What the abortion result in Kansas could mean for the midterms

https://news.yahoo.com/what-the-abortion-result-in-kansas-could-mean-for-the-midterms-165524894.html

A massive victory for abortion rights on Tuesday has bolstered Democratic hopes that the issue will be a winning one for them in November’s midterm elections. In conservative Kansas, a state that Donald Trump won by 15 points in 2020, voters overwhelmingly rejected a Republican-sponsored ballot initiative that would have stripped abortion protections from the state constitution.

The result was a surprise. Polls had indicated that the measure had significantly more support than it wound up receiving. And Republicans in the state Legislature had placed the initiative on Tuesday’s primary ballot, rather than the November ballot, in hopes that a smaller and more conservative electorate would help it succeed.

Additionally, organizers argued that the language of the ballot measure was designed to confuse voters and that ads in support of it were misleading. In the end, however, turnout was massive — nearly double the number who turned out for the 2018 primary and triple the 2014 number, despite a lack of marquee statewide races for either party.

The results were driven in large part by unaffiliated, independent voters who could not vote in either party’s primary. More than 100,000 of them went to the polls to vote on the measure, which was known formally as Amendment 2.

It was the first test of how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade might affect November’s midterm elections. In a Yahoo News/YouGov poll taken immediately after the June ruling, only 33% of Americans agreed with the decision, a level of discontent Democrats hoped to capitalize on.

Public sentiment is in line with the result in Kansas, according to surveys. A July Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 54% of Americans said abortion is “a constitutional right that women in all states should have some access to,” versus 30% who said individual states should be allowed to outlaw it.

In another Yahoo News/YouGov poll taken over the weekend, 43% percent of Americans said they felt Democrats would do a better job on abortion, as opposed to 30% who said Republicans would. There was also a slight uptick in Democrats who wanted the party to focus most on “preserving abortion rights nationwide,” with candidates pushing abortion as a topic in some of their latest ads.