state government was not just paying attention but primed to do something about it. At the same time that Dugan was steaming over his neighbors in Whitefish, analysts in Helena were worrying about the displacement of middle-class families, and politicians in Bozeman were hearing complaints about long commutes. “I can’t do a town hall in any community in Montana and not have the affordability of housing come up,” Governor Greg Gianforte told me. “Housing prices have just been out of control.”

Last July, Gianforte created a housing task force, bringing together homebuilders, politicians, experts, and advocates, including Dugan, who had gone on to found a housing nonprofit called Shelter WF. In October, the group delivered a series of proposals to state officials; in December, to local officials. Montana’s legislature debated a set of bills based on those recommendations. Then it passed them this spring. The state transformed its land-use policies. It set itself up for dense development. It did this on a bipartisan basis and at warp speed.

Montana’s just one state. But it did something—and maybe enough—to fix its housing crisis.

Over the past decade and change, the country’s housing shortage has spread from coastal cities to suburbs and satellite cities to rural communities and small towns in the Mountain West, the plains, the interior South. Fannie Mae estimates that the country needs 4.4 million more homes. The National Association of Realtors puts the number at 5.5 million. But the country is not building enough homes to close the gap, or even keep up with population growth.

Millions of families are stuck in apartments they do not want to live in, paying prices they cannot afford. Eventually, many decamp for low-cost, low-wage regions of the country. “Even before the pandemic, there was an increasing trend of people leaving expensive coastal areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York for more affordable places,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, told me. “Then the pandemic hit, and the trend accelerated.”

In recent years, that migration has buoyed or battered Montana, depending on how you look at it. The state’s population surged 1.6 percent from mid-2020 to mid-2021, faster than that of 47 other states. Montana added nearly 20,000 residents while it permitted just 3,000 new single-unit homes. Home prices climbed by nearly 50 percent in a matter of months.

When the pandemic hit, Montana already had a housing shortage; in fact, it had a few of them. First, a dilapidation problem. Building new housing in Montana’s rural reaches is expensive, which leaves many residents occupying decaying and at times dangerous units. (This is a particular problem on Montana’s American Indian reservations.) “If you look at population numbers and counts of housing units in these rural places, it doesn’t look that bad,” Andrew Aurand of the National Low Income Housing Coalition told me. “But when you look at the quality of the housing, the safety of the housing, and the extent to which families are doubling up, the housing crisis is severe.”

Second, the tight market in resort, gateway, and second-home communities. Coastal-city billionaires and rich retirees keep buying up ranches and lodges in Montana. Their shmancy consumer spending creates jobs. But the people working those jobs end up living in campers close by or in homes far, far away, because there is just not enough housing.

Third, a shortage of affordable homes in Montana’s population centers, such as Billings and Missoula. “The math does not work” for homebuilders to create low-income housing anywhere in the country absent government subsidies, Jeffrey Lubell, the director of housing and community initiatives for Abt Associates, told me. The math especially does not work in Montana, where frozen ground shortens the construction season, and where a lack of skilled tradespeople drives up costs.

These problems collided with the state’s pandemic-era population surge. “I started looking around and thinking, Holy cow, prices are going up,” Christopher Dorrington, the director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the chair of Gianforte’s housing task force, told me. The state suddenly had a noticeable homeless population; town squares and vacant lots filled with tents in the summertime. All but the very wealthiest families started feeling strained. “You couldn’t move, because supply was so short,” Adam Hertz, a real-estate developer and former member of Montana’s house, told me.

Gianforte said that the answer was obvious to him: Montana had a supply crisis. It needed a supply solution. His task force soon figured out how to get Montana more housing: Make it possible for folks to build housing units by right, rather than having every development go through a miserable, expensive process of negotiation. Encourage dense development in already dense areas. Cut red tape. Indeed, Montana already had pretty loose building regulations, and legislators loosened them even further—functionally banning single-family zoning and preventing towns and cities from adding onerous zoning policies, among many other changes and investments.

“We obviously did not anticipate being able to get the big wins we did,” Kendall Cotton, the founder of the local think tank the Frontier Institute and a driving force behind the housing bills, told me. “We thought maybe there might be one bill that passed. We ended up getting almost everything that we were asking for.”

Montana’s policies aren’t perfect. There still isn’t enough incentive for developers to create low-income housing units, experts told me. Housing costs won’t decline immediately, because building takes time (and because high interest rates have frozen the development pipeline). Montana has weak tenant protections and too few resources for struggling renters, antipoverty advocates said.

Still, housing experts around the country are cheering. Montana now arguably has the most pro-development, pro-housing set of policies of any state. How did this policy phenomenon happen, and so fast?

The explanation has something to do with the nature of Montana’s housing crisis, and something to do with the nature of Montana itself. The fact that so many people in such a small state found themselves affected at once pushed legislators to act. “We were victims of our own success,” Hertz, the developer and former state representative, told me. “We’ve been having all of these discussions about how to get people to move to Montana and start a business here: How do we get more tourism in Montana? How do we get tech businesses here? We got the demand, and wow, we got caught totally flat-footed on the supply side.”

Politics, for once, helped too. Montana had lower housing prices and fewer roadblocks to development than other states to begin with. Republicans with a strong libertarian streak, like Gianforte himself, are a powerful bloc, and happen to be the kind of folks thrilled to slash red tape. Joining them were anti-sprawl environmentalists, student activists, urban-density advocates, real-estate developers, and antipoverty liberals, creating a coalition spanning from the far left to the far right. The fact that Gianforte pushed so hard on the issue and that Montana’s legislature meets only once every two years put more pressure on those elected officials to get something big done.

Yet perhaps the biggest motivating factor—one mentioned by nearly every Montanan I spoke with—was California. Montana did not want sprawl ruining its wildlands, as happened in the Central Valley and along the Pacific Coast. Montana did not want San Francisco’s sky-high inequality and huge homeless population. Montana did not want middle-class families squeezed out, as they were in Oakland and San Diego. Montana did not want to throttle its own economy, as the Bay Area did.

“If you have single-family zoning and bury your head, you will eventually face San Francisco’s problems. It’s not just the high cost of housing. It’s a high cost of living, wealth inequality, homelessness, and crime,” Fairweather of Redfin said. “All cities should look at San Francisco as an example of what happens when you do nothing.” Montana did, benefiting from California’s missteps and learning from its YIMBY advocates.

Many other communities are doing the same. Washington and Maine are banning single-family zoning, as Oregon did in 2019. A number of cities are allowing single-room-occupancy buildings, getting rid of parking minimums, and letting homeowners build second properties on their lots. YIMBY groups are blanketing the country, pushing for denser development. Dugan’s is one of them. He’s hopeful that the state’s new policies will increase the housing supply in Whitefish, where he and his partner just—finally—bought a home.

A few weeks ago, Dan Afergan, a software engineer, met a few friends at 540 Rogues, a bar in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. As Afergan and his companions nursed their drinks, someone walked in with some unusual news: “There’s a Cruise out there with a cone stuck on it.”

Afergan stepped outside to check it out. Sure enough, a self-driving cab from the company Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, stood frozen in the middle of the street, its hazard lights blinking. A bright-orange cone was perched on the robotaxi’s hood.

“At the time, I thought it was a dumb prank,” Afergan told me later. “But one friend said, ‘No, I’ve heard about this.’ Until then I didn’t know that there are a bunch of people who are anti–autonomous vehicles.”

[Read: Seven arguments against the autonomous-vehicle utopia]

The “coning” that Afergan witnessed was part of a campaign launched by Safe Street Rebel, a local activist group previously known for organizing protests in support of bike-lane construction and public-transit funding. Now its members have turned their attention to robotaxis. According to government data reported by the news site Mission Local, Cruise and its rival Waymo—a subsidiary of Google’s parent, Alphabet—together operate 571 self-driving cabs in California. Users can hail them via an app. Service is concentrated in San Francisco, where the companies have been subject to a variety of limits imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission. The two companies now want the CPUC to remove those restrictions, despite objections from San Francisco’s police union and transportation and fire departments about robotaxis’ troubling habit of blocking traffic and obstructing emergency vehicles. The commission has postponed a decision twice but is expected to vote tomorrow.

After realizing that placing a simple orange cone on the hood seemed to paralyze a state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle, Safe Street Rebel posted a TikTok video encouraging San Francisco residents to try it for themselves. Hell no. We do not consent to this, a caption declares over a clip of a robotaxi on a city street. As the video ricocheted across social media, Cruise and Waymo were unamused, threatening to call the cops on anyone who placed a cone on their cars.

One might dismiss the guerrilla-style coning of robotaxis as one more sign of an anti-tech backlash, or just of San Francisco being San Francisco. But those narratives understate the significance of the current uproar. For the first time, urban residents, tech companies, and public officials are debating whether and how self-driving cars fit into a dense city. This is a conversation that needs to happen now, while autonomous-vehicle technology is still under development—and before it reshapes life in San Francisco and throughout urban America. A century ago, the U.S. began rearranging its cities to accommodate the most futuristic vehicles of the era, privately owned automobiles—making decisions that have undermined urban life ever since. Robotaxis could prove equally transformative, which makes proceeding with caution all the more necessary.

In the utopian version of the robotaxi story, trips in autonomous electric vehicles become so affordable, easy, and pleasant that many people decide to forgo owning their own car. Because San Francisco is close to Silicon Valley and is home to so many investors and tech journalists, the city is a high-profile, high-stakes testing ground for the emergent technology. It’s also a more challenging environment for autonomous cars than sprawling places such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which have fewer pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.

The novelty of self-driving cars is a key part of their appeal. “Tourists take pictures of me, so I get to feel like a small celebrity,” a San Francisco resident named David Anderson, who says he requests a Waymo ride multiple times a week, told me. Beyond the wow factor, these companies offer a service akin to ride-hailing, which researchers have found worsens urban congestion and pulls riders away from transit.

Perhaps the most appealing argument for robotaxis and other self-driving vehicles is that human drivers are so fallible. Last month, a Waymo co-CEO published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle extolling the safety of the company’s vehicles, and Cruise ran a full-page ad in The New York Times and other newspapers presenting its technology as a solution for the 42,795 road deaths last year in the United States. (The companies have been reluctant to share data on their operations, hampering unaffiliated researchers who might weigh in objectively.) For now, though, robotaxis are creating a slew of headaches for San Francisco officials. Even with limited deployment, the vehicles have blocked traffic lanes, obstructed buses and streetcars, driven over a fire hose, and entered an active construction zone. Since June 2022, San Francisco logged almost 600 instances in which robotaxis made unplanned stops—some lasting hours—on public streets. That count was limited to incidents reported to city officials, suggesting that the actual number could be far higher.

[Read: Finally, the self-driving car]

“These vehicles perform very well in basic suburban driving conditions, but they face challenges when cities have greater levels of complexity, and particularly when they are in unexpected situations,” Jeffrey Tumlin, the head of San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, told me. “In a city like San Francisco, the unexpected is ubiquitous.” Jeanine Nicholson, the city’s fire chief, offered a blunter robotaxi assessment: “They’re not ready for prime time.” Steven Shladover, a research engineer at UC Berkeley who has advised California officials about autonomous vehicles, told me that Cruise and Waymo vehicles sometimes show admirable sophistication. But, he said, “you’ll almost inevitably encounter a situation where the vehicle will act like an inexperienced driver. It’s an adolescent, not yet an adult.”

Cruise and Waymo have responded to critics by touting their vehicles’ overall safety record, which they argue is far superior to human drivers’. “We should be doing everything possible to quickly and safely scale this technology and combat a horrific status quo,” Cruise declared in a statement last month, after CPUC postponed its decision on easing limits on robotaxis. “Every single day of delay in deploying this [life]-saving autonomous driving technology has critical impacts on road safety,” Waymo asserted.

Robotaxi companies are under pressure to scale up quickly. Having invested billions of dollars, their backers want to see growth (the demise last year of Argo AI, a prominent robotaxi competitor backed by Ford and Volkswagen, undermined investor confidence in the industry). Cruise is aiming to put 1 million robotaxis on U.S. streets by around 2030, and CEO Kyle Vogt said during an earnings call last month that “certainly there is the capacity to absorb several thousand [robotaxis] per city at a minimum.” (When I requested comment from Cruise by email, the company did not respond to my questions about its expansion goals.) Any delay from the CPUC—one of whose five members is Cruise’s former managing counsel—makes the company’s objectives harder to achieve.

Despite its current challenges, self-driving technology is steadily improving, inferring new lessons from reams of data collected from vehicles plying public streets. Eventually, robotaxis might avoid the kinds of traffic and safety hazards that have afflicted San Francisco. But even if robotaxis operate perfectly, what would life be like in a city where they are ubiquitous?

Before gas-powered automobiles arrived en masse, American streets bustled with activity. Pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and bicyclists jostled for space, and children played stickball, marbles, and other games on the pavement. Streetcars carried millions of passengers on 45,000 miles of track; in the 1920s, most of Chicago’s nearly 100 streetcar lines operated 24 hours a day, with some providing service at eight-to-10-minute intervals in the dead of night. Photographs of urban thoroughfares at the dawn of the 20th century may appear chaotic, but the danger was limited, because no one traveled much faster than 15 miles per hour.

Early on, cars were too pricey for all but the most affluent urban residents. But after the introduction of the Ford Model T, U.S. car sales surged, rising from 181,000 in 1910 to 4.5 million in 1929. Traveling faster than anything else on the street, these vehicles soon presented a mortal threat to pedestrians and children. Some 25,800 people died in crashes in 1927, a per-capita fatality rate substantially higher than today’s despite Americans owning far fewer cars at the time. “The dead were city people, they were not in motor vehicles, and they were young,” the University of Virginia historian Peter Norton wrote in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

[Read: Everyone has ‘car brain’]

In the early 1920s, Norton recounts in his book, St. Louis and Pittsburgh residents erected immense memorials to those killed in car crashes. In Cincinnati, a 1923 ballot initiative proposed a mandate that all motor vehicles within the city be outfitted with speed governors set to 25 miles per hour. “Forty-two thousand people put their names on petitions, just in that city,” Norton told me. “That’s a sign that there were a lot of people troubled by car domination.” Alarmed, the auto industry rushed to mobilize against the Cincinnati measure, which was defeated.

Seeking to avoid debating whether fast vehicles could coexist with urban neighborhoods, the car industry worked with friendly government officials to reframe road safety as the responsibility of the individuals at risk of being struck. Car groups funded school curricula instructing children to stay out of streets and worked to establish jaywalking as a crime. Meanwhile, city sidewalks and public spaces were torn up to expand traffic lanes.

Urban cars proved devastating for streetcars unable to navigate around a motor vehicle blocking their tracks. “The arrival of private automobiles quickly gummed up streetcar efficiency and made them much less competitive and comfortable,” Nicholas Bloom, a Hunter College urban historian and the author of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight, told me in an email. “Streetcars lacked exclusive rights of way, so exploding auto traffic dramatically slowed streetcar service.” Automobiles also enabled many city residents to relocate to suburbs unreachable by transit. By the 1950s, American streetcar service had collapsed. In 1960, just 12 percent of commutes to work occurred on transit; by 2019, the share had tumbled to 5 percent.

The aftermath of these early auto-centric decisions still reverberates today, causing cities to become dirtier, more dangerous, and less fun. More than half of the land in many downtowns is used to move and store motor vehicles, occupying space that could otherwise accommodate housing, retail, playgrounds, and parks.

Many cities are now taking steps to correct past mistakes. Last year, Denver voters passed a referendum that will allocate millions of dollars to improve sidewalks. Striving to make public transportation competitive with car trips, Phoenix and Madison, Wisconsin, are planning their first bus-rapid-transit lines. (Such moves could have aided streetcars a century ago.) In recent years, California, Nevada, and Virginia have moved to decriminalize jaywalking. Progress is gradual, but it is real.

Autonomous vehicles threaten that momentum, for the simple reason that self-driving cars are still cars. Whether operated by a human or software, automobiles generate pollution, require traffic lanes, and endanger pedestrians and cyclists.

One member of Safe Street Rebel told me he agreed with AV boosters that self-driving cars could make car trips easier than ever—which is exactly the problem (he asked to remain anonymous because of the dubious legality of the group’s activities). “We have these two competing visions for the future of transportation,” he said. “We’re now talking about tearing down sections of freeways in San Francisco, but AVs go completely against that, because they need that road space to go quickly. If we have more AVs, do we have to keep those freeways? Or can we invest in better transit, so we don’t need those freeways?”

[Joshua Sharpe: We should all be more afraid of driving]

Norton, the University of Virginia historian, thinks the San Francisco activist’s concerns are valid. “Once we have streets with robotaxis, there is definitely a risk that the city feels that it doesn’t have to supply basic public transportation,” he told me. In fact, such views have already been shared. “Don’t build a light rail system now. Please, please, please, please don’t,” Frank Chen, a partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told The New York Times in 2018. “We don’t understand the economics of self-driving cars because we haven’t experienced them yet. Let’s see how it plays out.” The year before, officials in Miami-Dade County, Florida, cited autonomous vehicles as a reason to refrain from expanding public transportation.

But any suggestion that the vehicles will significantly improve mobility on their own seems fanciful. A few years ago, researchers provided 13 Bay Area volunteers with a personal chauffeur who would bring them wherever they liked, mimicking the experience of accessing a self-driving car. During their week with the chauffeur, the test subjects traveled a whopping 83 percent more car miles than they did previously. Autonomous vehicles would be an environmental disaster if they induced anywhere near that much extra driving. They could also create unprecedented gridlock on highways and streets.

Shladover, the Berkeley research engineer, thinks such fears are overblown. “It depends on how the self-driving cars are used,” he said. “If they are deployed in ways that are complementary to transit, such as serving parts of the city that have minimal transit access, that is a significant plus.” But would for-profit companies focus on so-called transit deserts, or would they cater to the needs of a smaller subset of wealthier customers? For AVs to complement transit lines, urban residents must be willing to hop into robotaxis with strangers. That assumption is built into Cruise’s small, podlike Origin shuttle vehicle, but the troubles of Uber Pool and Lyft Line cast doubt on the idea.

Even if AVs do live up to their hype technologically, their long-term effect on cities is hard to predict. “While there’s a lot of data indicating that AVs can contribute to overall safer streets, the reality is that they exist in a transportation ecosystem and are not a panacea,” Drew Pusateri, a Cruise spokesperson, told me in an email. “We need a much broader approach to road safety that includes more investments in mass transit, wider, slower roads and a variety of other solutions.” But the past century suggests that when a transportation system is built primarily for cars, people using other modes get short shrift. That may remain true even when the cars are driving themselves.

In San Francisco, public officials and activists are raising fundamental questions about the desirability of autonomous vehicles within cities—questions that have seldom been aired in public. Instead, elected officials seeking an aura of innovation in states such as Texas and Arizona have actively pursued early AV deployments, minimizing regulations and shunning hard questions. Only now, in California, are robotaxi companies finding themselves in the unfamiliar position of playing defense in the public arena.

Regulators at the CPUC and elsewhere should encourage a vibrant public dialogue around autonomous vehicles, and learn from it. The worst thing they can do is rush decisions to scale an alluring new technology whose downsides could be catastrophic.

Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.

Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Fearing the passage of an abortion-rights amendment in November, Republicans in Ohio asked voters to approve a proposal that would raise the threshold for enacting a change to the state constitution, which currently requires a simple majority vote. The measure on the ballot today would have lifted the threshold to 60 percent.

Ohio voters, turning out in unusually large numbers for a summertime special election, declined. Their decision was a rare victory for Democrats in a state that Republicans have dominated, and it suggests that abortion remains a strong motivator for voters heading into next year’s presidential election. The Ohio results could spur abortion-rights advocates to ramp up their efforts to circumvent Republican-controlled state legislatures by placing the issue directly before voters. They have reason to feel good about their chances: Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, statewide abortion-rights ballot measures have been undefeated, winning in blue states such as Vermont and California as well as in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

[Read: The next big abortion fight]

In Kansas last summer, an 18-point victory by the abortion-rights side stunned members of both parties in a socially conservative state. By the final day of voting in Ohio, however, the defeat of Issue 1 could no longer be called a surprise. For weeks, Democrats who had become accustomed to disappointment in Ohio watched early-voting numbers soar in the state’s large urban and suburban counties. If Republicans had hoped to catch voters napping by scheduling the election for the dog days of August, they miscalculated. As I traveled the state recently, I saw Vote No signs in front yards and outside churches in areas far from major cities, and progressive organizers told me that volunteers were signing up to knock on doors at levels unheard of for a summer campaign. The opposition extended to some independent and Republican voters, who saw the proposal as taking away their rights. “It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment.

Opponents of Issue 1 assembled a bipartisan coalition that included two former Republican governors. They focused their message broadly, appealing to voters to “protect majority rule” and stop a brazen power grab by the legislature. But the special election’s obvious link to this fall’s abortion referendum in Ohio drove people to the polls, particularly women and younger voters. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.”

Voters in South Dakota and Arkansas last year rejected similar GOP-driven efforts to make ballot initiatives harder to pass. But Ohio’s status as a large former swing state that has turned red over the past decade posed a unique test for Democrats who are desperate to revive their party in the state. “We’ve been beat in Ohio a lot,” Dennis Willard, a longtime party operative in the state who served as the lead spokesperson for the No campaign, told me. That Republicans tried to pass this amendment, he said, “is a testament to them believing that they’re invincible and that we cannot beat them.”

The defeat of Issue 1 likely clears the way for voters this fall to guarantee abortion access in Ohio, and it will keep open an avenue for progressives to enshrine, with a simple majority vote, other policies in the state constitution—including marijuana legalization and a higher minimum wage—that they could not get through a legislature controlled by Republicans. Democrats, including Willard, are eying an amendment to curb the gerrymandering that has helped the GOP lock in their majorities. They also hope that tonight’s victory will put Ohio back on the political map. “Us winning sends a message to the rest of the country that Ohio has possibilities,” Willard said. “And winning in November demonstrates to people that you can’t write Ohio off anymore.”

[Read: The Kansas abortion shocker]

For the moment, though, the GOP is in little danger of losing its hold on the state. It controls supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature; the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, trounced his Democratic opponent by 25 points last year to win a second term. One Ohio Republican, speaking anonymously before today’s election, told me that the defeat of Issue 1 and the expected passage of the reproductive-rights amendment in November could actually help the party next year, because voters might no longer believe that abortion access is in danger in the state. (The GOP performed better last year in blue states such as New York and California, where abortion rights were not under serious threat.)

Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Will they be chastened and recalibrate, or will they continue to push the boundaries? It’s a question the proponents of Issue 1 did not want to contemplate before the votes confirming their defeat were counted. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”