When former President Donald Trump told the national audience in his first, and likely only, debate against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris that abortion rights are “the vote of the people now,” he was partly right. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, in June 2022, voters in seven states (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, and Vermont) have weighed in on abortion policy via ballot referenda. Abortion-rights proponents won in all seven—some by approving state constitutional amendments ensuring abortion rights and others by preventing more-stringent restrictions from going into effect. In November, voters in ten states—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota—will vote on ballot measures that seek to include forms of abortion-rights protection in the state constitutions.
But Trump’s insistence that “each individual state is voting” doesn’t apply across the country, including in Texas. The second-largest state in the U.S., with a population of 30 million, is one of fourteen with total abortion bans (laws with rare, and confusing, exceptions). In a recent interview with Texas Monthly, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who is seeking a third term, shared a more nuanced view of Trump’s perspective, telling reporter Michael Hardy, “The particular restrictions that the state legislatures adopt reflect the values of the citizens of each state.”
But the values adopted by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature—which, in 2021, before the overturning of Roe, passed Senate Bill 8, the so-called abortion “bounty” law—don’t align so neatly with what voters say they want. An August survey from the Texas Politics Project shows that nearly half of Texas’s voters want less-extreme abortion laws. And after the passage of SB 8, another Texas Politics Project survey found that 78 percent of Texas’s adults believed abortion should be allowed in some form, while only 15 percent said it should be never permitted. Respondents fell mostly along party lines, with a majority of Democrats (67 percent) saying a Texan should be allowed to seek an abortion as a personal choice. But even a plurality of Republicans (42 percent) said they were in favor of allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest or when the woman’s life is in danger.
Despite public opinion in the state, there’s no mechanism in place to let Texans vote on abortion rights explicitly—Texas does not allow any form of citizen-led referendum. All amendments to the Constitution must be initiated by the state legislature. And while most bills require only a simple majority vote in each chamber for adoption, joint resolutions proposing amendments to the state’s constitution require a vote of two-thirds of the total membership in each chamber for adoption. (This amounts to a minimum of 100 votes in the Texas House and 21 votes in the Texas Senate.) The GOP-controlled Legislature is not likely to put such a question before the voters, so Texans have no direct way to affect abortion policy in the state.
This system goes back to the early 1900s, a time when other states in the nation adopted progressive reforms, including policies that allowed citizen-led ballot initiatives. Texas came close. In 1912, Texans passed an amendment to the constitution allowing for “home-rule” cities. This allowed citizen-led initiatives at the municipal level, but only on local matters that didn’t conflict with state or federal statutes. Two years later, Texans voted on a proposal to allow citizens to create statewide initiatives, but it was defeated 52 percent to 48 percent. Some advocates for the initiative movement celebrated the amendment’s defeat because the measure contained burdensome signature requirements. At the time, they believed they could get lawmakers to pass a better version, but that never crystallized.
Still, in an era of government reforms across the nation, Texas’s leaders—then conservative Democrats—opted to enact measures that limited voting access and restricted citizen participation, Nancy Beck Young, a professor of history at the University of Houston, told me. For example, Texas did pass voting rights for women in 1918 in the Democratic primary, but only white women were allowed to cast ballots. (A 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled the “white primary” unconstitutional.) “In the minds of the state’s government back then, proper voters were white people,” Young said. “Folks who think that way are not going to make it easier to place voters’ own ideas on the ballot in the forms of an initiative or a referendum, nor are they going to make it easier to recall legislation for which they disagree.”
Over the years, there have been efforts by some Texas lawmakers to create a system for citizen-initiated referenda. But they’ve all fallen short. In 1996, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock appointed a special committee in the Texas Senate—made up predominantly of Republicans, who were then in the minority—to study ballot initiatives and referenda. The committee filed a report in December of that year that appeared to endorse the idea that the Legislature should propose a constitutional amendment allowing for citizen-led initiatives. But another important event happened in 1996. A month before the report was filed, Republicans flipped the Texas Senate, and they were close to flipping the House; suddenly, the idea of ceding power back to voters became less popular. A 1997 initiative-and-referendum bill filed by then-Senator (now Secretary of State) Jane Nelson, a Republican, was referred to a Senate committee and never seen again. The issue has remained largely dormant since.
There have been some recent efforts by Democrats to put ideas favored by their base on odd-numbered-year ballots for yes or no votes. During last year’s legislative session, Representative James Talarico, of Austin, filed a joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment that would have limited the Legislature’s ability to pass laws restricting abortion. It languished in a state House committee and ultimately died.
“If politicians don’t want voters to make their voices heard on a particular issue, it’s because they know Texans disagree with them on this issue of abortion rights,” Talarico told me. “In my view, they are silencing and muzzling the people of Texas. On issues that are this important, we should let Texans decide.” But resolutions such as Talarico’s are unlikely to pass in a state legislature controlled by one of the most radical Republican parties in the country, particularly on issues related to reproductive rights. The ascendance of lawmakers who want to make abortion a felony—potentially punishable by death—makes that clear.
So does this mean Texans will never get an up or down vote on abortion measures? It doesn’t look likely in the near term. Republicans dominate both Capitol chambers—holding 19 seats in the 31-member Senate and 86 seats in the 150-member House. After November 5, that could change, but only modestly. As Texas Monthly previously reported, Democrats have a realistic chance of wresting up to 7 seats from Republicans in the House. The party is unlikely to pick up any seats in the Senate, in part because the GOP thoroughly gerrymandered the state’s legislative districts in 2021 to protect nearly all of its current incumbents. That leaves Texans who want less-stringent abortion measures with only one real mechanism for legislative change: voting in lawmakers who will act on the clear will of the electorate.
