The shame of it! Mississippi has found itself in the humiliating position of being compared disobligingly with the United Kingdom. Just last week, the Financial Times ran a column asking, “Is Britain Really as Poor as Mississippi?”  

Most Mississippians do not spend much time worrying about comparisons with Britain. The same cannot be said about those on the other side of the Atlantic. For Brits—and I am one, though now based in Jackson, Mississippi—the issue of whether they are more or less prosperous than Mississippi has become a thing. Indeed, the Financial Times now calls it “the Mississippi Question.”

It was nine years ago when Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom Mississippi, as a byword for backwardness, conjures up clichés about the Deep South. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data.

In practice, when trying to provide a definitive answer to the Mississippi Question, no uniform, up-to-date set of data exists. But if you take the most recent U.S. figure for Mississippi’s GDP and divide it by the state’s population, you get a pretty accurate figure for GDP per capita in current dollar values. Make the same calculation for the U.K., with total GDP data divided by the population, and you end up with two comparable numbers.

[Read: Punching above their weight in Mississippi]

Last year, by my math, the U.K.’s output per person was the equivalent of $45,485; Mississippi’s was higher, at $47,190. If Britain were invited to join the U.S. as the 51st state, its citizens would be at the bottom of the table for per capita GDP. Some might say that, for Mississippi, that is still disconcertingly close.

“That’s not fair!” the critics would counter. “When you compare the wealth of nations, you need to look at how far the money goes. Things cost more in the U.K. than in Mississippi.” To adjust the raw numbers, the argument runs, you need to use an economist’s tool called “purchasing power parity.” Sure enough, when you consider differences in the price of things in Britain and in America, the U.K. does appear richer than Mississippi. Thus, after such PPP adjustments, a Financial Times analyst suggested that for 2021, Mississippi’s per capita GDP was a mere $46,841 to the U.K.’s $54,590 (though conceding that, without the global city-state effect of London’s economy, much of Britain was relatively poorer than the Magnolia State).

“Hold on!” we on Team Mississippi retort. “Why adjust the numbers for our state using U.S. national data?” Here, a dollar goes a lot further than it would in New England or on the West Coast. To produce PPP-adjusted numbers for Mississippi that reflect the buying power of a dollar in places like New York or San Francisco, we say, is absurd. And sure enough, tinkering with the numbers to reflect purchasing power in Mississippi itself puts doubt on the U.K. coming out ahead.

Perhaps more interesting, however, than the way you cut the numbers for any given year is the fact that the gap between Mississippi and Britain seems to be growing. Never mind PPP—just run the numbers for GDP per capita in current dollars for the first part of 2023, rather than 2022, and you can see that Mississippi’s output is rising at a faster rate than Britain’s.

[See: Mississippi—images of the Magnolia State]

Over the past 30 years, several southern U.S. states have seen rapid economic growth. Texas and Nashville, for example, have become economic hubs to rival California or Chicago. North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and even Alabama have all flourished. Mississippi was missing out. Until now.

Historically, business in Mississippi was highly regulated. Licenses used to be mandatory in order to practice many of even the most routine professions. The state has now lifted a lot of these restrictions, deregulating the labor market. According to a recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group representing conservative state legislators, the size of Mississippi’s public payroll has been pared back. In 2013, there were 645 public employees out of every 10,000 people in the population; today, the number is down to 607. Last year, Mississippi also passed the largest tax cut in recent history, reducing the income-tax rate to a flat 4 percent.

How did this come about? Policy makers here have drawn inspiration from the State Policy Network, a constellation of state-level think tanks, borrowing ideas that have worked well elsewhere. We got the idea for labor-market deregulation from Arizona and Missouri. Tennessee inspired us to move toward income-tax elimination. Florida’s successful liberalization stands as an example of how we could reduce more red tape.

What was once just a trickle of inward investment has turned into a steady flow. Growth is up, visibly: The areas of prosperity along the coast and around the state’s thriving university towns are getting larger, even if pockets of deprivation in the Delta remain.

Perhaps many in Britain find it hard to accept that Mississippi has overtaken them economically, because they still think of Mississippi as cotton fields and impoverished backwoods, peopled by folk who subsist on God, guns, and grits. But what if Britons’ reluctance to face changing economic realities comes from an outdated perception of themselves?

Most of my fellow Brits like to think that they live in a prosperous free-market society. They have not fully grasped the way in which their country has been sleepwalking toward regulatory regimentation. Stringent new regulations on landlords have seen thousands of owners pull out of the market, resulting in a dire shortage of rental accommodations. New corporate-diversity requirements have imposed additional costs across the financial-services sector, with little evidence that bank customers are getting a better deal.

[Matthew Goodwin: Britons’ growing buyer’s remorse for Brexit]

Individually, none of these restrictions matters all that much. But together, this relentless micromanagement inhibits innovation and growth. And Brits have become so accustomed to government red tape that they no longer seem to see the crimson blizzard that blankets so many aspects of their economic, and even social, lives.

To be fair to them, for many years it did not seem to matter that taxes rose and the regulatory burden grew heavier. Thanks to the use of monetary stimuli in place of supply-side reform since the late 1990s, the country’s economy seemed to defy gravity, engineering the sort of growth that high taxes and tight regulation might otherwise preclude. Few in the U.K. seemed to notice as ever more aggressive doses of monetary stimuli were required to stave off a downturn. Only now that the option of further stimuli has been exhausted are the cumulative consequences of 30 years of folly becoming apparent.

To recognize that one’s country has been run on a false premise for three decades is difficult. To have to acknowledge that Britain is now poorer than the poorest state in the Union could prompt a moment of self-reckoning that many Brits seem determined to postpone.

Britain’s recurrent fixation with the Mississippi Question tells us as much about the country’s state of mind as it does about GDP. Rather than confront uncomfortable truths, my countrymen dispute the data. Instead of facing up to the consequences of bad public policy in Britain, many blame Brexit, or Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine might have caused higher energy prices, but it alone does little to explain Britain’s poor economic performance. As for Brexit, though commentators who originally opposed it love to blame the country’s woes on it now, they never seem to ask why, if leaving the European Union was the cause of Britain’s lack of growth, the country has still managed to outperform much of Europe.

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the U.K. economy has grown by 5.9 percent; German GDP has increased by only 5 percent. Unlike Germany, the U.K. has so far also managed to avoid recession. Far from a reduction in trade, Britain has seen a boom in exports, especially in the service sector, since withdrawing from the EU trade block. Service exports grew by nearly 23 percent in real terms from 2018 to 2022—the strongest growth in this sector among the G7 countries, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and far more than in neighbors such as Italy, Germany, and France.

[Derek Thompson: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe]

In any case, Nelson posed the Mississippi Question nearly two years before Britain voted to leave the EU. The country’s lackluster output, productivity, and growth were apparent well before Brexit. Leaving the EU should have been a perfect opportunity to correct course, but little has been done to address the problem. In fact, after leaving the EU, Britain has been hit by a succession of disastrous policy choices.

Having rushed to impose a lockdown in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, British ministers insisted on more and more draconian measures long after it was apparent that such steps were disproportionate, as well as ruinously expensive. Then, in the name of achieving net-zero targets on “decarbonizing” the U.K. economy by 2050, successive governments have made rash commitments to move to renewables. Higher energy costs have helped price British industry out of world markets.

Instead of changing course, ministers have stuck stubbornly to their dogma—even though the latest moves to outlaw the internal combustion engine and new emissions regulations are making car ownership unaffordable for millions.

Mississippi has managed to borrow good ideas that have proved to work elsewhere. Britain, by contrast, has preferred to pioneer its own bad ideas. The former approach helps explain why Mississippi is emerging as part of a wider southern success story. The latter approach accounts for why a once-successful country is really struggling.

Growing up as one of six siblings—the third oldest, and the second of three girls—Carlita Gay loved the distinction of a big family and that everyone was exposed to so many personalities. Though she saw her family less after moving away from her hometown, going to therapy as an adult helped Gay, now 33 and an executive assistant in New York, understand “how much of a refuge my siblings can still be” because of their deep context and shared history. In particular, they were some of the few people who could understand her experience of growing up biracial in a “mainly white” part of Minnesota. “I had a perspective of ‘Maybe I’m alone’” in trying to make sense of how her racial identity developed, Gay told me, but over time she realized that her siblings could relate to both that general experience and how it played out within their family. “If anyone could understand my experience the most,” she said, “it might be them.”

Not many people have five siblings like Gay does, but 82 percent of American kids do have at least one. The prototypical sibling relationship has two distinct phases. First, the kids’ connection is embedded within the family system and shaped by their parents. Then they start becoming independent, eventually leaving home and building their own lives. In these later years, the sibling bond is an intriguing mix of involuntary (nobody chooses their siblings) and voluntary (drifting apart from a sibling is generally considered less concerning than divorce or estrangement from a parent).

In other words, siblings are forced together, and then suddenly they’re not. The independence of adulthood—when proximity is no longer required and the obligations lessen—creates opportunities for siblings to build, repair, or discard the relationships of their youth, to stay stuck in or break free of the roles they played as children.

If there’s one thing that most people think they know about sibling relationships, it’s the influence of birth order. Experts I spoke with for this article wanted to correct that misconception: It’s a myth. Forget it. No matter how many kids post on TikTok lamenting “middle-child syndrome,” birth order doesn’t have that much influence on personality.

But even if the exact ordering of the kids doesn’t matter, siblings do shape one another’s lives deeply. During the teen years, brothers and sisters are as influential as peers, and far more so than parents, in guiding decisions about whether to drink and do drugs, according to Shawn Whiteman, an expert in adolescent development and a professor at Utah State University. In one study, subjects who had conflict or distance in their relationships with siblings before age 20 were more likely to be depressed at age 50. It’s worth noting, however, that a lot of sibling research is done on the specific formation of two siblings no more than five years apart, giving short shrift to wider age gaps and bigger families.

[Read: Are siblings more important than parents?]

The experts also pointed to a factor that does have a big effect on sibling relationships, and that contains the potential to poison the dynamic: favoritism. Katherine Jewsbury Conger, a UC Davis family-studies professor, has been interviewing sibling pairs—both together and separately—since they were in ninth grade; they are now adults. Through these interviews, Conger found that siblings remembered who shared more interests with Mom and who preferred to play ball with Dad. Being treated differently based on specific hobbies or perceived need, such as whether a sibling needed extra help with homework, was fine, but “if they felt like Mom or Dad or both of them played favorites with one of the siblings, that’s where you saw conflict or tension arise in the relationship,” Conger told me.

Favoritism-based feelings of resentment tend to peak before the teen years. When kids enter high school, they become more independent, spending more time with their own friends and less time supervised by their parents. At this point, the voluntary nature of sibling relationships starts to emerge and “you actually have to put effort forth to have a relationship,” Nicole Campione-Barr, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, told me. What happens in this period can set the stage for how siblings relate in adulthood.

For Mimi Gonzalez, a 27-year-old who hosts a podcast about grief and mortality, a traumatic event during the crucial period of adolescence changed her relationship with her older sister, Imahni. Like Carlita Gay, Gonzalez comes from a big family—five girls, ranging from 28-year-old Imahni to a 4-year-old. When Mimi was 6, Imahni, her stepsister, came into her life. Both curly-haired with freckles, the girls were often mistaken for twins. Though they fought constantly, they were close, too, and spent most of their time with their best friend, Meghan.

Meghan died by suicide when the girls were 15; grief from the loss caused Mimi and Imahni to grow apart. Imahni began to retreat and “distanced herself a lot” compared with before, Gonzalez told me.

This year, Imahni became pregnant. “It kind of opened the door,” Gonzalez said. Talking about the coming baby became a way to initiate other conversations and then, slowly, talk about Meghan and other losses, and how the two women would relate going forward. “Most of the core memories we have is when we were young, playing outside, going to the beach, going camping, and just not having these adulting responsibilities,” Gonzalez said. “And we both made it clear that we can still create core memories even though some of the people we love aren’t here. At least we have each other and she’s bringing new life into the world. We’re really trying to work on our relationship, and trying to become closer.”

[Read: Why are people weird about only children?]

Conger calls what happened between Mimi and Imahni “dynamic re-centering”: the process of siblings coming together later in life to reevaluate and rewrite their bond. During childhood, kids see their parents as the focus of the family, so re-centering, then, refers to centering the sibling bond instead, and changing that way of relating.

Many factors affect who is most likely to build, or rebuild, a relationship. One of the most important predictive factors, according to both interviews and survey data, however, is warmth. Parents may lament how much their kids bicker, but conflict at least shows that the siblings are engaged with one another. High conflict is not necessarily a problem if there is also high warmth; more worrying are relationships that are dismissive and uninvolved.

Still, Conger suspects that the majority of siblings are likely to go through some type of dynamic re-centering. “I’m not going to say there’s not a couple of 40-year-olds out there who don’t still have rivalries,” Michele Van Volkom, a psychologist at Monmouth University, told me, but she thinks that time and maturity are powerful in wearing down old barriers.

Major life events and transitions, such as marriage, pregnancy, birth, and death, can all shake up a family. Though most of the research on dynamic re-centering has focused on its more positive possibilities, these big events and their associated stresses can drive people apart as well. For example, those favoritism-based resentments that experts mentioned can reemerge when siblings need to come together to provide caregiving, according to Megan Gilligan, a human-development professor at Iowa State University.

[Read: It used to be okay for parents to play favorites]

For Mimi and Imahni, Meghan’s death drove them apart initially, but the pregnancy kicked off a process of reevaluating their relationship. Conger believes that a common catalyst for this sort of revived attention is a new shared experience—for example, someone having their first child might reach out to a sibling who already has kids for input and advice.

Carlita Gay said that circumstances surrounding their father’s illness deepened the relationship between her and her brother Ryan, who is 36 and a therapist in Minnesota. The six kids had gotten along when they were young but were not particularly close. “All my siblings are very sensitive people—my parents included—and I think that sensitivity sometimes had us be guarded with each other and not as vulnerable with our emotions,” Carlita explained.

Five years before he died, their father moved in with Ryan, the oldest of the siblings. It had always been hard for Carlita to get in touch with their parents, but with Ryan there to answer her calls, she was able to talk with her parents more frequently. “Ryan wasn’t shy to give that insight into what was happening with both my parents, and it was especially helpful because I couldn’t get there for two of the years with COVID,” she said. “These are really important things that someone gives you access to. Being out of town, it just meant a lot to me to have that plug in.”

Ryan remembers giving Carlita updates on their father, and he said that that became a way for them to have conversations about their own lives, relationships, and hopes. Now they talk on the phone every weekend and frequently send each other voice memos. Ryan is not only a bridge to her parents but to different parts of her life too. Two years ago, he visited Carlita in New York, and now he is the only person from their family to have met her cats and seen her apartment from that time. “I no longer have those cats because they’re with my ex, and he saw them at seven weeks [old],” she said. “That did hit me. I was like, ‘I’m so glad you did that.’ It’s like grief. When someone is gone or animals are gone, it’s really cool when people have met them.’”

Carlita was realizing something that many sibling researchers emphasize: that for a lot of people, sibling bonds are the longest relationships of our lives. We know siblings before we meet our partners (and before we have our own kids), and we’ll know them after our parents die. “I tell my students this all the time,” said Van Volkom, the Monmouth psychologist. “There’s only one person who’s been there from the beginning. Not my friends, not my spouse, not anybody but my sibling.” Siblings are a living part of someone’s history and a form of memory that lives outside of ourselves. And because every enduring relationship can be frustrating, layered with decades of misunderstandings and baggage, sibling bonds have their own complexity. But the longevity and changing nature of the relationship offers siblings a choice: to let that history define the bond or to use the past as a foundation from which a new way of relating can grow.

For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.

“With all due respect, pastor, hell no!” shouted Betty Montgomery, a former Ohio attorney general. Montgomery is a Republican, which gave the largely Democratic audience even more reason to roar with approval. They had gathered at the Warren AME Church, in Toledo, to voice their opposition to a constitutional amendment that Ohio voters will approve or reject in a statewide referendum on August 8. Many of those in the boisterous crowd were experiencing a feeling unfamiliar to Democrats in the state over the past decade: optimism.

If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority.

In other years, a rules tweak like this one might pass without much notice. But next week’s referendum has galvanized Democratic opposition inside and outside Ohio, turning what the GOP had hoped would be a sleepy summertime election into an expensive partisan proxy battle. Conservatives have argued that making the constitution harder to amend would protect Ohio from liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage, tighten gun laws, and fight climate change. But the Republican-controlled legislature clearly timed this referendum to intercept a progressive march on one issue in particular: Ohioans will decide in November whether to make access to abortion a constitutional right, and the outcome of next week’s vote could mean the difference between victory and defeat for backers of abortion rights.

A year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the back-to-back votes will also test whether abortion as an issue can still propel voters to the polls in support of Democratic candidates and causes. If the abortion-rights side wins next week and in November, Ohio would become the largest GOP-controlled state to enshrine abortion protections into law. The abortion-rights movement is trying to replicate the success it found last summer in another red state, Kansas, where voters decisively rejected an amendment that would have allowed the legislature to ban abortion, presaging a midterm election in which Democrats performed better than expected in states where abortion rights were under threat.

[Read: The Kansas abortion shocker]

To prevent Democratic attempts to circumvent conservative state legislatures, Republican lawmakers have sought to restrict ballot initiatives across the country. Similar efforts are under way or have already won approval in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Idaho. But to Democrats in Ohio and beyond, the August special election is perhaps the most brazen effort yet by Republicans to subvert the will of voters. Polls show that in Ohio, the abortion-rights amendment is likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, as have similar ballot measures in other states. For Republicans to propose raising the threshold three months before the abortion vote in November looks like a transparent bid to move the proverbial goalposts right when their opponents are about to score.

“I don’t think I’ve seen such a naked attempt to stay in power,” a former Democratic governor of Ohio, Dick Celeste, told the church crowd in Toledo. As in Kansas a year ago, the Republican majority in the state legislature scheduled the referendum for August—a time when the party assumed turnout would be low and favorable to their cause. (Adding to the Democratic outrage is the fact that just a few months earlier, Ohio Republicans had voted to restrict local governments from holding August elections, because they tend to draw so few people.) “They’re trying to slip it in,” Kelsey Suffel, a Democratic voter from Perrysburg, told me after she had cast an early vote.

That Ohio Republicans would try a similar gambit so soon after the defeat their counterparts suffered in Kansas struck many Democrats as a sign of desperation. “The winds of change are blowing,” Celeste said in Toledo. “They’re afraid, and they should be afraid, because the people won’t tolerate it.”

The upcoming vote will serve as an important measure of strength for Ohio Democrats ahead of elections in the state next year that could determine control of Congress. Democrats have had a long losing streak in Ohio. Donald Trump easily won the state in 2016 and 2020, and Republicans have won every statewide office except for that of Senator Sherrod Brown, who faces reelection next year. Still, there’s reason to believe Celeste is right to be optimistic. A Suffolk University poll released last week found that 57 percent of registered voters planned to vote against Issue 1. (A private survey commissioned by a nonpartisan group also found the August amendment losing, a Republican who had seen the results told me on the condition of anonymity.) Early-voting numbers have swamped predictions of low participation in an August election, suggesting that abortion remains a key motivator for getting people to turn out. Groups opposing the amendment have significantly outspent supporters of the change.

Abortion isn’t explicitly on the ballot in Ohio next week, but the clear linkage between this referendum and the one on reproductive rights in November has divided the Republican coalition. Although the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, backs Issue 1, the two living GOP former governors, Bob Taft and John Kasich, oppose it as an overreach by the legislature.

“That’s the giant cloud on this issue,” Steve Stivers, a former Republican member of Congress who now heads the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, told me. The Chamber of Commerce backs the amendment because, as Stivers said, it’ll help stop “bad ideas” such as raising the minimum wage, marijuana legalization, and proposals supported by organized labor. But, he said, many of his members were worried that the group would be dragged into a fight over abortion, on which it wants to stay neutral: “The timing is not ideal.”

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

Democrats have highlighted comments from Republicans who have departed from the party’s official message and drawn a connection between the August referendum and the abortion vote this fall. “They’ve all said the quiet part out loud, which is this election is 100 percent about trying to prevent abortion rights from having a fair election in the fall,” the state Democratic chair, Liz Walters, told me.

But to broaden its coalition, opponents of the amendment have advanced a simpler argument—preserve “majority rule”—that also seems to be resonating with voters. “I’m in favor of democracy,” explained Ed Moritz, an 85-year-old retired college professor standing outside his home in Cleveland, when I asked him why he was planning to vote no. Once a national bellwether, Ohio has become close to a one-party state in recent years. For Democrats, citizen-led constitutional amendments represent one of the few remaining checks on a legislature dominated by Republicans. Moritz noted that the GOP had already gerrymandered the Ohio legislature by drawing maps to ensure its future majorities. “This,” he said, “is an attempt to gerrymander the entire population.”

To Frank LaRose, the suggestion that Issue 1 represents an assault on democracy is “hyperbole.” LaRose is Ohio’s Republican secretary of state and, of late, the public face of Issue 1. Traversing Ohio over the past few weeks, he’s used the suddenly high-profile campaign as a launching pad for his bid for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2024.

LaRose, 44, served for eight years in the state Senate before becoming Ohio’s top elections officer in 2019. (He won a second term last year.) He’s a smooth debater and quick on his feet, but on the Issue 1 campaign, he’s not exactly exuding confidence.

In an interview, he began by rattling off a litany of complaints about the opposition’s messaging, which he called “intentionally misleading.” LaRose accused Issue 1’s opponents of trying to bamboozle conservative voters with literature showing images of the Constitution being cut to pieces and equating the amendment with “Stop the Steal.” “That’s completely off base,” he said. “We’ve had to compete with that and with a mountain of money that they’ve had, and with a pretty organized and intentional effort by the media on this.”

LaRose likes to remind people that even if voters approve Issue 1, citizens would still be able to pass, with a simple majority, ballot initiatives to create or repeal statutes in Ohio law. The August proposal applies only to the state constitution, which LaRose said is not designed for policy making. Left unsaid, however, is that unlike an amendment to the constitution, any statutory change approved by the voters could swiftly be reversed by the Republican majority in the legislature.

“Imagine if the U.S. Constitution changed every year,” he said. “What instability would that create? Well, that’s what’s at risk if we don’t pass Issue 1.” LaRose’s argument ignored the fact that Ohio’s rules for constitutional amendments have been in place for more than a century and, during that time, just 19 of the 77 changes proposed by citizen petitions have passed. (Many others generated by the legislature have won approval by the voters.)

LaRose has been spending a lot of his time explaining the amendment to confused voters, including Republicans. When I spoke with him last weekend, he had just finished addressing about two dozen people inside a cavernous 19th-century church in Steubenville. He described his stump speech as a “seventh-grade civics class” in which he explained the differences between the rarely amended federal Constitution and Ohio’s routinely amended founding document. The laws that Ohio could be saddled with if the voters reject Issue 1, LaRose warned, went far beyond abortion: “It’s every radical West Coast policy that they can think of that they want to bring to Ohio.”

The challenges LaRose has faced in selling voters on the proposal soon became apparent. When I asked a pair of women who had questioned LaRose during his speech whether he had persuaded them, one simply replied, “No.” Another frustrated attendee who supported the proposal told LaRose that she had encountered voters who didn’t understand the merits of the idea.

Republicans have had to spend more time than they’d like defending their claim that Issue 1 is not simply an effort to head off November’s abortion amendment. They have also found themselves playing catch-up on an election that they placed on the ballot. “They got out of the gate earlier than our side,” the state Republican Party chair, Alex Triantafilou, told me, referring to an early round of TV ads that opposition groups began running throughout the state.

[David Frum: The humiliating Ohio Senate race]

The GOP’s struggle to sell its proposal to voters adds to the perception that the party, in placing the measure on the ballot, was acting not from a position of strength but of weakness. The thinly disguised effort to preempt a simple-majority vote on abortion is surely a concession by Republicans that they are losing on the issue even in what has become a reliably red state.

When I asked LaRose to respond to the concerns about abortion that Stivers reported from his members in the Chamber of Commerce, he lamented that it was another example of businesses succumbing to “cancel culture.”

Confidence can be dangerous for a Democrat in Ohio. Barack Obama carried the state twice, but in both 2016 and 2020, late polls showing a tight race were proved wrong by two eight-point Trump victories. A similar trajectory played out last year, when the Republican J. D. Vance pulled away from the Democrat Tim Ryan in the closing weeks to secure a seven-point victory in Ohio’s Senate race.

“Democrats in the state are beaten down,” says Matt Caffrey, the Columbus-based organizing director for Swing Left, a national group that steers party donors and volunteers to key races across the country. He’s seen the decline firsthand, telling me of the challenge Democrats have had in recruiting canvassers and engaging voters who have grown more discouraged with each defeat.

That began to change this summer, Caffrey told me. Volunteers have flocked to canvassing events in large numbers, some for the first time—a highly unusual occurrence for a midsummer special election, he said. At a canvass launch I attended in Akron over the weekend, more than three dozen people showed up, including several first-timers. As I followed Democratic canvassers there and in Cleveland over two days last week, not a single voter who answered their door was unaware of the election or undecided about how they’d vote. “It’s kind of an easy campaign,” Michael Todd, a canvasser with the group Ohio Citizen Action in Cleveland, told me. “Not a whole lot of convincing needs to be done.”

The response has prompted some Democrats to see the August election as an unexpected opportunity to reawaken a moribund state party. The referendum is a first for Swing Left, which has exclusively invested in candidate races since it formed after Trump’s victory in 2016. “It’s a great example of what we’re seeing across the country, which is the fight for reproductive freedom and the fight for democracy becoming closely attached,” the group’s executive director, Yasmin Radjy, told me in Akron. “We also think it’s really important to build momentum in Ohio, a state that we need to keep investing in.”

A win next week would make the abortion referendum a heavy favorite to pass in November. And although Ohio is unlikely to regain its status as a presidential swing state in 2024, it could help determine control of Congress. Brown’s bid for a fourth term is expected to be one of the hardest-fought Senate races in the country, and at least three Ohio districts could be up for grabs in the closely divided House.

For Democrats like Caffrey, the temptation to think bigger about a comeback in Ohio is tempered by the lingering uncertainty about next week’s outcome—whether the party will finally close out a victory in a state that has turned red, or confront another disappointment. “It would be hard for Democrats in Ohio to feel complacent. I wish we would be in a position to feel complacent,” Caffrey said with a smile. “This is more about building hope.”