Nebraska passed it with 68 percent of the vote. In a midterm cycle where Republicans got shellacked nearly everywhere else — voters said biological males do not belong in girls' sports.
They weren't alone.
Four states — Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, and Colorado — all approved ballot measures on Tuesday night barring biological males from competing in women's athletics. Washington's Initiative 638 passed with 56 percent. Arizona's "Protect Girls Sports in Arizona Act" cleared at 59 percent. Nebraska's Initiative Measure 442 hit 68 percent. And Colorado's Proposition 134 squeaked through at 52.4 percent — in Colorado, a state that hasn't gone red in a presidential election since 2004.
Washington's Initiative 638 applies to girls' K-12 school sports and reverses a longstanding state policy that allowed transgender students to compete on teams matching their gender identity. Arizona's measure goes further — separating not just sports teams but locker rooms and bathroom access based on birth certificate sex. Nebraska's Initiative Measure 442 covers K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and even private schools, requiring them to designate sports as male, female, or coed and barring biological males from female-only teams. The Nebraska Supreme Court upheld the measure's validity in October 2026, clearing the way for voters to have the final word.
Colorado's Proposition 134 bans transgender athletes from gendered sports from kindergarten through college, requiring students assigned male at birth to play on boys' or coed teams.
Matt Sharp, Alliance Defending Freedom's Senior Counsel and vice president of public policy, put it plainly: "Girls deserve to compete on a safe and fair playing field." He noted that girls have "lost athletic opportunities and medals" — a statement that would've been considered unremarkable common sense a decade ago and is now treated as a political grenade.
The usual institutional response to these results will be to call them products of fear and misinformation. That argument has a structural problem: it requires you to believe that voters in four different states, across vastly different political cultures, all got tricked on the same night. Washington state — home of Seattle, Amazon, and some of the most progressive voter demographics in the country — passed this at 56 percent. The "misinformation" theory needs a better explanation for why deep-blue electorates keep arriving at the same conclusion.
This is the issue that breaks the polling models. Every cycle, we're told the culture has moved on, that resistance to trans athletes in women's sports is a fringe position held by people who watch too much Fox News. And every cycle it goes to a ballot, it wins. Not narrowly. Not in ruby-red strongholds. In purple and blue states, by margins that suggest the actual fringe position is the one being promoted in faculty lounges and cable news panels.
Four states. One night. During a cycle where Republicans lost ground almost everywhere they looked.
The ballot box doesn't care about the narrative.