2024 won’t be the first time Arizona votes on abortion. In 1992, it ended in a landslide

Arizona will vote on an abortion-related proposition this November, but it will not be the first time a question about abortion laws has appeared on ballots in the state.

In 1992, voters in what was then a much more deeply red state delivered a resounding defeat to a measure that would have banned most abortions in Arizona. Will the results be a precursor to this year’s outcome?

In 1992, abortion had been legal across the U.S. for nearly 20 years, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, but the issue was back in the spotlight because of a new Supreme Court case.

The state of Pennsylvania had enacted several restrictions on abortion, including a 24-hour waiting period for patients to give consent before the procedure and a parental consent rule for minors seeking abortions. Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers had sued then Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey over the restrictions.

“People thought back in 1992 that this was going to be the case that overruled Roe v. Wade,” said Barbara Atwood, professor of law emerita at the University of Arizona.

It was an election year, and Atwood said as this case was pending before the court, anti-abortion groups began preparing for the possibility that the power to regulate abortion could soon be handed back to states.

Arizona Secretary of State

In Arizona, an anti-abortion political group called Arizonans for Common Sense began circulating a petition for a ballot measure to amend the state constitution to outlaw abortion except to save a mother’s life. The proposed measure also allowed the state Legislature to grant possible exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

“The premise of the initiative was, if we didn’t do it, the other side would,” said Trent Franks, who headed the Arizonans for Common Sense campaign. “The idea was to preempt, and get ours on the ballot first.”

Franks at the time was director of the anti-abortion Arizona Family Research Institute, now known as the Center for Arizona Policy. Franks went on to represent Arizona’s Eighth District in Congress for more than a decade, but resigned in 2017 after the House Ethics Committee said it would investigate sexual harassment claims against him. Franks built his political career around his deeply held anti-abortion views. Back in 1992, he really hoped to see Roe v. Wade fall, he said.

But the court instead delivered a more complicated decision in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case. In a 5-4 vote, justices said abortion would remain a constitutional right nationwide, but they left the door open for states to adopt Pennsylvania-style abortion restrictions.

Just two days after that decision, Franks and Arizonans for Common Sense turned in more than 255,000 signatures — nearly 100,000 more than what was required — to get their measure onto Arizona’s ballot.

But since the Supreme Court had not overturned Roe v. Wade in the Casey decision, Atwood said the proposed near-total abortion ban was clearly going to be at odds with U.S. law.

“There definitely would have been legal challenges,” Atwood said.

Even the legislative analysis printed in the 1992 Arizona voter pamphlet cautioned that the Supreme Court may have to weigh in if the measure, known as Proposition 110, passed.

But Franks said that was exactly the point.

“We were trying to force the court to do what they should have done,” Franks said.

(Photo courtesy of Trent Franks)

Franks and the measure’s supporters thought if they could get voters to approve a ban on most abortions in Arizona, they would have a chance to reshape abortion laws nationwide through the legal challenges they knew would follow.

In the era before email or text message donation drives, the grassroots Prop. 110 campaign organized largely among evangelical church groups and outraised its opposition by two-to-one, according to reporting in the Arizona Daily Star at the time.

But the opposition group, which called itself Pro-Choice Arizona, had a broad reach.

“I remember there being quite a few Republicans and Democrats,” said Bré Thomas. Thomas is now CEO of the Arizona reproductive health nonprofit, Affirm, but in 1992 she was a volunteer organizer for the Pro-Choice Arizona campaign.

Even though Arizona was a more solidly Republican state in 1992, Thomas said this was the era of Barry Goldwater conservatism.

The longtime U.S. senator from Arizona had retired just a few years earlier. He was one of several influential Arizona Republicans to come out against Prop. 110. Goldwater even appeared in a television commercial to urge Arizonans to vote “no” on the measure.

“We Americans share a heritage of freedom guaranteed us by our Constitution. Some of those freedoms, particularly freedom of choice by women, are being threatened today, particularly by Proposition 110,” Goldwater said in the ad.

Goldwater’s wife, Peggy, was a reproductive rights advocate who had helped launch Planned Parenthood’s Central Arizona branch. And Goldwater had been highly skeptical of shifts in the Republican party toward the religious right.

Library of Congress

Thomas said that was a dramatic difference in the conversation around abortion three decades ago.

“I don’t remember it being as much of a political party line divide at all,” Thomas said. “Those Republicans, slowly over time no longer exist.”

When election day came, Arizona picked Republican George H.W. Bush for president, while most other states picked Democrat Bill Clinton. Arizona voters also gave more power to Republicans in state races that year.

But those same voters delivered a landslide defeat to Prop. 110.

“It lost with every category of citizen except for white evangelicals. Women and men voted virtually alike, as did mainline Protestants and Catholics, Republicans and Democrats, the different economic categories, and the different age groups,” late University of Arizona political scientist Daniel J. O’Neil wrote in the 1995 book, Abortion Politics in American States. “It proved a disastrous defeat for the supporters.”

68% of voters checked “no” on their ballot and the anti-abortion campaign conceded defeat before midnight.

“At 60 points you have lost horribly, and it begs the question of, what did you miss going in?” said Kevin DeMenna, a longtime Republican political strategist in Arizona.

DeMenna did not work on Prop. 110 or its opposition campaign, but remembers that election season well. He said it was a lengthy ballot that included everything from hunting regulations to a controversial effort to establish a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in Arizona. In a crowded campaign season, DeMenna said Prop. 110 couldn’t get the media attention or donor backing it would have needed to succeed.

But more than that, DeMenna thinks organizers of the Prop. 110 campaign misjudged how Arizonans, in spite of their conservative leanings, would react to an effort to restrict abortion.

“That to me, was the big misread in 1992, and it is a regular misread for campaign strategists,” DeMenna said. “It was tone-deaf for the moment.”

And 32 years later, has the moment changed?

The population of the state has nearly doubled since 1992 and the state has become much more racially diverse. What was considered a Republican stronghold in the 1990s has become a presidential battleground state in the 2020s. Roe v. Wade has now been overturned and Arizona has been enforcing a 15-week abortion ban since 2022.

Now, a new generation of Arizona voters will be weighing in on Proposition 139, which seeks to amend the state constitution to allow abortions up to about 24 weeks, with exceptions beyond that when health risks are involved.

In spite of the dramatically changed political landscape, Franks sees some similarities between 1992 and 2024.

“The media is entirely in control of the nomenclature, of the phraseology, they perpetrate semantic gymnastics, verbal circumlocution,” Franks said.

He blames his campaign’s loss in 1992 on wording. He thinks Arizonans would have supported Prop. 110 if it had been described to voters the way he intended, as an amendment to protect unborn children. But state officials defined it on ballots as prohibition of abortion.

04 Nov 1992, Wed Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, Arizona) Newspapers.com

“We knew we were going to lose, I said, ‘with this language we’ll get 33% of the vote, according to our own polls,’” Franks said. “How the question is asked is everything.”

This year, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled state voter pamphlets may use the phrase “unborn human being” in descriptions of Prop. 139. Even so, Franks thinks news coverage of this year’s measure has framed the issue in terms that favor the other side.

“The way [the 1992 ballot measure] was distorted, just as [the 2024 measure] is distorted, the pro-life cause is at great disadvantage,” Franks said.

Looking back on 1992, Thomas sees parallels too, especially when it comes to voter sentiment.

“People are done having politicians make these decisions for them,” Thomas said. “In a sense that’s exactly what was happening in ‘92.”

Thomas said the 1992 Pro-Choice Arizona campaign focused its messaging to voters around protecting a person’s right to choose to have an abortion without government interference. That resonated with Arizona voters, she said. Political parties have become much more polarized on abortion in the time since, Thomas said, but she thinks voters feel similarly today about the issue as they did 32 years ago.

“It feels like we’re back there,” Thomas said. “Took us a long way to get there, but I feel like we’re back there.”