“We never win. We’re only ever winning,” said Lara Granich, one of the supporters of the successful campaign to pass Missouri’s Proposition A, the 2024 ballot measure to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour and guarantee paid sick leave for workers.
This election, Missouri voters also approved Amendment 3, which ended the state’s total abortion ban and created a state constitutional right to reproductive freedom. In recent years, Missourians have also used the power of direct democracy to expand Medicaid, legalize recreational and medical marijuana, and reject a harmful right-to-work law on their statewide ballot.
None of these victories start or end on Election Day. They are the product of decades of hard work, year-round organizing, and long-term coalition building. Groups from every corner of Missouri — including faith-based organizations, reproductive rights groups, labor organizations, and more — have spent years building trust and bringing people together in order to build sustainable, state-based power.
“The way these ballot measures have been won in Missouri really sets up the strong foundation for defending and implementing these victories — like the cooperation among groups who care about reproductive rights and economic justice. These types of alliances engaged diverse grassroots memberships that had not necessarily been invested in each other’s issues before. That means that voters from all over the state, and from all backgrounds, are ready to make sure that the legislature will respect these victories,” Granich explained.
To create transformational change and build something lasting beyond a single ballot measure win or loss, organizers must use every phase of the 360 Ballot Measure Lifecycle to build capacity, bring people together around a common goal, center those most impacted, and shift the culture of how we do things. Because it’s how we win that helps us build power.
This type of long-term power-building is particularly important in a state like Missouri, where legislators have introduced more attacks on the ballot initiative process than in any other state. In 2024 alone, Republican lawmakers in Missouri’s House and Senate filed at least 20 bills to undermine or alter the initiative process. One proposed resolution sought to outright ban any change in the constitution protecting abortion rights, and another attempted to create a concurrent majority rule that would have made it possible for a ballot measure to be defeated by as few as 23% of Missouri voters.
Defending the win
Luckily, activists in the state have prepared for these challenges and are ready to fight back. “In the hostile political environment that exists in Missouri, we have to be prepared for legislative defense,” said Kay Mills, the political director of Missouri Jobs with Justice, which helped spearhead Prop A. Their victory in 2024 was informed by another victory in 2018 when Missouri voters passed Proposition B — a ballot measure to increase the statewide minimum wage to $12.
Prop. B won with over 62% of the vote, but Mills said that even with broad support for the measure across partisan lines, the legislature still tried to undo it in myriad different ways over the first three years it was being implemented: They tried to roll it back completely. They tried to freeze wages for tipped workers. They tried to exempt religious institutions from having to comply. Self-interested legislators in the state were willing to try just about anything to prevent the measure from taking effect. So this time around, organizers knew what to expect, and they’d spent the past six years continuing to build the infrastructure needed to usher in and defend another win.
“In Missouri, we’ve worked really hard to build a strong coalition of grassroots organizations, because alone we just don’t have as much power as we do when we invest in each other and do this work together,” Mills said.
Missouri isn’t the only state where organizers are taking a 360 approach to winning at the ballot. This election, Nebraska voters passed Initiative 436, Paid Sick Leave for Nebraskans, which provides for paid sick leave for working Nebraskans. This comes after Nebraskans passed a measure to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour in 2022, repealed language from their state constitution allowing slavery or involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime in 2020, and voted to expand Medicaid in 2018.
Brad Christian-Sallis, Director of Power Building at the Nebraska Civic Engagement Table, said that organizers in Nebraska know that any and all victories at the ballot box will need to be defended.
”That’s just part of the nature of this work,” he said. “And because we know and have always known that whatever victories we got we would have to defend, we did a lot of work to make sure we built strong coalitions that were geographically diverse.
“Regardless of who we’re talking to in the legislature when we’re defending these wins, we’ll be able to say, ‘Your constituents agree with us.’”
Moving forward, Christian-Sallis said he’s incredibly optimistic about what’s to come. As an organizer who spends much of his time knocking on doors and talking with voters, he believes that most people have a good grasp on the power they hold as individuals, but sometimes there’s a disconnect in “not realizing how that power gets multiplied in community.”
He, Granich, and Mills are all grounded in their belief that none of us is as strong as all of us. And as we move forward, our work is clear: We must defend direct democracy and the will of the people, we must implement voter-approved ballot initiatives and we must build off these victories as we move towards equity, justice, and freedom for all.
Featured image courtesy of Missouri Jobs With Justice.