We’re back! Part Two: Our latest edition in the Arkansas Times series on the triumphs and heartbreak of the citizen-led push to put abortion on the 2024 ballot.
‘We had to be perfect’
What went right
and what went
wrong in the
campaign to
restore abortion
rights in Arkansas
This is the second installment in an Arkansas Times series. Start here for the first entry.
‘We could do this in Arkansas’
It was not a surprise, but it was still a shock: On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. For the first time in nearly five decades, federal legal protections for abortion were gone.
Jason Rapert, a former state senator, tweeted: “TODAY #Abortion ends in #Arkansas — To God Be All the Glory.” Rapert had been the sponsor of a 2019 trigger law, which decreed that an abortion ban would automatically go into effect in Arkansas if Roe v. Wade was overturned. The restrictions were immediate and draconian: State lawmakers nixed exceptions for cases of rape or incest; all abortions were banned, with the only exception a narrowly tailored exemption “to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency.”
In 2022, Christine Althoff — then on the board of ACLU Arkansas — knocked on doors to help defeat a ballot initiative that would restrict abortion rights in Kansas. Voters there rejected the measure by an 18-point margin. “The more we talked to people, and then saw the results of that vote, we thought: If it can happen in Kansas, we could do this in Arkansas,” Althoff said.
 100vw, 1200px”/>From Left: Volunteers at War Memorial Park in Little Rock | Supporters of the abortion amendment outside the Chappell Roan concert in Little Rock, June 4 | Gennie Diaz, executive director of For AR People Credit: Ben Hall, Kristin Stuart</p><p>That November, reproductive rights activists began conducting informal meetings about how to respond. A number of prominent national and state groups were involved in these early discussions, which centered on the possibility of a ballot initiative. Popular ballot measures have been an increasingly common tool in the last decade in Arkansas, and represent the only end-around for the public when the Legislature won’t budge. In the past decade, citizen-led petition drives raised the minimum wage and legalized medical marijuana, even as the state’s elected officials have become more and more intractably right wing.</p><p>Early on, the group conducted polling on measures to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The version that polled the best — guaranteeing the right to an abortion up to 18 weeks of pregnancy, alongside exceptions past that point for rape, incest and health of the mother — found that 51% of Arkansans would support such an amendment.</p><p>For national groups, that number was far too low. After the fall of Roe, there were battles over abortion policy across the country. There were other states that offered more promising terrain than Arkansas, where the polling showed a split electorate even prior to the inevitable big-money negative campaign that would take swings at the measure if it made the ballot.</p><p>National groups also preferred measures that would restore the Roe protections to fetal viability (a moving target with medical advances, but roughly 24 weeks, far later than the 18-week mark in Arkansas’s proposal). For some, enshrining restrictions into the state constitution that were tougher than the law under Roe felt like a step backward.</p><p>But for Arkansas activists suddenly living under a total ban, that poll number was a beacon of hope. Sure, it was a slim majority. But it was still a majority. Here, in Arkansas, a dead-red state led by hardcore anti-abortion politicians. The 18-week line might be frustrating for national activists, but it would still protect the vast majority of abortions (according to 2022 CDC data, 92.6% of abortions in Arkansas happened in the first 17 weeks), and the more moderate approach might represent a strategy tailormade for a state like Arkansas.</p><p>As state and national groups dropped out one by one, the coalition dwindled down to seven core activists by the summer of 2023 — including Lauren Cowles and Gennie Diaz. With the bigger groups gone, the coalition turned to Cowles and Diaz, both of whom have leadership roles in local political organizations, for institutional support. For AR People, a nonprofit headed by Diaz, became the conduit for the abortion campaign. Founded by Diaz in 2020, For AR People had just two staffers in addition to her. This would be the first time Cowles and For AR People had taken on a ballot initiative campaign.</p><p>While some within the campaign later questioned whether Cowles and For AR People had the institutional capacity to take on a campaign of this magnitude, it’s important to keep in mind that by that summer, no other organization was stepping up.</p><p>“When it wasn’t a good fit for the national groups, we said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it,’” Diaz said. “And then we didn’t sleep for nine months.”</p><p class=)
Cowles moved back to her hometown of Little Rock in 2018, after 14 years in Washington, D.C. — first as a staffer in Sen. Mark Pryor’s office and then as a lobbyist. She began working to build an infrastructure to more efficiently direct flows of money to progressive causes, and was joined in her efforts by Diaz. The network of organizations associated with them — at least eight — is often referred to, unofficially, as “Arkansas Values” (two of the organizations have “Arkansas Values” in the name). Only For AR People, Diaz’s organization, had any legal connection to the abortion rights ballot initiative campaign.
This network helps to fund various nonprofits and progressive causes, including the Arkansas Times. Cowles serves as executive director. But if you search for an Arkansas Values website, you will come up empty. Cowles and Diaz declined to comment on any aspects of organizational structure beyond what is available in public records.
For better or worse, this kind of secrecy is absolutely par for the course when it comes to political operations bolstered by big donors: The opacity is precisely the point. Now, I know how that sounds. But it’s worth keeping in mind that progressive political operations playing to win don’t make the rules, they have to play by them. For some transparency advocates, a consortium like this will always raise eyebrows. But as long as they color within the lines, there are political and fundraising upsides to keeping things out of public view.
There’s one other goofy thing, and I want to be crystal clear that I genuinely don’t think there’s anything remotely nefarious about this, it’s just funny. For reasons that I struggle to fully understand, the network declined to acknowledge the existence of the name “Arkansas Values” or “AV.” Like, the idea, I guess, was that we were not supposed to type either of those words in the story. That proved complicated. In any event, former Times editor and Arkansas Values contributor Max Brantley outed them in a comment posted to this series.
Despite the cloak-and-dagger routine, volunteer leaders within the abortion campaign routinely referred to Cowles, Diaz and their network as “Arkansas Values” or “AV,” and for simplicity’s sake, we’ll do the same in this story.
When activists first began meeting in late 2022, it was a loosely organized group, open for anyone committed to the issue to join, working together by consensus. In addition to Cowles and Diaz, there was Rachel Spencer, a senior manager at Walmart who previously served as a presidential management fellow for the federal government. There was Ezra Smith, a Fayetteville attorney and experienced progressive organizer. Early on, David Couch, a Little Rock attorney who has been involved in many of the most high-profile ballot initiative campaigns in the state for more than a decade (including minimum wage and medical marijuana), also participated in meetings and discussion. And there were other notable figures in reproductive rights activism working behind the scenes.
On November 9, 2023, around a year after the informal meetings began, Cowles filed the petition to enshrine the right to an abortion in the Arkansas constitution. The group formed an official committee to fundraise and make expenditures for a campaign, with a name meant to convey a bipartisan, Arkansas-friendly approach: Arkansans for Limited Government.
Soon, other experienced players in reproductive rights joined up, eventually becoming key volunteer leaders that helped anchor the campaign — including Althoff; Murry Newbern, a longtime Planned Parenthood volunteer who previously worked as a policy analyst and lobbyist for the organization; Veronica McClane, a social worker and the executive director of CAPES, the group that backed an unsuccessful ballot initiative to repeal LEARNS, the state’s education overhaul; Marlee Stark, who works in economic development for the city of Fayetteville; Katie Rhodes, a marketing consultant and experienced community organizer; and Kristin Stuart, an activist with Indivisible Arkansas and the Arkansas Abortion Support Network, and has worked on field campaigns for progressive candidates. Alongside the original coalition, the group formed something close to a local Dream Team of abortion activists, political organizers and people with experience in ballot initiative efforts.
Cowles and Diaz said that the original plan was for them to take on a temporary role in getting the campaign off the ground, then hire a major firm to take on executive leadership of the campaign once they got enough funding to do so. But the funding didn’t come in as they had hoped, they said, so they stepped in to fill the gap. Eventually, on Feb. 19, Cowles named herself executive director of the AFLG campaign and Diaz communications director.
 100vw, 1200px”/>The Arkansans for Limited Government leadership team: Gennie Diaz and Lauren Cowles Credit: Ben Hall</p><p>Arkansans for Limited Government, or AFLG, was registered as a ballot question committee with the state’s Ethics Commission on November 27, 2023. A ballot question committee is basically just an instrument of government regulation, similar to a campaign committee for a political candidate. The committee has a bank account and is required to itemize and report all of its fundraising and all of its expenditures. In theory, the members of the committee would also have the final say-so on the campaign’s policies, though how this works out in practice can vary.</p><p>Hershey Garner, a Fayetteville doctor and lawyer who is married to Democratic state Rep. Denise Garner, was named chair; Jim McHugh, a Little Rock attorney, was named treasurer. And there were two more members: Spencer also joined as a member, along with For AR People — the nonprofit led by Diaz. It’s not unusual for a group to join a ballot question committee as part of a larger coalition. But when Cowles and Diaz wound up running the campaign, the optics were awkward: With For AR People on the committee, they had a role both as executive leaders and as the board exercising oversight of the executive. </p><p>“In hindsight, I wish I had advocated for a clearer delineation between For AR People and the abortion campaign,” Smith said. “At times it felt like Arkansans for Limited Government operated as a subsidiary of For AR People. There were times when our workflow on the campaign was complicated by that dynamic. Despite everyone’s good intentions, what we wound up with had a structural conflict of interest. This would have been true in any situation where a single organization is running every aspect of a ballot initiative: You need a separate oversight body to represent the campaign’s interests, and you need a firewall between that body and the organization running the show.” </p><p>Cowles and Diaz agreed that structural reform was a key lesson. For them, the root of the problem was the lack of a more formalized organization. From their perspective, some in the early coalition wanted a more consensus-based approach that was just unrealistic for a campaign of this type.</p><p>“This is our everyday job,” Diaz said. “We’ve done this before, know where the hiccups can come. In retrospect, we should have pushed harder to formalize and structure more.” They would have preferred more official written agreements on leadership roles and chain of command.</p><p>Couch, whose involvement with the abortion coalition ended in November 2023, offered some critiques from the peanut gallery. “There was no reason for For AR People to be on the ballot question committee,” he said. “One reason the abortion thing fell apart is that AV wanted to have exclusive control over it so they could get exclusive credit for it — in order to elevate their profile for fundraising in the future. When you have an initiative, you can’t worry about anything other than passing the initiative. You can’t take your eye off the ball, and they took their eye off the ball.”</p><p>Cowles and Diaz said they took their responsibility as stewards of the campaign seriously. And there is no reason to doubt their deep and passionate commitment to the cause of abortion rights. Even if Couch is wrong in his diagnosis, though, the perception issue remained tricky: What would happen if the interests of the AV network and the abortion campaign didn’t perfectly align?</p><p>McHugh, the committee treasurer, said that he saw no problem with the presence of For AR People on the ballot question committee, but he said that there was a disconnect about what the role of the committee was in relationship to the campaign leadership. </p><p>Cowles and Diaz said they thought there was an implicit agreement that the ballot question committee would be relatively hands off. Empowering campaign leaders with a fair amount of latitude to run the operation day to day makes sense: They have to be nimble and make quick decisions on the fly. From McHugh’s point of view, the committee wanted to empower Cowles and Diaz, but expected input and oversight on major decisions to a much greater degree than what happened. “I think it would have been helpful to have more involvement from the ballot question committee,” he said. “I don’t think they viewed it as a serious oversight body.” After the disqualification, McHugh said, when objections were made on a policy decision, Cowles told the committee it was not a voting body, which came as a surprise to McHugh. </p><p>This underlying tension would turn out to be at the core of many of the challenges to come: What happens if there isn’t consensus about a key strategic decision? Who makes the final call?</p><p>These issues reached a boiling point after the ballot measure was disqualified and some committee members had disagreements with Cowles on matters such as contracts, messaging and resourcing. On August 1, Spencer resigned. In her resignation letter, she wrote: “I feel compelled to step down because it has become increasingly apparent that Arkansas Values (‘AV’) refuses to accept oversight from this committee. … There has been a pattern of unilateral decision making by AV.”</p><p>The letter closed: “I remain supportive of the mission and hope that my resignation will prompt a reassessment of the processes and practices currently in place.”</p><p>A word on disclosure: The Arkansas Times has financial and content partner relationships with the Arkansas Values network, which has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the Times. Austin Gelder, the editor in chief of the Times, is a friend of Lauren Cowles and Gennie Diaz, and worked briefly with Diaz at For AR People before coming to the Times. </p><p class=)
Last summer, my colleagues and I wrote more words than I care to remember on the battle over the citizen-led effort to expand abortion rights in Arkansas. But while the legal fight between the grassroots coalition that gathered signatures to put the question on the ballot and the state’s anti-abortion gatekeepers produced the most dramatic public drama, that’s just one part of the tale.
Read the Full Introduction
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Publish date : 2025-02-04 07:28:00
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