Last week, voters in Ohio passed a pair of ballot initiatives that were vociferously opposed by conservatives: one to legalize marijuana for recreational use and another to codify abortion rights in the state’s constitution. Approved with nearly 60 percent support, both measures reflect a broader national consensus. According to one Gallup poll published within a day of last week’s elections, public support in the US for legal marijuana stands at a record high of 70 percent. A 2022 Pew study, meanwhile, found that some 61 percent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases.

In the plainest of terms, then, last week’s outcome was a simple expression of democracy. Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on who you ask. During an interview on the far-right network Newsmax that quickly went viral, former Pennsylvania senator and onetime Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the perplexing case that democratic votes actually constitute some kind of cheat code:

[The Democratic Party’s] base is more ginned up to go out and vote generally than Republicans. We’ve seen this now for the last several years, and so a base election, they — Democrats — outspend, and you put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote. It was a secret sauce for disaster in Ohio. I don’t know what they were thinking, but that’s why I thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot, because pure democracies are not the way to run a country.