What Happened in Kansas is Bigger Than Abortion
Tuesday’s defeat of a constitutional referendum that would have rolled back abortion rights in Kansas is not as shocking as some pundits and election watchers would have one believe.
Many national takes about what happened on the ground interpret the results as an impossible achievement in a ‘deep red’ state. Respectfully, this is the wrong way to think about Kansas. As a native Kansan, I watched Tuesday’s primary closely. Like many, I was relieved, but I was not surprised.
If you are genuinely surprised by the results in Kansas, then you may not fully appreciate the complexities of the state, its culture, and its voters. I want to set some of the record straight on what happened in Kansas.
Yes, Kansas is a Republican state, but it is more pragmatic than ideological. Yes, Kansas tends to consistently vote Republican in Presidential and Senate elections and has a conservative Republican super-majority in the legislature. However, would it surprise you to learn that Kansas has a fine tradition of electing Democratic and progressive women Governors, Senators, and members of Congress?
As it stands, Kansas does not presently qualify as a ‘deep red’ state. From an institutional perspective, Kansas is not dominated by a Republican trifecta. Kansas has a Democratic Governor, Laura Kelly, who defeated the Trump-backed voter fraud conspiracist, Kris Kobach in 2018. The Kansas 3rd Congressional district (the swing district encapsulating the northeastern suburban counties of Johnson and Wyandotte) is currently represented by a two-term Democrat, Sharice Davids. This district routinely swings back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. Democrat Dennis Moore represented the district between 2000-2008. Kevin Yoder, a Republican, represented the district from 2010 until 2018 when Sharice Davids won the Congressional seat. Furthermore, public opinion on the ground showcase that a plurality of Kansans believe abortion should be legal. The bottom line is that Kansas is not as deep red as some interpret it to be.
The defeat of the constitutional amendment on Tuesday was about more than just abortion rights. It was a victory for democracy. Voters grasped the implications of what was at stake in Tuesday’s primary. The amendment represented a political attack on the Kansas Supreme Court for its 2019 opinion in Trust Women Foundation Inc. v. Bennett in which the court held that, “the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights protects all Kansans’ natural right of personal autonomy,” which “includes the right to control one’s own body, assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination.” The court went on to affirm that the state constitution allows persons to make their own decisions about continuing a pregnancy.
The political opponents of abortion rights asserted an originalist interpretation of the Kansas constitution arguing that the Kansas Supreme Court had erred. In January 2021, the Republican dominated legislature passed the ‘Value them Both’ amendment as a legislative referendum (there was not enough support to pass the amendment in a regular legislative session.) The language of the amendment read:
“§ 22. Regulation of abortion. Because Kansans value both women and children, the constitution of the state of Kansas does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion. To the extent permitted by the constitution of the United States, the people, through their elected state representatives and state senators, may pass laws regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.”
The thing about the Kansas religious right is that it compiles most of the Republican Party’s extremist faction and it campaigns under the banner of morality and sanctity to push anti-democratic proposals that would effectively modify and maim democratic institutions.
Most Kansas voters know and appreciate this about the politically mobilized religious factions across the state. Kansans know what is attached to the abortion fight having had front row seats to the physical, political, and religiously motivated violence inflicted on their communities spanning the 1991 ‘Summer of Mercy’ campaign that resulted in violent attacks on clinics to Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline’s (2003-2007) failed quest to criminally prosecute Dr. George Tiller (the high profile abortion provider in Wichita, KS) to Dr. Tiller’s assassination on a Sunday morning in his church to the most recent campaign to amend the state constitution. There is a great deal of violence done in the name of holiness in Kansas (and elsewhere) but Kansas’ state history has a legacy of it. Voters on the ground know this and they will tolerate a limited degree of zealous vigilantism to a point. However, when it begins to encroach on personal freedoms and liberty, voters clap back. And that’s what happened in Kansas on Tuesday.
There is a great deal of well-intentioned national analysis that is earnestly trying to understand Kansas, but this is where they get it wrong. There are several data driven interpretations and analysis frames being applied, but they are limiting the full scope and appreciation of what happened on the ground.
Threat Perception and High Voter Turnout
The election was not a typical Kansas primary due to the constitutional referendum being on the ballot. This was likely done strategically because Republicans have always enjoyed a turnout advantage in late summer primaries. Even though Kansas operates a closed primary, unaffiliated voters are permitted to vote on non-partisan items such as ballot initiatives and referendums. Voters from across the partisan spectrum mobilized on the constitutional question. It wasn’t just the Democrats and Independents banding together to defeat it, Republicans voted it down too.
Threat perception is different than anger. Kansas voters did not mobilize to punish the Republicans for the Dobbs decision. Voters mobilized on threat perception. While abortion, in the literal sense, was on the ballot, so too was the integrity of the courts and the state constitution. The Republican led legislature was asking voters to electorally reverse the State Supreme Court’s opinion affirming constitutionally protected rights so they could claim a populist mandate to consolidate political power. Voters intuitively knew the radical faction of Republicans would not stop there. Thus, voters perceived the threat presented to their constitutionally protected personal freedoms and to the stability and predictability of political institutions that make democracy function (like the state constitution).
Threat perception induces anxiety and anxious political conduct arouses information seeking behaviors. The Kansas electorate mobilized because the threat perception elevated the stakes of the election’s outcomes. The nation saw the same phenomenon in the turnout of the 2020 presidential election in areas much redder than Kansas (thinking about Georgia). High stakes elections manifest with high voter turnout.
To put it more broadly, it was a referendum on Kansas’ democratic institutions—and abortion opponents were asking voters to legitimize a specific interpretation of freedom, or the lack of freedom, that would have made it much easier for the Republicans to consolidate power and invalidate the State Supreme Court (something Governor Sam Brownback attempted).
Exurban Areas Made the Difference
Most election analysis was trained on how the suburban regions mobilized. Analysis characterized those regions as the ones that defeated the amendment. However, the suburban regions performed as expected—overwhelming rebukes of the amendment in areas such as Kansas City, Kansas, Johnson County, Topeka, Wichita, Manhattan, and Lawrence. The regions receiving less attention are the exurban regions. Those regions situated beyond the suburbs— in the case of Kansas- the counties that harbor rural, agricultural areas with, perhaps, one reasonably sized city in the midst.
It’s the rural precincts that deserve credit. Abortion opponents did not underperform in rural areas. They were simply out voted on principle. Rural counties in western Kansas such as Finney (Garden City), Ford (Dodge City), Seward (Liberal, KS) to name a few, had closer than predicted vote margins on the amendment. These are areas in which Republicans outnumber Democrats and Independents two to one. There was a sizable contingency of rural Republicans who voted down the amendment in the most notably Republican territory.
In the more easterly situated counties like Crawford, Franklin, and Miami (these are also rural, farming communities with a reasonability sized city situated in them) the margins of victory were extremely tight in some places. Looking at the precinct level data, precincts within the city limits defeated the amendment by reasonably comfortable margins of about 300 votes. It’s the precincts beyond the city limits, in those sparsely populated areas, that reveal the most compelling narrative of what happened on the ground. For example, in Miami county (a rural county south of Kansas City) there are several rural precincts that defeated the amendment (and by rural, I mean fewer than 60 voters cast ballots) by one to three votes. This is the key take away point for the 2022 midterms—every vote counts—every voter is worth contacting.
Freedom Isn’t Partisan
When it comes to Kansas Republicans, ideology and partisanship are two different concepts at work in vote choice. Republicans will vote for the candidate with the “R” next to their name, but when it comes to interpretations of personal freedom, Kansas voters behave quite differently—they are resistant to the idea of state entanglement with personal liberty and privacy. Collectively, Kansas voters saw the amendment as something much bigger than abortion—it was about defending an interpretation of the state constitution that guarantees protections of personal freedom.
There really is no way to be certain that abortion opponents under-performed. One thing we do know though is the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade complicated their quest to roll back abortion rights in Kansas. The current Republican legislative majority might have hoped to turn the Dobbs decision into some ground momentum to undo the 2019 Kansas State Supreme Court ruling. There had been an expensive and protracted ground war as soon as the referendum was announced in January 2021. Abortion opponents may have overplayed their hand or perhaps they overindulged in their own rhetoric, but they committed the one mistake that always sends the Republicans down in defeat in Kansas: they underestimated the power of the voter.
What can be learned from Kansas ahead of the 2022 midterms? The election results are not as surprising when viewed through the lens of voters defending democratic institutions. This was an important battle won in a protracted war on bodily agency in this country, but there is more work to be done. It is important to remember that voting to protect and codify access to legal and safe abortion is not the same thing as repudiating Trumpism. Yes, abortion legislation will be on several ballots across other states, but abortion rights is just the canary in the coal mine. It’s the litmus test because Republicans believe it’s a winning strategy— to attach morality and sanctity frameworks to anti-democratic efforts. Kansas voters saw through it, and with some savvy strategy elsewhere, voters in other states will too.
