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Imran Khan Sentenced to Prison in Pakistan
The former prime minister of Pakistan was taken into custody, sentenced to three years after a court found him guilty of illegally selling state gifts and concealing the assets.Former Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan was arrested on Saturday after a trial court sentenced him to three years in prison, a verdict likely to end his chances of running in upcoming general elections.The police took Mr. Khan into custody from his home in the eastern city of Lahore soon after the court’s decision was announced in Islamabad.The verdict is a climactic turn in a political showdown between Mr. Khan and Pakistan’s powerful military that has embroiled the country for over a year.It comes on the heels of a monthslong intimidation campaign by the military aimed at hollowing out Mr. Khan’s political party and stifling the remarkable political comeback he has made since being ousted from office last year in a vote of no confidence.Now, the prospect that Mr. Khan, a cricket star turned populist politician, will be disqualified from running in the country’s general elections — the next ones are expected this fall — has offered a major victory to a military establishment that appears intent on sidelining him from politics.It has also sent a powerful message to Mr. Khan and his supporters, who have directly confronted and defied the military like few else in Pakistan’s 75-year history: The military is the ultimate hand wielding political power behind the government, and no amount of public backlash will change that.“Imran Khan’s arrest marks a significant turning point in the state’s actions against P.T.I.,” said Zaigham Khan, a political analyst and columnist based in Islamabad, using the initials of Mr. Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. That effort seems “designed to hinder the P.T.I.’s chances in the upcoming elections,” he added.Supporters of Mr. Khan clashed with the police in Peshawar in May.Arshad Arbab/EPA, via ShutterstockIn its ruling on Saturday, the trial court found the former prime minister guilty of hiding assets after illegally selling state gifts.“The allegations against Mr. Khan are proven,” said Judge Humayun Dilawar, who announced the verdict in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. The court also imposed a fine of around $355.The case is related to an inquiry by the country’s election commission, which found last October that Mr. Khan had illegally sold gifts given to him by other countries when he was prime minister and concealed the profits from the authorities.Mr. Khan has denied any wrongdoing. He and his lawyers had accused Judge Dilawar of bias and sought to have the case transferred to another judge. They are likely to appeal this ruling.In a statement, Mr. Khan’s party rejected the verdict, calling it “the worst example of political revenge.”Members of the country’s governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, welcomed the outcome. In a statement, the country’s information minister, Marriyum Aurangzeb, hailed Mr. Khan’s arrest and denied that it was linked to “political persecution” or that it was part of a plot to prevent the former prime minister from running in the country’s next elections.“My message to Imran Khan is straightforward: Your time is up,” she said.The verdict is the culmination of a nationwide political saga that has escalated since Mr. Khan was ousted in April 2022. In the months that followed, he drew thousands out to protests where he railed against the country’s powerful military establishment and accused Pakistan’s generals of orchestrating his fall from power — an accusation they deny.Mr. Khan, who is facing an array of court cases, was briefly arrested earlier this year in a different one. That arrest, on May 9, set off violent protests across the country, as well as attacks on military installations. Days afterward, the country’s top court declared that the authorities had unlawfully detained Mr. Khan and ordered his release.The protests channeling anger toward the military were widely considered to have crossed an unspoken red line of defiance — a rare rebuke in a country where few defy military leaders. Since then, Pakistan’s military establishment has staged an extensive crackdown.Security forces near an office of Mr. Khan’s party in Karachi on Saturday.Rehan Khan/EPA, via ShutterstockThrongs of supporters of Mr. Khan were arrested in connection with the protests in May. Media personalities considered sympathetic to him said they were intimidated. And many prominent leaders of his party resigned — after they were arrested or said they had been threatened with criminal charges and arrests.After Mr. Khan was arrested on Saturday in Lahore, the police in several cities were put on alert in case his supporters again took to the streets.In a prerecorded message before his arrest in Lahore on Saturday, Mr. Khan urged his supporters to stage peaceful protests and not remain silent at home. In the port city of Karachi and in Peshawar, a few dozen supporters staged small protests.But unlike when Mr. Khan was arrested in May, by Saturday evening there were no mass protests in support of Mr. Khan — a sign of the effectiveness of the military’s efforts to intimidate his supporters in recent months, analysts say.In recent weeks, Pakistan’s governing coalition had signaled that it was considering postponing the fall elections so that the military’s crackdown on Mr. Khan’s party could continue and so that the coalition’s political leaders could be sure that he would not pose a major political threat in the race. But now, his arrest and likely disqualification may make that unnecessary, observers say.“Khan’s removal from the scene may actually expedite the election process, potentially allowing them to be held within 90 days, if not sooner,” said Zaigham Khan, the political analyst. “What remains to be seen is whether he can obtain any immediate relief from the superior courts, where his sentence could be suspended.” More
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The Normal Paths to Beating Trump Are Closing
In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.But it’s true that Biden did a fair bit of abnormalizing in his campaign rhetoric, and you could argue that the establishment panic was successful at keeping Trump’s support confined to a version of his 2016 coalition, closing off avenues to expand his popular appeal.Whatever your narrative, the events of Jan. 6 understandably gave abnormalizers the upper hand, while inflation and other issues took the wind out of the more normal style of Democratic politics — leading to a 2022 midterm campaign in which Biden and the Democrats leaned more heavily on democracy-in-peril arguments than policy.But when this abnormalizing effort was successful (certainly more successful than I expected), it seemed to open an opportunity for normalizers within the Republican Party, letting a figure like Ron DeSantis attack Trump on pragmatic grounds, as a proven vote loser whose populist mission could be better fulfilled by someone else.Now, though, that potential dynamic seems to be evaporating, unraveled by the interaction between the multiplying indictments of Trump and DeSantis’s weak performance so far on the national stage. One way or another, 2024 increasingly looks like a full-abnormalization campaign.Post-indictments, for DeSantis or some other Republican to rally past Trump, an important faction of G.O.P. voters would have to grow fatigued with Trump the public enemy and outlaw politician — effectively conceding to the American establishment’s this-is-not-normal crusade.In the more likely event of a Biden-Trump rematch, the remarkable possibility of a campaign run from prison will dominate everything. The normal side of things won’t cease to matter, the condition of the economy will still play its crucial role, but the sense of abnormality will warp every aspect of normal partisan debate.Despite all my doubts about the abnormalization strategy, despite Trump’s decent poll numbers against Biden at the moment, my guess is that this will work out for the Democrats. The Stormy Daniels indictment still feels like a partisan put-up job. But in the classified documents case, Trump’s guilt seems clear-cut. And while the Jan. 6 indictment seems more legally uncertain, it will focus constant national attention on the same gross abuses of office that cost Trumpist Republicans so dearly in 2022.The fact that the indictments are making it tougher to unseat Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is just tough luck for anti-Trump conservatives. Trump asked for this, his supporters are choosing this, and his Democratic opponents may get both the moral satisfaction of a conviction and the political benefits of beating a convict-candidate at the polls.But my guesses about Trump’s political prospects have certainly been wrong before. And there is precedent for an abnormalization strategy going all the way to prosecution without actually pushing the demagogue offstage. A precedent like Berlusconi, in fact, who faced 35 separate criminal court cases after he entered politics, received just one clear conviction — and was finally removed from politics only by the most normal of all endings: his old age and death.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More
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DeSantis Dismisses Trump’s 2020 Election Theories as False
The Florida governor went further than he has before in acknowledging that the election was not stolen as a major donor pressured him to appeal to moderates.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that claims about the 2020 election being stolen were false, directly contradicting a central argument of former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.The comments went further than Mr. DeSantis typically goes when asked about Mr. Trump’s defeat. The governor has often tried to hedge, refusing to acknowledge that the election was fairly conducted. In his response on Friday, Mr. DeSantis did not mention Mr. Trump by name — saying merely that such theories were “unsubstantiated.” But the implication was clear.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” Mr. DeSantis said in response to a reporter’s question after a campaign event at a brewery in Northeast Iowa.The more aggressive response comes a day after Mr. Trump was arraigned on charges related to his plot to overturn the 2020 election, and as Mr. DeSantis’s campaign struggles to gain traction and burns through cash. On Friday, Mr. DeSantis was dealt another blow: Robert Bigelow, the biggest individual donor to Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis, told Reuters he would stop giving money to the group unless Mr. DeSantis took a more moderate approach and got other major donors on board.As he has courted Mr. Trump’s voters, Mr. DeSantis has blasted the prosecution in the election case as politically motivated and has said that he did not want to see Mr. Trump charged. His new comments suggest that Mr. Trump’s legal peril may have altered his political calculation.Mr. DeSantis also suggested on Friday that he would pardon Mr. Trump, should the former president be convicted in the election case.“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the country to have a former president that’s almost 80 years old go to prison,” he told reporters at a campaign stop in Waverly, Iowa. It was an answer that, by invoking Mr. Trump’s age, also served to highlight the contrast with Mr. DeSantis, who is 44.“And just like Ford pardoned Nixon, sometimes you’ve got to put this stuff behind you, and we need to start focusing on things having to do with the country’s future,” Mr. DeSantis said, and added: “This election needs to be about Jan. 20, 2025, not Jan. 6, 2021.”But his remarks about the 2020 election have previously been far more circumspect. He generally uses such questions on the subject to talk about electability, lament the “culture of losing” that has developed among Republicans under Mr. Trump’s leadership and boast about the security of Florida’s elections.On Friday, Mr. DeSantis did criticize aspects of the 2020 election, including changes to voting procedures made because of the coronavirus pandemic. But he specifically dismissed one particularly far-fetched theory that Venezuela, now led by President Nicolás Maduro, hacked voting machines.“It was not an election that was conducted the way I think that we want to, but that’s different than saying Maduro stole votes or something like that,” he said. “Those theories, you know, proved to be unsubstantiated.”Mr. DeSantis also said he did not have much time to watch coverage of his chief rival’s arraignment on Thursday.“I saw a little bit,” he said. “Unfortunately, one of the things as governor that you have to do is oversee executions. So we had an execution yesterday, so I was tied up with that for most of the day.” More
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Some Democrats Don’t Like Eric Adams. But Can They Beat Him in 2025?
A group of mostly left-leaning Democrats held an early strategy meeting to discuss how they might defeat Mr. Adams in 2025. It won’t be easy.On a warm July evening, as Mayor Eric Adams visited Staten Island to highlight his work on public safety at a town hall meeting, a cross section of some of New York City’s progressive class was nearby, plotting how to make the mayor’s first term his last.The group had been summoned for a “completely confidential” dinner meeting to discuss how to take on “a dangerous man,” according to an invitation obtained by The New York Times.The dinner included members of some of the city’s most important left-leaning institutions, including the Working Families Party, and staffers from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. There was also a potential challenger they were hoping to recruit: Antonio Reynoso, the 40-year old Dominican American lawmaker who succeeded Mr. Adams as Brooklyn borough president.As the group dined on a vegetarian menu of homegrown squash Parmesan and beet salad, they strategized over how to harness festering discontent and assemble a coalition capable of beating the mayor in the 2025 Democratic primary — an unusual pushback to a party incumbent, especially this early in his tenure.“This is a room full of people who truly believe in the ability to go up against Adams and win,” said Cristina González, one of the hosts, on Thursday, after word of the meeting leaked.Mr. Adams will likely be a heavy favorite to capture a second term.He remains broadly popular with the coalition of Black and Latino voters outside of Manhattan that sent him to Gracie Mansion. He has already built a campaign war chest that is expected to hit $4.6 million with matching funds, and barring a dramatic reversal, the incumbent mayor would likely enjoy the support of the city’s most powerful labor unions.Evan Thies, a spokesman for the Adams campaign, said in a statement that the mayor had lowered crime and “invested billions of dollars in working people” and that polls showed he had strong support from New Yorkers.“The fact that these folks would rather play politics in some back room two years before the election, instead of help the mayor help working people, tells you all you need to know about what they really care about: their own power,” he said.Liberal and progressive Democrats have made little secret of their dismay over Mr. Adams, a centrist former police captain who ran on a public safety message. They have assailed his moves to cut library funding and universal prekindergarten, his efforts to delay the closing of the Rikers Island jail complex, and his response to the migrant crisis, among other policies.The dinner was perhaps the clearest sign yet that they are now openly strategizing how best to put forward a formidable challenger.Ms. González, an alumni of the de Blasio administration who hosted the dinner with her partner Janos Marton, a civil rights advocate who ran for Manhattan district attorney in 2021, at their Staten Island home, described the event as part of a “serious effort” to rally around a progressive candidate who can actually win.Mr. Reynoso, the only elected official at the dinner, acknowledged that the left was “trying to coalesce early to find one candidate. The strategy is to start early and find one strong candidate this time.”In an interview, Mr. Reynoso said he was not interested.Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, said he was uninterested in challenging Mr. Adams, but understood the desire for the left to coalesce behind one candidate as early as possible.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“I got elected to be the borough president of Brooklyn,” Mr. Reynoso said. “It’s a big borough, and I have a big job.”Mr. Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, has made a habit of using the left as a foil, blaming progressives for spikes in crime because they support policies like bail reform and favor reducing the amount of money spent on policing. The mayor has challenged the definition of what it means to be a progressive and often refers to himself as the “original progressive.”But Mr. Adams has also faced a series of negative headlines in recent weeks and has struggled to respond to the migrant crisis — a situation that has soured his relationship with President Biden and led to people sleeping on the streets in Midtown Manhattan.Progressives are broadly unhappy with Mayor Adams and are looking for a challenger to face him in 2025. Dave Sanders for The New York Times“It’s clear that Adams is vulnerable. What remains to be determined is, if there’s a viable candidate to challenge him,” said Rebecca Katz, a liberal operative who has not been part of the anti-Adams discussions, but works with Representative Jamaal Bowman, whose name has been floated as a possible opponent.Some progressive leaders appear to be coalescing around the idea that the ideal candidate would be a Black or Latino Democrat running to the left of Mr. Adams, but with appeal to a broader ideological range of voters. Even so, that candidate would face a daunting challenge.Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens, has discussed running with people in politics, but has not made a decision, according to a person familiar with the matter.Zellnor Myrie, a state senator who represents the Brooklyn district Mr. Adams once did, is also said to be in the early stages of considering a run. Mr. Myrie, a lawyer who has made affordable housing a top priority in Albany, declined to comment. But a person familiar with his thinking said he had not moved toward assembling a campaign — despite being pushed by political allies.Others have tried to convince Mr. Bowman to enter the race. Mr. Bowman, an outspoken former middle school principal, has made no secret of his differences with Mr. Adams over policing and city resources for schools and libraries, but he currently lives in Yonkers in Westchester County and told The Times this spring that he was not interested in running.New York City officials were criticized for forcing migrants to sleep and stay outside for days, outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOther attendees at the July dinner included Rodrigo Camarena, director of Immigration Advocates Network, and Nisha Agarwal, a former commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs under Mr. de Blasio.Ms. González, who is Puerto Rican, said it was important that a viable challenger to Mr. Adams be a person of color. The mayor has already said that certain attacks against him were based on his race. He has begun to lean heavily on his base of religious supporters.“It needs to be a person of color to inoculate them against specific kinds of attacks,” she said. “Those are also the people who are most impacted by his policies right now — it’s important to have someone from the community who is most impacted.”In the 2021 mayoral primary, the city’s progressives had a disastrous showing. The former city comptroller, Scott Stringer, faced sexual harassment allegations and was abandoned by many of his progressive endorsers. Some on the left supported Dianne Morales, who faced a revolt from her staff. Much of the left finally threw their support behind Maya Wiley, a former top lawyer for Mr. de Blasio; she finished a distant third.“Whoever challenges this mayor has to be equipped — nothing amateurish,” said Councilwoman Shahana Hanif, a co-chairwoman of the Council’s progressive caucus. “We really need to prop up someone who will unite a broad coalition, understand the progressives and work in collaboration with us.”Alyssa Cass, a political strategist with Slingshot Strategies who worked on Mr. Yang’s campaign, said the mayor’s opponents should be looking someone with broad ideological appeal.“Any challenge to Mayor Adams that hopes to be anything other than a pipe dream requires a candidate who can make the case that the functioning of the city is reaching a point of no return — and can make that case with just about every voter who did not support the mayor in 2021,” Ms. Cass said.Another dinner guest was Bill Neidhardt, a former press secretary for Mr. de Blasio who worked on Brandon Johnson’s winning mayoral campaign in Chicago. He said the discussion focused on “frustrations with the Adams administration,” including his response to wildfire smoke that darkened the skies this summer.There was “a lot of shared urgency about the moment we’re in right now,” he said, adding: “Also Cristina might be the best chef in all of Staten Island.” More
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Chris Christie Meets With Zelensky in Surprise Trip to Ukraine
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Friday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he praised for demonstrating “the resolve it takes to survive a war and ultimately win it.”Mr. Christie is the second 2024 G.O.P. hopeful to visit Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, signaling his support for Ukraine in a war that has divided the Republican candidates and Republican voters. Former Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Ukraine in June.Escorted by a Ukrainian security detail, Mr. Christie visited sites near Kyiv that were devastated during Russia’s drive toward the Ukrainian capital in the first months of the invasion, including Bucha, a Kyiv suburb where Russian soldiers massacred more than 400 people last April.“There are hundreds of millions of people in our country who support you,” Mr. Christie told local officials in Moshchun, a village northwest of Kyiv, during a visit to a memorial overlooking a trench used by Ukrainian soldiers during a battle in March of last year.The United States has provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in military and security assistance since Russia’s invasion more than a year ago, with President Biden often framing the extraordinary level of support as part of an existential fight for democracy against authoritarian aggression as well as being vital to national security interests.A majority of Americans continue to approve of U.S. aid to Ukraine in the conflict, but that support has softened over time, owing mostly to increasing Republican opposition. The percentage of Republicans saying the United States is providing “too much” support to Ukraine has grown to 44 percent from 9 percent since the Russian invasion in February 2022, according to polling by the Pew Research Center.That shift has been led by former President Donald Trump, whose first impeachment resulted from his 2019 phone call to Mr. Zelensky pressuring him to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals after freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Mr. Trump, who maintained that he did not pressure Mr. Zelensky, has said defending Ukraine is not a vital national interest for the United States.In a CNN town hall in May, he refused to say whether he would continue President Biden’s policy of supplying weapons and ammunition to Ukraine if he returned to the White House, or whether he supported Mr. Zelensky or Russian President Vladimir Putin in the conflict.“I want everybody to stop dying,” Mr. Trump said.Mr. Christie said that in his meeting with Mr. Zelensky, which was closed to reporters, the Ukrainian president “spoke about his desire for there to be bipartisan support for Ukraine.” He said the subject of Mr. Trump did not come up. “There was no conversation from him about the race that I’m in,” Mr. Christie said. He said Mr. Zelensky told him, “Whoever the next president is, I need to have that person feel a partnership with Ukraine.”Ukraine policy is an area in which Mr. Christie, a 2016 Trump rival-turned Trump adviser-turned Trump critic, has sought to draw a sharp contrast between himself and the former president, calling Mr. Trump a “puppet of Putin” and mocking his recent claim that he could negotiate “in one day” a truce between Mr. Zelensky and the Russian leader.“Move over Churchill, Trump is here to save the day,” Mr. Christie tweeted last month.“I think he really likes strongmen,” Mr. Christie said late Thursday of Mr. Trump in an interview aboard a train to Kyiv. “I think those are his role models in terms of the way he would like to control power if left to his own devices.”Mr. Christie also criticized the Biden administration for not doing more to support the Ukrainian war effort, in particular its delays in supplying Mr. Zelensky’s government with F-16 fighter jets, which Mr. Biden had resisted doing for a year before approving the move in May. “I would have been sending them months ago,” Mr. Christie said. He also favors NATO membership for Ukraine.A New York Times/Siena poll this week showed Mr. Christie trailing far behind Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming favorite in the race, with the support of 54 percent of likely Republican primary voters.“I wish you political luck,” Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, told Mr. Christie during his visit to the city.“We all hope for that, right?” Mr. Christie replied, clapping him on the back. More
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Anti-Abortion Republicans Don’t Want You to Notice Ohio’s Issue 1
There’s an extraordinarily important referendum in Ohio next week that the anti-abortion movement hopes most citizens don’t notice. It’s a vote that demonstrates why reproductive rights and the preservation of democracy, two issues that have catalyzed recent Democratic victories, are intertwined. That’s almost certainly why it’s being held in the torpid month of August, a time when a great many people would rather think about almost anything other than politics.Issue 1, which Ohio Republican legislators put on the ballot, would make future ballot measures to change the state Constitution harder to pass in two key ways. If it’s approved, citizens who hope to put amendments to the voters would first have to collect signatures in each of the state’s 88 counties, up from 44 now. And to pass, constitutional ballot initiatives would need to win 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority.The measure’s import may not be immediately clear to voters, but it’s meant to thwart a November ballot initiative that will decide whether reproductive rights should be constitutionally protected in Ohio, where a sweeping abortion ban is tied up in court. Publicly, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has denied that abortion is the motivation behind Issue 1. But at a private event in May, he told a group of supporters, “It’s 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”The outcome of next Tuesday’s vote will resonate nationally, because the strategies of both Ohio abortion-rights supporters and opponents are being replicated elsewhere. Throughout the country, reproductive-rights advocates, faced with legislatures that have insulated themselves from the popular will, are turning to referendums to restore some of what was lost when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And throughout the country, abortion opponents understand that to keep abortion illegal, they need to change the rules.Most voters, as we’ve seen repeatedly, want abortion to be legal. Last August, a Kansas measure declaring that abortion isn’t protected by the state’s Constitution was defeated by an overwhelming 18 percentage points. In the midterms, there were abortion-related initiatives on the ballots in five states, including Kentucky and Montana, and the pro-choice side won all of them. Encouraged by these victories, activists are planning ballot measures to restore reproductive rights in states including Arizona, Florida, Missouri and, of course, Ohio.Ohio has been trending right for years, but gerrymandering ensures that the State Legislature is far more extreme than the population. As The Statehouse News Bureau, a news organization devoted to Ohio politics, has reported, “Ohio’s voter preference over the past 10 years splits about 54 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic.” Yet under Ohio’s highly gerrymandered maps, Republicans control 67 of 99 State House seats and 26 of 33 State Senate seats. The Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled these maps unconstitutional, but before the last election, federal judges appointed by Donald Trump ordered the state to use them.“This August election is sort of a final vote that gives the people any chance to say, at some point we still exert power here,” said David Pepper, former head of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” a book about undemocratic right-wing statehouses.Ohio, you might remember, is the state that forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee to Indiana for an abortion. Its prohibition on abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detectable — usually at around six weeks of pregnancy — has no exceptions for rape or incest. The Republican governor, Mike DeWine, told The Statehouse News Bureau that even though he signed the law, he thinks it goes farther than voters want, and he urged lawmakers to amend it, though he didn’t specify how. But with Republicans in gerrymandered districts more worried about primary challenges from the right than about general election challenges from the center, they have little incentive to respond to public sentiment. Instead, some anti-abortion lawmakers want even stricter anti-abortion laws, and one, Representative Jean Schmidt, has said she’d consider a ban on birth control.The November ballot initiative to make abortion a constitutional right is a chance for Ohio voters to circumvent their unrepresentative representatives. With this August initiative, the Republicans are working to head off the voters by essentially asking them to disenfranchise themselves. Because most people are unlikely to give up their rights quite so easily, Republicans scheduled the vote at a time when few are paying attention. Just last December, Ohio Republicans voted to effectively eliminate August special elections because of their expense and low turnout. But for this election, they reversed themselves.It is not just Democrats who oppose Issue 1; the former Ohio governors John Kasich and Bob Taft, both of whom are Republicans, do as well. “This is a fundamental change in Ohio’s voting rights,” Taft said during a League of Women Voters forum in June, adding, “I just think it’s a major mistake to approve or disapprove such a change at the lowest-turnout election that we have.”The task for opponents of Issue 1 isn’t to convince voters, but to alert them. “It’s just a math question: Can you reach enough people on a short timeline?” said Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the progressive group Swing Left, which is running a get out the vote drive in Ohio. Polling has been mixed: A July USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that 57 percent of voters oppose the measure, but one from Ohio Northern University shows a tossup, with a little more than 42 percent supporting Issue 1, 41 percent opposing it, and the rest neutral or undecided. (Interestingly, the Ohio Northern poll also shows that almost 54 percent of voters support a constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights, suggesting that some voters aren’t connecting Issue 1 to abortion.) As The Columbus Dispatch points out, there hasn’t been an August vote on a ballot initiative in Ohio in almost a century, making the outcome unpredictable.Issue 1’s backers are doing their best to confuse Ohioans with ads suggesting, bizarrely, that the initiative is about defending parents’ rights against those who, as one spot said, “put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids.” This is such dishonest agitprop that it’s challenging to even parse the logic behind it, but essentially, Issue 1 proponents are pretending that language in the November referendum saying that “individuals” have the right to make their own “reproductive decisions” implies that children have the right to transition without parental consent.If the right prevails on Issue 1 — and probably even if it doesn’t — you can expect to see the blueprint repeated in other places. Already, Republicans in states including Florida, Missouri and North Dakota, recognizing the danger that direct democracy poses to their own abortion bans, are trying to make the ballot initiative process much more onerous.In May, Dean Plocher, the Republican speaker of the Missouri House, angry that a bill creating new obstacles to citizen-led ballot initiatives had stalled in the State Senate, warned that, in the law’s absence, there would be a referendum to “allow choice,” which would “absolutely” pass. If that were to happen, he said, the Senate “should be held accountable for allowing abortion to return to Missouri.” It’s not clear whom exactly he thought the Senate should be accountable to. He certainly didn’t mean the voters.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
