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Kansas Result Suggests 4 Out of 5 States Would Back Abortion Rights in Similar Vote [1]

['Nate Cohn']

Date: 2022-08-04

It’s a pattern that suggests abortion rights would have much greater support than Joe Biden did as a candidate in a relatively white state like Kansas — perhaps even enough to make abortion rights favored to survive.

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 J. Trump by around 15 percentage points in 2020, enough to make it pretty safely Republican. Yet it’s 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.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/upshot/kansas-abortion-vote-analysis.html

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