There was every reason to expect close elections.
Instead, Tuesday’s resounding victory for abortion rights advocates in Kansas offered 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 the Republican stronghold, suggests that Democrats will be the energized party on an issue where Republicans typically have an edge in enthusiasm.
The Kansas vote suggests that about 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject such an initiative to repeal abortion rights, including in more than 40 of the 50 states (several states on each side are very close to 50-50). That’s a rough estimate based on how demographics predicted the results of recent abortion referendums. But that’s an evidence-based way to arrive at a fairly obvious conclusion: If abortion rights get 59 percent support in Kansas, it does even better than it does nationwide.
That’s a result that’s consistent with recent national polls that have shown greater support for legal abortions since the court’s decision. And high voter turnout, especially among Democrats, confirms that abortion is not just any issue important to political activists. The stakes of abortion politics have become high enough that they alone can drive midterm-like high turnout.
None of this proves 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 field makes one thing clear: The political winds are now at the backs of abortion rights advocates.
A surprisingly decisive result
There weren’t many public polls ahead of the Kansas election, but the best data available suggested voters were likely to be fairly evenly split on abortion.
In a Times national poll compilation released this spring, 48 percent of Kansas voters said they think abortion should be mostly legal, compared with 47 percent who think 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 point to a close race in Kansas — perhaps even one in which the “no” vote to preserve abortion rights will have the upper hand.
As with the Kansas vote, a yes vote on any of these four state initiatives would change the state constitution to allow significant restrictions on abortion rights or abortion funding. Unlike Kansas, the 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 districts in all four states, especially in -few religious areas outside of the deep south.
It’s a model that suggests abortion rights would have much more support than Joe Biden as a candidate in a relatively white state like Kansas — perhaps even enough to make abortion rights favored to survive.
It might seem surprising that abortion supporters would even have 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 swung Democratic in recent years.
Kansas voted for Donald J. Trump by about 15 percentage points in 2020, enough to make him pretty safely Republican. Yet this is not entirely out of the ordinary for Democrats. Republicans have learned this the hard way; look no further than the 2018 Democratic victory in the governor’s race.
However, a landslide victory for abortion rights in Kansas did not seem a likely outcome, whether based on polls or recent initiatives. The most likely explanations for the surprise: Voters may be more supportive of abortion rights after Roe was overturned (as national polls show); they may be more cautious about removing abortion rights now that there are real political consequences to these initiatives; supporters of abortion rights may be more energetic to go to the polls.
Abortion rights supporters may not always find it so easy to support their cause. They defended the status quo in Kansas; elsewhere they will try to overturn abortion bans.
Whatever the explanation, if abortion advocates could do as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance of protecting abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it’s far more conservative than the nation as a whole — and the result wasn’t close. There are only seven states — in the Deep South and the Mountain West — where abortion rights supporters are expected to fail a hypothetical similar initiative.
Change in voter turnout
If there’s any rule of thumb about partisan turnout in American politics, it’s that registered Republicans vote at a higher rate than registered Democrats.
Although the data for Kansas is still preliminary, it appears that registered Democrats are more likely to vote than registered Republicans.
A total of 276,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary, which also took place on Tuesday, compared to 451,000 who cast ballots in the Republican primary. The Democratic turnout was 56 percent of registered Democrats in the state, while the number of Republican primary voters was 53 percent of registered Republicans. (Unaffiliated voters are the second largest group in Kansas.)
In Johnson County, outside Kansas City, Missouri, 67 percent of registered Democrats turned out, compared to 60 percent of registered Republicans.
This is a rare feat for Democrats in a high-turnout election. In nearby Iowa, where historical voter 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.
Superior 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 the pattern of the last election. It could even boost Democrats’ hopes that they can buck a long-standing trend of low turnout for the president’s party in midterm elections.
For Republicans, turnout numbers may be modest. They may reasonably hope that turnout will be more favorable in November’s midterm elections, when abortion will not be the only issue on the ballot and Republicans will have many more reasons to vote — including control of Congress.
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