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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.

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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.

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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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If Democrats avoid the worst outcome in November’s midterm elections, the principal reason will likely be the GOP’s failure to reverse its decline in white-collar suburbs during the Donald Trump era.

That’s a clear message from yesterday’s crowded primary calendar, which showed the GOP mostly continuing to nominate Trump-style culture-war candidates around the country. And yet, the resounding defeat of an anti-abortion ballot initiative in Kansas showed how many voters in larger population centers are recoiling from that Trumpist vision.

Democrats still face enormous headwinds in November, including sweeping voter dissatisfaction over inflation, low approval ratings for President Joe Biden, and the near unbroken history since the Civil War of the party that holds the White House losing seats in the House of Representatives during a president’s first two years.

Polls indicate that many college-educated center-right voters have soured on the performance of Biden and the Democrats controlling both congressional chambers. Yet in Tudor Dixon, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, and Blake Masters, the party’s Senate selection in Arizona, Republicans have chosen nominees suited less to recapturing socially moderate white-collar voters than to energizing Trump’s working-class and nonurban base through culture-war appeals like support of near-total abortion bans. With Trump-backed Kari Lake moving into the lead as counting continues in the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary, the top GOP nominees both there and in Michigan will likely be composed entirely of candidates who embrace Trump’s lie that he won their state in 2020.

In the intermediate term, most Democratic strategists believe that the party must find ways to combat the GOP’s strong performance during the Trump era with working-class voters, particularly its improvement since 2016 among blue-collar Hispanic voters. But with inflation so badly squeezing the finances of many working- and middle-class families, recovering much ground with such voters before November may be tough for most Democratic candidates. Those working-class voters “know the shoe is pinching,” says Tom Davis, the former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, quoting the late political scientist V. O. Key Jr.

The more realistic route for Democrats in key races may be to defend, as much as possible, the inroads they made into the white-collar suburbs of virtually every major metropolitan area during the past three elections. Although, compared with 2020, the party will likely lose ground with all groups, Democrats are positioned to hold much more of their previous support among college-educated than noncollege voters, according to Ethan Winter, a Democratic pollster.

An array of recent public polls suggest he’s right. A Monmouth University poll released today showed that white voters without a college degree preferred Republicans for Congress by a 25-percentage-point margin, but white voters with at least a four-year degree backed Democrats by 18 points.

A recent Fox News Poll in Pennsylvania showed the Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman crushing Republican Mehmet Oz among college-educated white voters, while the two closely split those without degrees. Another recent Fox News poll in Georgia found Senator Raphael Warnock trailing his opponent Herschel Walker among noncollege white voters by more than 40 percentage points but running essentially even among those with degrees (which would likely be enough to win, given his preponderant support in the Black community). The most recent public surveys in New Hampshire and Wisconsin likewise found Republicans leading comfortably among voters without advanced education, but Democrats holding solid advantages among those with four-year or graduate degrees. A poll this week by Siena College, in New York, found Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul splitting noncollege voters evenly with Republican Lee Zeldin, but beating him by more than two-to-one among those with a degree.

This strength among college-educated voters may be worth slightly more for Democrats in the midterms than in a general election. Voters without a degree cast a majority of ballots in both types of contests. But calculations by Catalist, a Democratic-voter-targeting firm, and Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout, have found that voters with a college degree consistently make up about three to four percentage points more of the electorate in a midterm than in a presidential election. “When we see lower turnout elections,” like a midterm, “the gap between high-education and low-education voters increases,” McDonald told me. In close races, that gap could place a thumb on the scale for Democrats, partially offsetting the tendency of decreased turnout from younger and nonwhite voters in midterm elections.

Republicans have mostly counted on voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation and Biden’s overall performance to recover lost ground in white-collar communities. But as the polls noted above suggest, many voters in those places are, at least for now, decoupling their disenchantment with Biden from their choices in House, Senate, and governor’s races. “Voters have concerns about the direction of the country,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me, “but they’re terrified of the direction it would take if these MAGA Republicans took power.”

[Geraldo L. Cadava]: The battle for latino voters in the rust bell.

One reason for this decoupling may be that, although all families are feeling the effects of inflation, for white-collar professionals, it generally represents something more like an inconvenience than the agonizing vise it constitutes for working-class families.

That doesn’t mean white-collar voters are unconcerned about the economy, but with less worry about week-to-week financial survival, they are more likely to be influenced by the trifecta of issues that have exploded in visibility over the past several months: abortion rights,  gun control, and the threats to American democracy revealed by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

As last night’s Kansas result showed, abortion rights may be an especially powerful weapon for Democrats in white-collar areas. Polls, such as a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, have generally found that about two-thirds or more of voters with at least a four-year college degree believe abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances. That support is evident even in states that generally lean toward the GOP: Recent public surveys found that strong majorities of voters with college degrees supported legal abortion in Georgia and Texas, and another survey showed majority backing among more affluent voters in Arizona.

In deep-red Kansas, two-thirds or more of voters have just supported abortion rights in four of the state’s five largest counties. Particularly noteworthy was the huge turnout and massive margin (68 percent to 32 percent at latest count) for the pro-choice position in Johnson County, a well-educated suburb of Kansas City that demographically resembles many of the suburban areas that have moved toward Democrats around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix.

Republican candidates this year have ceded virtually no ground to the pro-abortion-rights or pro-gun-control sentiments in those suburban areas. With the national protection for abortion revoked by the Supreme Court, almost all Republican-controlled states are on track to ban or restrict the practice. In swing states that have not yet done so, GOP gubernatorial candidates are promising to pursue tight limits. Dixon, the GOP’s Michigan nominee, said recently that she would push for an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother (while she would allow them only in cases that threaten the mother’s life). Asked during a recent interview about a hypothetical case of a 14-year-old who had been impregnated by an uncle, Dixon explicitly said the teenager should carry the baby to term because “a life is a life for me.”

Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, told me that the magnitude of the pro-abortion-rights vote in Kansas was “unexpected,” but it does not guarantee Democratic candidates’ suburban domination in November. “This was a rare up or down vote on this issue,” he told me in an email. “November will be different, as voters will have lots of reasons to vote and lots of issues to consider … Polls consistently show the economy trumping this issue in the minds of the voters.”

But Democrats believe that the contrast on abortion will be highly consequential, especially in governor’s races, where Democrats such as the incumbent Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and the nominee Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania are presenting themselves as a last line of defense against Republicans intent on banning the procedure. Suburban “voters might have been thinking about voting Republican because they are unhappy with the direction of country and inflation, and they might decide to back Whitmer because of abortion,” Winter, the Democratic pollster, told me.

The choice may not carry such immediate implications in House and Senate races, but leading Democrats are running on promises to pass legislation restoring the national right to abortion, while Republicans are either opposing such a bill or signaling openness to imposing a national ban. The two top Democratic challengers for Republican-held Senate seats (John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin) have both called for ending the filibuster to pass legislation codifying national abortion rights.

Davis, the former NRCC chair who represented a suburban Northern Virginia district, believes that even in white-collar communities supportive of abortion rights and gun control, Democrats won’t escape discontent over inflation. If Republicans could frame the election simply as a referendum on Biden’s performance, Davis told me, “that’s their path to victory and a path to an electoral landslide.” But, he added, the choice by GOP voters in so many states to nominate “exotic candidates” mostly linked to Trump has provided Democrats with an opportunity, particularly in higher-profile Senate and governor contests, to make this “a choice election.” And that, he said, gives Democrats a shot at winning enough “white ticket-splitters” to at least hold down their losses.

Given the headwinds, Democrats would take a November outcome in which they narrowly lose the House but hold their Senate majority and preserve control of the governorships in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while perhaps adding some others, such as Arizona. With Biden’s approval rating still scuffling, that outcome is hardly guaranteed. But it remains a possibility largely because, as yesterday’s primaries showed, Republicans have responded to their suburban erosion by betting even more heavily on the policies and rhetoric that triggered their decline in the first place. In November, white-collar suburbs may be the deciding factor between a Republican rout and a split decision that leaves Democrats still standing to fight another day.

While the battle to ban abortion in Kansas may have been lost, the fight continues across the US.

In a victory for US abortion rights, voters in the midwestern state rejected a ballot measure that would have allowed state lawmakers to restrict or ban abortion.

Kansas vote rejecting removal of abortion protections is the first of several US ballots on abortion rights this year.

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.

Voters overwhelmingly decide they do not wish to amend the state constitution to assert there is no right to abortion.