It’s time for the RVA Politics 2026 Election Preview! All this month I’ll be looking at what’s on the ballot this fall in Virginia. First up: the first proposed Constitutional Amendment (and some general thoughts on Amendments.)

It’s election time in Virginia! …as usual.

In some sense it’s already a bit late to be weighing in on elections, thanks to the rising popularity of early voting. My colleague at Randolph-Macon College, Elliott Fullmer, wrote a book about early elections called “Tuesday’s Gone,” and I think he’s right about that. (Or maybe Skynyrd was.) But if Election Day is now more like Election Month, the folks who vote early are probably higher-info voters who already know what they want to vote about, and what’s on the ballot. There are still plenty of people learning, and making up their minds.

Especially this year! The ballot is a little… complicated, with important decisions to make at all levels of government. There’s federal elections, of course. It’s the Congressional midterms, which is why you can’t escape Rob Wittman or Elaine Luria or Mark Warner on your screens. (More on that in future posts.) But there’s also a bunch of local special elections, depending on where you live, including school funding referenda in many districts across the Commonwealth (again, I’ll write more on that soon).

At the state level, there are constitutional amendments. Three of them. And they’re kind of a big deal.

Amending for Fun and Profit

First, a reminder: Virginia, like all states, has its own Constitution.

If you’re reading this, you likely know that already. But as I’ve written elsewhere — and if you are a paid subscriber, you’d get to read that Backgrounder! Just sayin’ 🙂 — half of Americans do NOT know their state has one.

All three of this year’s proposed constitutional amendments have been in the works for some time. The idea for at least one of them first came up after the 2023 elections, and all three were first introduced in 2024. They were pushed to the 2025 session, in part because they couldn’t get on the ballot until this year.

Why? Before an amendment can get onto the ballot, it needs to be approved by two different General Assembly sessions, without any changes to the text in between. The second session has to come after an election, so it didn’t matter if this proposed trio was approved in 2024 or 2025; they would need to wait until after the 2025 election for the 2026 legislature to approve them a second time. (You can see an infographic here that lays out how this timeline works.)

The principle behind this structure is that amending the Constitution is so important, voters should have TWO chances to weigh in. First, voters can presumably vote out legislators who have already given initial approval to a bad amendment; and then if the legislature still goes ahead, the people get to vote directly on the amendment. Only if the amendment passes BOTH tests can it be added to the Constitution. Just ask the Democrats about their redistricting amendment, which died in part because they didn’t respect this principle.

Democrats proposed all three of the currently pending amendments as well. What’s with their fascination with constitutional amendments?

Some of the motivation clearly is based in principle and political commitments. The amendments on marriage equality and voting rights are supposed to correct longstanding “errors” in the Constitution of Virginia (more on those errors next time). The reproductive rights amendment is more a reaction to national politics. But the commitments from Democrats are pretty longstanding. The Democratic Party nationally supports reproductive rights and gay rights. And thanks to the election denialism that has taken hold among the MAGA right, Democrats have also found themselves defending voting rights as well. This is especially true in Virginia, where Democrats have been at the forefront of expanded election access for a decade now.

But these political commitments have not-so-hidden political benefits as well. The Dems clearly feel like they are on the right side of each of these issues in terms of numbers. And there’s plenty of evidence that they’re correct to think that. You can certainly disagree with the resulting policy choices if you want, but a majority of Americans and Virginians have consistently supported reproductive rights. Marriage equality has earned majority support for a decade, and people are increasingly worried about threats to voting rights.

These three issues are political winners, and Democrats know it. While it’s not always out in the open, there’s clearly been an understanding from Virginia party leaders that these amendments would be a possible turnout booster when they got on the ballot. From a pro-democracy perspective, that’s not exactly a bad thing. Elections are about choices, and these amendments help clarify policy differences between the Democrats who proposed them and the Republicans who (mostly) oppose them.

Ballot initiatives have often proven to be smart politics in other states, especially in elections where turnout dips (as they often do in Congressional midterms). The presence of these amendments, plus voter antipathy to Trump, are contributing to the suggestions that a Blue Wave again will be cresting this fall.

There was a moment when the Democrats’ redistricting amendment this spring seemed to have upended the momentum of this wave. These days the redistricting mess from earlier this year seems less of a factor than I thought. The Democrats have moved on. And while Republicans might have been angry about the seeming power grab, which helped motivate a much closer vote than anticipated, that anger doesn’t seem to have carried over into the fall. We’ll see.

Let’s take a quick look at each amendment. Today: Ballot Question 1.

Ballot Question 1: Reproductive Rights

The pro-choice argument for this first proposed amendment is that since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision removed federal protections for abortion, the issue has been thrown back to the states. Virginia remains the only southern state that has not implemented significant restrictions on abortion, and pro-choice advocates want to keep it that way. Adding protections to the Constitution ensures that a change in political winds in the Commonwealth would make it harder to implement restrictions in the future.

While the ballot question is sometimes labeled an abortion amendment, it actually positions abortion as part of a broad array of types of reproductive care: “prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion, miscarriage management, and fertility care.” This reflects a longstanding strategy for pro-choice advocates, as they want the public to recognize abortion as an important healthcare procedure.

The strategy makes sense, because some of the other types of care included in the amendment — birth control, particularly — are widely considered under threat from the Supreme Court after Dobbs. The amendment also includes protections for healthcare workers, many of whom are worried about their ability to provide care and not get prosecuted, and explicitly allows for restrictions on abortion in the third trimester.

Opponents have raised concerns that the amendment goes too far. The objection I’m seeing most often is that because the amendment establishes a “fundamental right” to abortion, courts will see that as justification for overruling any parental consent laws. But I’m not sure this objection really follows (at least one expert agrees). For example, everyone knows there’s a right to free speech, but those rights aren’t fully extended to minors. And I don’t think these objections are landing with voters either.

One thing opponents have correct: adding a right to a constitution is a big deal. After years of relying on implied rights in the U.S. Constitution to protect abortion have now failed, advocates feel strongly that the time has come to explicitly add reproductive rights to the list. In general, states have always had a more expansive approach to including protections in a Bill of Rights than our more limited national constitution. So the only question is if this year, Virginia voters are ready to add to Virginia’s list. I think they are. It would be a huge surprise, to me at least, if this first ballot measure failed.

To me, the more interesting political question this fall is how this measure in particular drives voter turnout. The lack of organized opposition suggests that pro-life folks also think this will pass handily. (“Vote yes” is out-raising no 20 to 1.) So what does that mean for the rest of the election? Will having reproductive rights on the agenda, in a post-Dobbs and anti-Trump environment, help Democrats up and down the ballot? I’m wary of predictions, especially when we’re still a month out. But these kinds of questions are why some people are predicting an even bigger Blue Wave this year than we’ve seen in recent anti-Trump reaction elections. If there is a bigger win for Democrats than we thought going in, this ballot initiative will be a big reason why.

Next week: I’ll look at the other two amendments, one concerning marriage and the other voting rights.

RICHARD MEAGHER is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia; he writes the RVA Politics newsletter on Substack.