Missouri Democrats scored a major win on Friday after Republicans abandoned their effort to make it harder to amend the state constitution. The victory paves the way for a ballot measure that would restore abortion rights to pass with just a simple majority this fall.
The stunning climb-down came thanks to a record-breaking Democratic filibuster and bitter internal divisions among Republicans, both between warring factions in the Senate and between the upper and lower chambers of the legislature.
Republicans were open about their desire to thwart an effort to undo Missouri's near-total ban on abortion by moving the goalposts for an amendment that's likely to appear on the ballot in November.
To that end, they sought to place a measure on the Aug. 6 primary ballotjust ahead of the November votethat would require amendments to win not only majority support among voters statewide, as is currently required, but also a majority in five of the state's eight congressional districts.
Those rules would have made it much harder to pass progressive proposalsbut not conservative measuresthanks in large part to Republican gerrymandering.
The fifth "bluest" district in the state (northern Missouri's 6th District) voted for Donald Trump by a daunting 37-point margin, putting it far to the right of the state as a whole, which Trump won by 16 points in 2020. By contrast, the tipping-point district for conservatives would have been the 3rd District, which backed Trump by 26 points.
"So basically the effect of that is it would dilute the voices of those who live in more populous areas like Kansas City and St. Louis," Democratic state Sen. Lauren Arthur told Daily Kos Elections on "The Downballot" podcast, "and it would give more power and weight to the votes of those in rural Missouri."
But Republicans knew that even this one-sided approach would struggle to win the support of conservative voters, even though it would only need a majority to pass.
"I think Republicans recognize that the measure will be incredibly unpopular," said Arthur, "and that people understand and support the concept of one person, one vote."
So the GOP sought to sweeten the deal with a cynical bit of manipulation that both sides dubbedone derisively, the other unabashedly"ballot candy."
Like any confection, this candy was sugary, empty, and unnecessary. Republicans proposed to woo conservatives by including provisions that would ban non-citizens from voting and prohibit foreign political donationsthings that are already illegal under state and federal law.
Democrats were prepared to fight the GOP's amendment fair and square at the ballot box and would have let Republicans send it to voters (albeit with Democrats voting against it) without any blandishments.
But they objected furiously to the inclusion of conservative candy. And they had good reason to, since this tactic had proven successful in the past: In 2020, voters repealed a redistricting reform measure they'd passed in a landslide two years earlier by narrowly adopting a Republican amendment that included some fig-leaf ethics reforms.
The Senate's Democratic minority turned to one of the few tools at its disposal to keep ballot candy off the ballot. In February, Democrats successfully staged a 20-hour filibuster that led the chamber to pass a version without these artificial sweeteners, though the measure's sponsor, Republican Mary Elizabeth Coleman, said at the time the battle to reinsert them wasn't over.
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