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Ballot-measure results reveal the power of state policy

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WIPING AWAY tears, Lauren Brenzel, who led Florida’s campaign to enshrine a constitutional right to an abortion, claimed one victory: “A majority of Floridians…just voted to end Florida’s abortion ban.” Though 57% of Floridians supported the amendment, it fell short of the 60% threshold required in the state. Florida’s current law banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, will stand. The proposed amendment would have made abortion accessible until about 24 weeks from conception. The loss will affect 4m women in Florida and millions more across America’s south-east, where the procedure is highly restricted.

Nine other states voted on abortion measures on November 5th. South Dakotans rejected even a limited loosening of their strict ban. Nebraskans enshrined a 12-week ban into their constitution. Some states voted the other way: a slim majority of Missourians threw out the state’s complete prohibition. In Arizona, Montana and Nevada amendments passed easily. At an election-night party in Phoenix, Laura Dent, campaign manager of the pro-abortion-rights side, lamented the fragmented policy landscape that resulted in victory in Arizona and defeat in Florida. The failures mark the first times abortion-rights supporters have lost a state ballot campaign since the Supreme Court overturned a national right to the procedure in 2022.

Abortion amendments were among the most prominent of nearly 150 initiatives on America’s ballots on November 5th. Such measures allow voters to decide their own policies on everything from criminal justice to climate policy. About $1.2bn was spent campaigning for and against them. Some states have yet to finish counting votes. Abortion aside, the results so far suggest that Americans were aligned on several issues. For the most part, voters repudiated ranked-choice voting (RCV), barred non-citizens from voting and strengthened criminal penalties.

Seven states and Washington, DC, voted on whether to adopt RCV or open primaries, in which all candidates are listed on one ballot regardless of party affiliation. Campaigners hoped such constitutional amendments could help boost moderate candidates over more extreme ones, despite emerging evidence that RCV’s effects on partisanship are minimal. The nation’s capital was the only place that chose to adopt such a system, while Missourians voted to pre-emptively reject the practice. At the time of writing, a measure to repeal Alaska’s relatively new RCV-and-open primaries combo was narrowly leading.

Each of the eight (Republican-leaning) states that weighed whether to bar non-citizens from voting endorsed the idea. These results are a political signal, not a policy change. Before the poll, Donald Trump and Republicans began to question the results of the election by arguing, incorrectly, that illegal immigrants were voting en masse. In reality, the practice is already unlawful except in very few local jurisdictions. A more consequential vote came from Ohioans, who decided not to create an independent redistricting commission for congressional and legislative races. It is the third time in a decade that voters there have tried and failed to stamp out rampant partisan gerrymandering.

Californians will be counting votes for some time, but a controversial measure to strengthen penalties for some thefts and drug crimes seems to have passed with widespread support. In Colorado voters opted to increase funding for police, deny bail for people facing first-degree murder charges and delay parole for violent offenders. These results are part of a broader shift away from milder criminal-justice policies in Democratic states. Arizonans voted to allow police to arrest people for crossing the border illegally. The measure was modelled on a similar law in Texas which is tied up in the courts.

All these votes together offer a mishmash of policies in states that can differ greatly from one another. But the results still provide lessons. The biggest? Americans fed up with what is happening in Washington should look to the states: that’s where a lot of the action is.

Economics

The judge losing his patience with the Trump administration

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DONALD TRUMP likes picking fights with judges. In 2016 Mr Trump said a judge’s Mexican heritage rendered him incapable of fairly adjudicating fraud cases against Trump University, a for-profit institution that closed in 2011. Two years later the president condemned a ruling against his immigration policies as a “disgrace”. Lawsuits against him during the Biden years—including one for conspiring to steal the 2020 election—spurred many attacks.

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Jobs report April 2025:

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Job growth was stronger than expected in April despite worries over the impact of President Donald Trump’s blanket tariffs against U.S. trading partners.

Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 177,000 for the month, slightly below the downwardly revised 185,000 in March but above the Dow Jones estimate for 133,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

The unemployment rate, however, held at 4.2%, as expected., indicating that the labor market is holding relatively stable.

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Economics

Euro zone inflation, April 2025

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Shoppers buy fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs at an outdoor produce market under green-striped canopies in Regensburg, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria, Germany, on April 19, 2025.

Michael Nguyen/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Euro zone inflation was unchanged at 2.2% in April, missing expectations for a move lower, flash data from statistics agency Eurostat showed Friday.

Economists polled by Reuters had been expecting the reading to come in at 2.1% in April compared to March’s 2.2% as inflation has been easing back towards the European Central Bank’s 2% target.

Core inflation, which excludes more volatile food, energy, alcohol and tobacco prices, accelerated to 2.7% from March’s 2.4%. The closely-watched services inflation print also picked up again, coming in at 3.9% compared to the previous 3.5% reading.

The increase in services inflation was likely “driven mainly by Easter timing effects,” Franziska Palmas, senior Europe economist at Capital Economics, said in a note. These effects would reverse in the coming month, she added, suggesting that this left the door open for further interest rate cuts from the European Central Bank.

“We think the services rate will decline significantly in the rest of this year as US tariffs weigh on activity and the labour market continues to weaken,” Palmas added.

ECB President Christine Lagarde told CNBC last week that “we’re heading towards our [inflation] target in the course of 2025, so that disinflationary process is so much on track that we are nearing completion.”

Lagarde and other policymakers last week warned the picture for inflation was less clear in the medium-term, with factors such as potential retaliation countermeasures from Europe against U.S. tariffs and fiscal shifts like Germany’s major infrastructure package coming into play.

Lagarde said the ECB would be “data dependent to the extreme,” when making interest rate decisions. The central bank last cut interest rates last month, taking its key rate — the deposit facility rate — to 2.25%, down from highs of 4% in mid-2023.

An interest cut in June seems appropriate amid many deflationary forces, ECB governing council member says

Several major euro zone economies had already earlier in the week released their latest inflation figures, which are harmonized for comparability across the bloc. Germany’s statistics office said Wednesday it expects consumer prices to have risen by 2.2% in April, below the previous month’s reading but slightly higher than expected. Meanwhile French harmonized inflation came in at 0.8%, also slightly ahead of expectations.

Data released earlier this week indicated that the euro zone economy could be picking up steam, with the bloc’s gross domestic product rising 0.4% in the first quarter of 2025, according to a preliminary reading. This was higher than the forecast of 0.2%, and followed a revised 0.2% growth print in the last quarter of 2024.

Growth is however widely expected to slow in the coming months due to the global tariff fallout.

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