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Last night, a primary election in Kansas marked “the first time that voters had a chance to weigh in directly on abortion since the Supreme Court scrapped Roe,” Russell Berman reported. Kansans voted resoundingly against an amendment that would have permitted the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to ban abortion without exceptions. I called Russell today to talk about what the result means for the midterm elections and for abortion legislation across the country.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The gamble of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan Well, the cover-up sure isn’t making January 6 look any better. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: The Bill Russell I knew for 60 years “A Tidal Wave”

Isabel Fattal: The article you wrote last night is headlined “The Kansas Abortion Shocker.” What was so surprising to you about this result?

Russell Berman: The surprise in this referendum was how big of a win it was for the abortion-rights side and how big of a defeat it was for the anti-abortion side. The polls, both publicly and privately, were showing a close race. Even when I was interviewing people yesterday, before the polls closed, I was asking them to respond to various scenarios—a close win for the abortion-rights side, a close defeat or a decisive defeat for the abortion-rights side. I didn’t even ask about the scenario that we actually saw, which was essentially a landslide rejection of the amendment and a victory for the abortion-rights side.

Isabel: You note in your article that this result is sure to buoy Democrats’ hopes to “capitalize on the overturning of Roe in the midterm battle for Congress.” Can you explain what the Kansas results might mean—or might not mean—for November?

Russell: We start with a midterms that, based on history and the current political environment with President Biden’s low approval ratings, are expected to be difficult if not downright bad for Democrats. The assumption, frankly both before and even after this result in Kansas, is that Democrats will lose the House. In the Senate, it’s more of a toss-up, but Democrats could easily lose the Senate as well. The big question is, what could change that environment? Democrats had been looking at the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade as the potential savior for them. It’s devastating for the abortion-rights movement, which is core to the modern Democratic Party, but politically, the silver lining would be that it would outrage the public and mobilize particularly younger voters and progressives, who are among the most disappointed in Democratic governance over the past year and a half and in President Biden’s record. That was the hope, and even, among some, the assumption. But until last night in Kansas, nobody had any idea whether that would materialize at the polls.

In Kansas, you saw a tidal wave of turnout by not only Democrats, but independents and some Republicans, who came out in an otherwise sleepy summer August primary to vote down an amendment that would’ve allowed the Republican-controlled legislature to potentially ban abortion.

How does that translate into the fall? We still don’t know. This was a referendum on a confusingly worded ballot question. It was not a choice between two candidates. Many of the independents and Republicans who voted to preserve abortion rights in Kansas yesterday are going to go ahead and vote for Republican candidates in Kansas in November. But Democrats did see that surge in turnout that they will need again in November.

Isabel: Did the specific strategy that the abortion-rights campaign used play a role in its success?

Russell: It’s possible that their strategy did work. They ran a variety of ads, but one of the ads they ran, especially in conservative areas, was really a libertarian-style message, calling the amendment a pathway to a government mandate. It included images of the vaccine and mask mandates that, especially in conservative areas, became quite unpopular during the height of the pandemic. They were clearly targeting voters who were not liberals, progressives, or Democrats, but who might rebel or recoil against an attempt by the legislature to essentially ban abortion and mandate that a doctor could not perform that procedure.

Isabel: Does what happened in Kansas have any bearing on how abortion might be restricted or protected in other states?

Russell: In Michigan, abortion-rights activists are likely to succeed in putting an abortion question on the ballot in November. That’s a very competitive state; there’s a huge governor’s race there, with Democrat Gretchen Whitmer running for reelection. Now, in light of what happened in Kansas, you may see Democrats or abortion-rights supporters—if they haven’t already or if it’s not too late—who are going to try to get this question on the ballot to really draw out people to the polls who want to have a say on abortion.

The Kansas result could also have an impact in nearby states such as Nebraska and Iowa, where Republicans in the legislature have not yet acted to ban or severely restrict abortion but are going to try. The hope of abortion-rights supporters is that this result will put some fear into Republican legislators who haven’t yet enacted these laws, that maybe it’ll slow them down or cause them at the very least not to go quite as far as they might have before this result.

Related:

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The Wedding Present

By Cynthia Ozick

During my very first term of high school, I failed elementary algebra, and as a consequence was doomed to study German. It was 1942, when the war was well under way—the Second World War, for my generation always “the” war, despite all that came after. Mine was a traditional school that claimed old-fashioned standards; today they might be regarded as archaic. Four years of Latin were required, and a choice between French and German … Together with nearly everyone else, I had opted for French. German, especially for a Jewish student in 1942, was a sinister tongue contaminated by its criminal speakers, repellent in its very substance.

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Earlier this summer, when the Supreme Court ended a 50-year federal right to abortion, Democrats had no choice but to place their faith in voters to rebel against the ruling. Until tonight, however, no one could definitively say whether Roe v. Wade outrage would carry over to the polls.

Tonight in Kansas, Americans got their first hint of that response, and it was a resounding victory for abortion rights. Voters there decisively rejected an amendment that would have allowed the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to ban abortion across the state. With more than three-quarters of precincts reporting, the “No” vote was leading by more than 20 points. The surprising result keeps abortion legal in a GOP stronghold, one of the few states in the region where conservative majorities have not already outlawed the procedure.

Politically, the outcome is sure to reverberate across the country and buoy the Democrats’ bid to capitalize on the overturning of Roe in the midterm battle for Congress this fall. It will lift the party’s hopes that anger over the Supreme Court’s decision will matter more than concerns about inflation and President Joe Biden’s leadership, allowing Democrats to maintain their narrow majorities on Capitol Hill. “This victory tonight confirms that abortion is popular in all states, not just on the coasts,” Elise Higgins, a lifelong Kansan who is the director of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive advocacy group, told me.

Tonight marked the first time that voters had a chance to weigh in directly on abortion since the Supreme Court scrapped Roe in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Both public and private polls had shown the race to be close, and opponents of the anti-abortion amendment were cautiously optimistic in the closing days that they could pull out an upset victory. None, however, predicted the landslide that occurred.

[Read: Abortion is literally on the ballot in Kansas]

Republican lawmakers in Kansas had put a constitutional amendment on the ballot long before the Supreme Court ruling, scheduling the vote to coincide a partisan August primary that they hoped would help the anti-abortion cause. For more than a year, it looked like that decision would pay off. But the June 24 decision in the Dobbs case galvanized abortion-rights supporters, who blanketed Kansas’s most populous counties with television ads that targeted not only Democrats but independent and Republican voters as well.

The amendment would have banned taxpayer funding of abortion and effectively invalidated a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that the state’s constitution protected abortion rights. Approval of the ballot measure would have given Kansas’s GOP lawmakers free reign to follow their counterparts in other conservative states, including Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas, and ban abortion without exceptions. Republicans have a supermajority in the Kansas legislature, meaning they would likely be able to override a veto by the state’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly.

Drawing on polling data over the past several years, the “Vote No” campaign insisted that despite the state’s Republican leanings, support for abortion rights in Kansas extended nearly as broadly as it does in the nation overall. “The majority of Kansans want abortion to remain safe, legal, and accessible,” Higgins said.

Kansas’s abortion foes didn’t make much effort to dispute that assertion. Rather than campaign outwardly for voters to give them the right to ban abortion, the “Yes” side argued that the ballot initiative—named the “Value Them Both Amendment”—would merely take the decision away from the courts and return it to the public and elected representatives. Canvassers were instructed to make clear to voters that the amendment itself did not outlaw abortion, even though its passage would free the GOP-controlled legislature to do so.

At times, anti-abortion advocates clouded their pitch in the language of their opposition, using words like “choice” and “regulation.” That effort veered into outright misinformation a day before the election, when thousands of voters—including a former Democratic governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius—received a text message warning that women in the state “are losing their choice” on abortion. “Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice,” the text said. “Vote YES to protect women’s health.” The sender was unidentified, although the Washington Post reported that the group behind the texts is run by a former arch-conservative Kansas congressman.

Higgins was one of the voters who received the text on Monday. She sent “a strongly-worded reply” to the number, she told me, but got no further response. “I was really furious,” Higgins said. “It was part and parcel of the deceptive tactics that the anti-abortion movement is using in this fight.”

But Higgins also told me she was hopeful, seeing the desperation inherent in the misleading texts as evidence that abortion-rights supporters had already succeeded in overcoming their biggest challenge. They had mobilized voters to turn out in what was expected to be a sleepy summer primary in which many voters would otherwise have had no reason to participate. That initial victory was confirmed the moment the polls began to close tonight, when Kansas’s secretary of state, Scott Schwab, said turnout would likely shatter expectations and rival that of a presidential general election.

The question then became whether a surge in enthusiasm would be enough to carry the abortion-rights side in a state that Donald Trump won by 15 points just two years ago. Within a couple of hours, the answer became clear, and it wasn’t particularly close. Now, Democrats will try to replicate that winning strategy in another long-shot campaign: keeping control of Congress in November.