AMONG THE results that came early on election night was for a ballot measure in Florida to enshrine a constitutional right to an abortion. Though 57% of Floridians supported it (with 91% of the vote counted), it failed—falling short of the 60% majority required in the state. The defeat marks the first time state-level abortion-rights campaigners have lost such a ballot campaign since the Supreme Court overturned a national right to the procedure in 2022. Florida’s current law will stand: it bans abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, with limited exceptions.
Nine other states also voted on abortion-related measures on November 5th (see map). Most, including those in Arizona and Nevada, are expected to pass. Tallies in Midwestern states—South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri—may be the tightest. The ballot measures vary in scope, from New York’s expansive equal-rights amendment to South Dakota’s measure offering unfettered access to abortion only in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only Florida required a 60% supermajority.
Map: The Economist
Florida’s proposed constitutional amendment would have made abortion accessible until a fetus’s viability, about 24 weeks from conception, and later if necessary to protect the health of the woman. Its failure will affect not only more than 4m women in Florida but millions more across America’s south-east. If the measure had passed, it would have offered relatively permissive access in a region blanketed with highly restrictive laws. None of the states bordering Florida have procedures for citizen-led ballot initiatives that might overturn their laws.
Florida’s abortion-rights activists had raised $110m, a record for such a campaign. Their messaging emphasised health care and freedom from government interference, hoping the Sunshine State’s social liberalism would help them reach a super-majority. While one famous Floridian, Donald Trump, said that he would be voting against the amendment, he did not join the opposition campaign. Instead Ron DeSantis, the state’s governor, became its figurehead. He labelled the amendment too extreme for Florida and defended the state’s six-week ban.
The campaign was contentious. The state agency that regulates medical providers published videos opposing the proposed change, and the Department of Health threatened criminal prosecutions against television stations airing supportive advertisements, claiming they could discourage women from seeking emergency care. (A federal judge rejected the threatened sanctions, saying: “It’s the First Amendment, stupid”).
More than two-fifths of Americans have now voted on abortion since 2022. The breakneck pace of ballot-measure campaigns will slow. Only two more states with bans—Oklahoma and Arkansas—have provisions for citizen-led ballot initiatives. America’s abortion environment is becoming calcified along regional lines, with little appetite for reform in states with restrictive laws. Given that a national law is unlikely to pass in Congress, many Americans will continue to be forced to travel to receive abortions, or receive posted pills. And harrowing accounts of women in restrictive states who have died from complications during miscarriages, or faced serious health risks because doctors were afraid to treat them, will continue to accumulate.■
WITH AMERICA still reeling from the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump on around 180 countries, a conservative organisation has filed a lawsuit challenging an initial round of tariffs the president announced in February—and doubled in March—on Chinese imports. The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which counts Charles Koch, a right-wing billionaire, among its supporters, argues that Mr Trump lacked the authority to impose these levies. Similar lawsuits against the broader tariff blitz of April 2nd could yet scuttle the boldest—and most destructive—move of Mr Trump’s second term.
President Donald Trump may hope his tariffs jump-start a renaissance in manufacturing in the United States, but the reality is not so simple, according to experts.
The president announced sweeping tariffs Wednesday, including a baseline 10% levy across the board on all imports. He also targeted specific countries with steep tariffs, such as 34% on China, 20% on the European Union and 46% on Taiwan.
Trump said “jobs and factories will come roaring back.”
“We will supercharge our domestic industrial base, we will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers and ultimately more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers,” he said during his news conference.
The U.S. has lost about 6 million jobs over the last four or five decades as companies moved operations overseas, largely because business could be done cheaper elsewhere, said Harry Moser, president of the nonprofit Reshoring Initiative.
He said the tariffs are a good start to overcoming that problem but that dealing with a strong dollar and building up the workforce is the best solution.
Moser said he would have preferred lower levies than those Trump announced.
“Smaller would be easier to defend, but still enough to drive reshoring and FDI [foreign direct investment] in excess of our ability to build and staff factories,” he said.
He said he expects Trump’s initial salvos to result in negotiations.
“As long as he convinces the other countries that he will keep attacking the problem until it’s solved, then they will come forward and maybe let their currency go up a little bit,” Moser said. “Maybe they’ll lower their tariff barriers to our products. Maybe they’ll encourage their companies to put factories here in the United States.”
“When you have crisis of confidence, the confidence of global companies that have announced investments in the U.S., they are going to pause,” Kabra said. “Unless we solve the crisis of confidence, the potential investments, the announced investments will not happen at a fast pace. It will slow down.”
“The U.S. is in the best position to get the incremental factories than it has been in the last 50 years,” he said. Plus, the wave of manufacturing starts that has occurred since the pandemic has stalled and the tariffs will give them more urgency to finish, he said.
Automobile makers are likely among the industries that will reshore, experts said. Trump imposed a 25% tariff on imported cars and has also vowed to tax key auto parts.
Manufacturers of gas-powered cars will have to weigh their options, since they already have a very streamlined supply chain, said University of Washington’s Kouvelis.
“The gas-powered car industry is in trouble with hard-to-adjust supply chains and not enough incentive to do it,” he said.
Electric vehicles are a different story, because they have fewer parts, the battery being the most important, so those companies are more likely to shift operations, he said.
“Everybody understands the U.S. market is lucrative to lose, and the competitors with an advantage [such as Chinese companies] more or less are kept out,” Kouvelis said.
Snyder also said that EVs are among those likely to come to the U.S., but because they will need more capacity. His thesis is that industries that need to expand — rather than close up shop in another country and move — will be the ones that return to the U.S. That includes industrial equipment and semiconductors, he said.
While semiconductors and pharmaceuticals were exempt from the tariffs, they may still be targeted at a later date. Experts said they expect both industries to reshore.
Semiconductor manufacturers got the incentive to return after Congress passed the CHIPS Act in 2022, which provided financial assistance and tax credits to those building and expanding facilities nationally. The computer and electronic products industry saw the most reshoring jobs announced in 2024, according to the Reshoring Initiative.
“Those are high tech, high-end technology and a lot of automation. They don’t need that many workers,” said Tang.
With pharma companies, just some of the supply chain may come back, Kouvelis said.
“The question is, where are you going to apply the tariff? Will you apply to the final or to the chemicals? Because right now, you want the chemicals and the active ingredients to be sourced from China,” Kouvelis said.
Formulation and packaging, however, can be done in the U.S., if that’s enough to avoid tariffs, he said.
“If you want them to bring all of the supply chain, you got to be very aggressive on how you apply tariffs on everything in the supply chain,” Kouvelis said.
Some pharma companies, including Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, already began expanding in the U.S. before Trump took office.
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