Kansas abortion vote suggests similar results in most states
Turnout appears to give Democrats midterm edge
There was every reason to expect a close election.
Instead, Tuesday’s resounding victory for abortion rights supporters in Kansas offered some of the most concrete evidence yet that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has shifted the political landscape. The victory, by a 5941 margin in a Republican stronghold, suggests Democrats will be the energized party on an issue where Republicans have usually had an enthusiasm advantage.
The Kansas vote implies that around 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 to 5050). This is a rough estimate based on how demographic characteristics predicted the results of recent abortion referendums. But it is an evidencebased way of arriving at a fairly obvious conclusion: If abortion rights wins 59 percent support in Kansas, it would do even better than that nationwide.
This tally is in line with recent national surveys that showed greater support for legal abortion after the court’s decision. And the high turnout, especially among Democrats, confirms that abortion is not just some wedge issue of importance to political activists. The stakes of abortion policy have become high enough that it can drive a high midterm-like turnout on its own.
None of this proves 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 backs of abortion rights supporters.
There was not much public polling in the run-up to the Kansas election, but the best available data suggested that voters would probably split fairly evenly on abortion.
In a New York Times compilation of national polling published 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 Cooperative Election Study in 2020 found that the state’s registered voters were evenly split on whether abortion should be legal.
It may seem surprising that abortion supporters would even have a chance in Kansas, given the state’s long tradition of voting for Republicans. But Kansas is more reliably Republican than it is conservative. The state has an above-average number of college graduates, a group that has swung toward Democrats in recent years.
Kansas voted for Donald Trump by around 15 percentage points in 2020, enough to make it pretty safely Republican. Yet it is not quite off the board for Democrats. Republicans have learned this the hard way. Look no further than the 2018 Democratic victory in the governor’s race.
Even so, a landslide victory for abortion rights in Kansas did not appear to be a probable outcome, whether based on the polls or the recent initiatives. The likeliest explanations for the surprise: Voters may be more supportive of abortion rights in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe (as national polls imply); they may be more cautious about eliminating abortion rights now that there are real policy consequences to these initiatives; abortion rights supporters may be more energized to go to the polls.
Abortion rights supporters may not always find it so easy to advance their cause. They were defending the status quo in Kansas. Elsewhere, they will be trying to overturn abortion bans.
Whatever the explanation, if abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much 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 would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative.
If there is any rule about partisan turnout in American politics, it is that registered Republicans turn out at higher rates than registered Democrats.
While the Kansas figures are still preliminary, it appears that registered Democrats were likelier to vote than registered Republicans.
Overall, 276,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary, which was held on Tuesday as well, compared with 451,000 who voted in the Republican primary.