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Once a quintessential US swing state that could decide general elections, Ohio has drifted to the right. It voted decisively for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 and just a single Democrat has won a statewide election in the past decade.
However, a vote this month to legalise recreational cannabis — a traditionally liberal cause — was approved by a wide margin, with 57 per cent in favour.
It made Ohio the 24th state, and the latest among conservative states, to make recreational pot legal, following reliably Republican Missouri last year and Montana in 2020.
As US politicians gear up for the 2024 elections, wide and growing support for the issue may create an opportunity for Democrats — traditionally more liberal on drug laws — to tap support for legalisation among a coalition of voters that extends beyond their typical base.
Much like abortion measures, voting patterns suggest the Democratic party’s stance on cannabis laws appeals to a broader range of the electorate than their candidates do, as well as having the potential to drive higher turnout.
But it is also exposing tensions between Republican voters and their constituents. While many traditionally conservative voters are growing more liberal on cannabis, Republicans have frequently fought to keep the issue off the ballot, and in some cases successfully repealed referendums.
The ballot in Ohio attracted a wide array of voters, with 30 per cent of self-identified Republicans and 64 per cent of independents supporting the measure, according to exit polling by NBC. But support from elected Republican officials was sparse. Governor Mike DeWine spoke out against the ballot measure and every Republican in the state senate voted for a resolution expressing opposition.
In 2020, South Dakota voters passed a ballot initiative legalising recreational cannabis before Republican Governor Kristi Noem took the issue to the state supreme court and had it overturned. In Ohio, some Republicans have promised to amend the recently passed ballot measure.
Ohio state representative Jamie Callender, one of the only Republican elected officials in the state to publicly support the ballot measure, said his stance aligns with his belief in limited government and less regulation.
“Factions of the Republican party have moved away from that,” he said. “My position is more consistent with a traditional Republican platform than some of those groups are.”
The growing popularity of legalisation measures suggests that the battleground for the issue will continue to extend beyond typically left-leaning states.
In deep red North Dakota, for example, a 2022 ballot measure received the support of 45 per cent of voters in a state where just 32 per cent backed Joe Biden for president in 2020.
Legislatively, support from Republican officeholders at any level has been sparse, with many openly hostile to reforms. A Financial Times analysis of nine successful state-level legislative efforts to legalise recreational cannabis since 2021 showed those bills were supported by just 4 per cent of Republican legislators who voted on them.
In Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, two moderate swing states where polls show broad support for cannabis legalisation, legislative measures have been gridlocked for years. Despite a rare Republican sponsor, Pennsylvania’s bill has been unable to attract enough GOP support to pass the state senate.
Morgan Fox, political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the dissonance between voters and elected officials reflected an unwillingness to prioritise what some politicians still considered a peripheral issue.
“Unless lawmakers actually hear from their constituents . . . they’re not going to spend the political capital,” Fox said, “because it still has a little bit of that taste of a fringe issue.”
Callender, the Ohio representative, pointed to a generational divide, driven by a period of heavy lobbying against marijuana that had culminated with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign during the US’s war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s.
“A lot of the leadership in our party at this point is of an age where they were very influenced by that campaign,” he said. “It’s a subconscious thing among folks of a certain age.”
Ohio exit polls showed 84 per cent of voters under the age of 30 supported cannabis legalisation, compared with just 40 per cent of those aged over 65.
A 2022 nationwide report from Gallup showed that while half of political conservatives supported legalisation, less than a third of conservatives in the oldest age bracket did.
This also means the presence of cannabis reform measures on a ballot could drive younger and generally more liberal voters — who may not normally vote — to the polls.
In polling ahead of the 2022 elections in Maryland, for example, young and non-white voters — traditional Democratic constituencies — said they were much more likely to vote because of the presence of a cannabis legalisation measure on the ballot.
Fox said: “Having cannabis policy reform on the ballot tends to bring out voters that may not necessarily be interested in supporting the status quo, and that can be particularly damaging for incumbents.”
