Abortion rights supporters scored a huge and surprising victory Tuesday in one of the nation’s most conservative states, with Kansas voters decisively rejecting a constitutional amendment that would have allowed state lawmakers to ban or greatly restrict abortions.
Results were still coming in as the night wore on, but with more than 90 percent of ballots counted, the pro-abortion-rights side was leading by about 18 percentage points, a stunning margin in a state that voted for President Donald J. Trump in 2020 by a margin of just under 15 percentage points.
Here’s what happened.
Opponents of abortion did not perform even in conservative districts.
On Election Day, many observers believed the outcome of the referendum would be decided in increasingly Democratic areas like the Kansas City suburbs — that is, by whether enough voters turned out there to offset the very conservative leanings of the rest of the state. But abortion opponents fared surprisingly poorly even in the reddest seats.
Consider far western Kansas, a rural area along the Colorado border that votes overwhelmingly Republican. In Hamilton County, which voted 81 percent for Mr. Trump in 2020, fewer than 56 percent chose the anti-abortion position Tuesday (with about 90 percent of the votes counted there). In Greeley County, which voted more than 85 percent for Mr. Trump, only about 60 percent chose the anti-abortion position.
We can talk about cities all day, but Kansas is known as a rural GOP state for a reason: Rural GOP districts cover enough of the state that they can, and almost always do, outnumber cities. The amendment’s rejection had as much to do with tepid support in the reddest districts as it did with strong opposition in the bluest.
Yes, the swing zones have rotated to the left.
Cities and suburbs certainly deserve some credit, though. Relatively thin margins of victory for abortion opponents in western Kansas left the door wide open, but abortion rights supporters still had to walk through it, and they did.
Wyandotte County, where Kansas City, Kansas is located, voted 65 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, but 74 percent for abortion rights on Tuesday. Neighboring Johnson County, the state’s most populous, voted 53 percent for Mr. Biden, but more than 68 percent for abortion rights.
What was actually striking was the extent to which the picture was the same everywhere. From the bluest counties to the reddest, abortion rights did better than Mr. Biden, and opposition to abortion did worse than Mr. Trump.
Voter turnout was high.
We won’t know exactly how many people voted, much less their party breakdown or demographic characteristics, until the results are fully counted. But we can now say that turnout across the state is much higher than expected — almost as high as it was in the last midterm election.
About 940,000 Kansas residents voted in the referendum, according to preliminary New York Times estimates, compared with about 1.05 million in the November 2018 midterm elections. The difference between primary and general election turnout is typically much wider. bigger than this one.
Before Tuesday, the Kansas Secretary of State’s office projected a voter turnout of about 36 percent. But as voting closed, Secretary of State Scott Schwab told reporters that unofficial evidence suggested turnout could reach 50 percent, an extraordinary increase over expectations. The Times estimate of 940,000 would mean a 49 percent turnout.
The voters expected to turn out Tuesday would, under normal circumstances, have been mostly Republican. That’s not only because registered Republicans vastly outnumber registered Democrats in Kansas, but also because most of the contested races on the ballot were Republican primaries, giving Democrats little reason to vote — other than to oppose the constitutional amendment.
The Supreme Court messed up the calculations of abortion opponents.
Abortion opponents’ strategic decisions around the amendment began with the choice to put it first on Tuesday’s ballot. The primary electorate was expected to be small and disproportionately Republican, and it seemed like a reasonable assumption that the amendment would have a better chance of passing in that environment than in a general election vote.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade in June upended that strategy, turning what might otherwise have been an under-the-radar ballot measure into a nationally controlled referendum on abortion rights. Many voters may have previously seen the stakes as theoretical: If the US constitution protects abortion rights, what does it really matter if the Kansas constitution protects the rights? But then the Supreme Court overturned the first part of that equation, and Kansas suddenly became an island of abortion access in a sea of Southern and Plains states banning the procedure.
Groups on both sides have showered the state with millions of dollars in advertising. Democrats who would otherwise have stayed home, knowing their party had few competitive primaries on the ballot, turned out specifically to vote against the amendment. Abortion rights supporters have been gripped by that great political motivator: anger.
On Tuesday, the results were clear.
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