There were many reasons to expect a close election.
Instead, Tuesday’s resounding victory for abortion rights supporters in Kansas provided some of the most concrete evidence yet that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has changed the political landscape. The victory, by a 59-41 margin in a Republican stronghold, suggests that Democrats will be the party with energy on an issue where Republicans have typically had an enthusiasm advantage.
The Kansas vote implies that about 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject a similar initiative to roll back abortion rights, including in more than 40 of the 50 states (a few states on each side are very close of 50-50). This is a rough estimate, based on how demographics predicted the results of recent abortion referendums. But it’s an evidence-based way of reaching a fairly obvious conclusion: If abortion rights are getting 59 percent support in Kansas, it’s doing even better than it is nationwide.
It’s a tally that’s in line with recent national polls that showed increased support for legal abortion after the court’s decision. And the high turnout, especially among Democrats, confirms that abortion is not just a wedge issue of importance to political activists. The stakes in abortion politics have become high enough that it can drive high mid-term turnout on its own.
None of this shows that the issue will help Democrats in the midterm elections. And there are limits to what can be gleaned from the Kansas data. But the lopsided margin makes one thing clear: The political winds are now at the back of abortion rights supporters.
A surprisingly decisive result
There wasn’t much public polling before the Kansas election, but the best available data suggested that voters were likely to be fairly evenly split on abortion.
In a Times compilation of national polls released this spring, 48 percent of Kansas voters said they thought abortion should be mostly legal compared with 47 percent who thought it should be mostly illegal. Similarly, the 2020 Cooperative Election Study found that registered voters in the state were evenly split on whether abortion should be legal.
The results of similar recent referendums in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia also pointed toward a close race in Kansas, perhaps even one in which a “no” vote to preserve abortion rights would have an advantage.
As with the Kansas vote, a “yes” vote on each of these four state initiatives would have amended a state constitution to allow significant restrictions on abortion rights or abortion funding. In contrast to Kansas, initiatives passed in all four states, including a 24-point victory in Louisiana in 2020. But support for abortion rights outpaced support for Democratic presidential candidates in relatively white areas of all four states, especially in less religious areas outside. the Deep South.
It’s a pattern that suggests abortion rights would have far greater support than Joe Biden did as a candidate in a relatively white state like Kansas, perhaps even enough to favor abortion rights by to survive
It might seem surprising that abortion supporters even had a chance in Kansas, given the state’s long tradition of voting Republican. But Kansas is more reliably Republican than conservative. The state has an above-average number of college graduates, a group that has tilted toward Democrats in recent years.
Kansas voted for Donald J. Trump by about 15 percentage points in 2020, enough to make him pretty safely Republican. However, the Democrats are not completely off the table. Republicans have learned this the hard way; look no further than the 2018 Democratic victory in the governor’s race.
Still, a landslide victory for abortion rights in Kansas did not appear to be a likely outcome, either based on polls or recent initiatives. The most likely explanations for the surprise: voters may be more supportive of abortion rights after Roe’s overturning (as implied by national polls); they may be more cautious about removing abortion rights now that these initiatives have real political consequences; Abortion rights supporters may have more energy to go to the polls.
Abortion rights supporters don’t always find it so easy to advance their cause. They were defending the status quo in Kansas; elsewhere, they will try to overturn abortion bans.
Whatever the explanation, if abortion supporters could do as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance of defending abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is far more conservative than the nation as a whole, and the result was not close. There are only seven states, in the Deep South and the Mountain West, where abortion rights supporters are expected to fail a hypothetically similar initiative.
A change in participation
If there’s one rule about partisanship in American politics, it’s that registered Republicans have higher rates than registered Democrats.
While the Kansas numbers are still preliminary, it appears that registered Democrats were more likely to vote than registered Republicans.
In all, 276,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary, which was also held Tuesday, compared to 451,000 who cast ballots in the Republican primary. The Democratic turnout amounted to 56 percent of the number of registered Democrats in the state, while the number of Republican primary voters was 53 percent of the number of registered Republicans. (Unaffiliated voters are the second largest group in Kansas.)
In Johnson County, outside Kansas City, 67 percent of registered Democrats participated, compared to 60 percent of registered Republicans.
This is a rare feat for Democrats in a high-turnout election. In nearby Iowa, where historical turnout data is readily available, turnout among registered Democrats in a general election has never eclipsed turnout among registered Republicans in at least 40 years.
The higher Democratic turnout helps explain why the result was less favorable to abortion opponents than expected. And it confirms that Democrats are now much more forceful on the abortion issue, reversing a pattern from the last election. It may even raise hopes among Democrats that they could challenge the president’s party’s long-standing trend of low turnout in midterm elections.
For Republicans, the turnout numbers may offer modest solace. They could reasonably expect turnout to be more favorable in the midterms in November, when abortion won’t be the only issue on the ballot and Republicans will have many more reasons to vote, including control of Congress.