It wasn’t even close; it was a blast With an unexpectedly large turnout and a wide margin, Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected a measure that would have removed the right to abortion from their state constitution. Nearly 60 percent of voters in the deeply conservative state rejected the anti-abortion measure. Only 40% supported it.
The so-called Value Them Both Act would have drastically devalued Kansas women. The bill was designed to amend the state constitution in response to a 2019 ruling by the state’s highest court, which held that abortion was protected under the state charter’s guarantee of “equal rights and inalienable” for all citizens. In contrast to the US Supreme Court, the Kansas court rejected the idea that civil rights were frozen in time at the time of the document’s ratification; instead, they extended these equal rights to women. “Now we are asked: Is this bill of rights more than an idealized aspiration?” the court wrote. “And, if so, do substantive rights include a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, including the decision to continue the pregnancy? We answer those questions, ‘Yes.'” Overwhelmingly, by a margin of about 20 points, Kansan voters agreed with them.
It was the first electoral test of support for abortion rights since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June, and the results were unequivocal. Even in conservative Kansas, abortion rights are popular with most Americans. Even in conservative Kansas, abortion bans are offensive to them.
On paper, this shouldn’t have been surprising. Americans have a wide range of views on abortion, but broadly speaking, the idea that women and others should have the legal right to end a pregnancy is very popular, capturing between 60% and 70% support. As a result, ballot initiatives that ask voters to restrict abortion tend to fail, according to New York magazine correspondent Irin Carmon. A measure that would have granted personhood rights to fetuses and embryos failed in ultra-conservative Mississippi in 2011. A municipal ballot measure seeking to ban abortion after 20 weeks in the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico failed by a large margin at an unusually high level. -turnout elections in 2013. When South Dakota passed its abortion ban in 2006, pro-choice advocates managed to collect enough signatures to put the measure to a popular vote. The electorate also rejected it.
The US Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v Wade is particularly unpopular with the public and has sparked renewed passion for the pro-choice cause. According to the CNN poll, 63% of Americans, nearly two-thirds, say they disapprove of the court’s decision. Just over half of them, 51%, say they “strongly” disapprove. This public outrage clearly translates into votes. After the court reversed Roe on June 24, many states saw a surge in new voter registrations. In Kansas, 70% of new voters were women.
There were some signs that the anti-abortion side was nervous, even before its resounding defeat on Election Day. They played dirty. The vote was scheduled for an oppressively hot primary day in August, when turnout is typically low and Republicans fare better. In the days leading up to the election, a Republican-aligned company in Nevada sent text messages to voters in Kansas. “Kansas women are losing their choice over reproductive rights,” the texts read. “Voting YES on the amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.” A vote in favor of the constitutional amendment would have been a vote against the right to abortion. It is clear that the anti-choice Republicans didn’t think they could win on merit. Turns out they couldn’t.
But you’d never know how popular abortion rights are because of the behavior of Democrats, who for the past three decades, and especially since the election of Donald Trump, have been allergic to full-throated defenses of reproductive rights and other so-called “culture war” issues.
The party’s centrist leadership has calculated that only economic issues – defined, in practice, as issues affecting white men – can generate enthusiasm among voters. The Biden administration was ineffective in its response to Dobbs, agreeing to take only the most fragile and risk-averse steps to restore abortion access and alienating large swathes of its base while trying to maintain focus on their efforts to slow down. inflation Biden almost never says “abortion.” You get the feeling he’d rather not talk about it at all.
But the results in Kansas suggest it should be. The abortion ballot initiative produced massive turnout. Abortion rights received considerably more electoral support than Joe Biden in most counties in Kansas. It’s a matter of the so-called “culture war” that led voters to vote for an item on the Democratic agenda. The Kansas vote shows that overturning Roe has created a moral emergency to which voters will respond. Ignoring these so-called “culture war” issues doesn’t make Democrats look sane and moderate. It makes them look like cowards, running away from a fight.
What Republicans want to do in America, especially on abortion rights, is unpopular. Most importantly, it is undemocratic and immoral. This is a fight voters want to take on. It’s time for the Democratic Party to get on board.