The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has woken the pro-abortion majority, as conservative Kansas (!) just demonstrated yesterday
According to Vote.org, a nonpartisan website that helps people register to vote, after the Supreme Court released its opinion in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, there was “a huge uptick in traffic to our website and on our voter tools. Nationally, we saw a 563 percent increase in registrations after the decision, compared to the week before.” Few noticed, though in early July the Kansas City Star’s Natalie Wallington reported that the jump was twice as big as that in Kansas, with the number of people registering 1038% bigger than the prior week. That is, more than ten times as many Kansans decided to register to vote in the week after the Dobbs decision compared to the week before it.
We now know that this was no fluke, since Kansas already had an upcoming ballot question charmingly called the Value Them Both Amendment on whether to remove statewide protection of abortion rights from the constitution scheduled for August 2nd. And yesterday, voters in Kansas resoundingly defeated the proposal by a margin of 59% to 41%. In a state that went for Donald Trump by 56% to 42% in 2020.
The actual number of new registrations can’t be credited for the ballot question’s failure. The Kansas City Election Board told the Star back in July that it had seen about 5,231 new registrations since the Dobbs decision, but that the pace of registration usually picked up before a state election. July 12th was the last day to register in order to vote yesterday. The Kansas Secretary of State’s office shows that between May and July, Republican registrations increased by less than .2%, while Democratic registration increased by .4% and unaffiliated by 1.1%.
But the surge in registrations was a sure indication of something equally important: a lot of Kansans feeling motivated to vote. Most of those new registrants were women, according to Tom Bonier, the head of Democratic voter data firm Targetsmart. And turnout yesterday across the state was huge. In Johnson County, the most populous county in the state and home to many Kansas City suburbs, a whopping 53.65% of eligible voters came out, more than double the number cast in 2018. Those voters opposed Value Them Both by 166,060 to 76,767, according to unofficial returns. And it wasn’t just urban and suburban areas that voted against the proposal. In rural Chase County, 527 of 1,093 voters opted against it.
Final numbers aren’t in yet, but Secretary of State Scott Schwab said he thought statewide turnout might rival the 2008 presidential election rate of 63%. According to the Star, he had previously predicted it would be just 36%.
When you consider the scale of this vote, you also have to remember that the anti-abortion Republicans who dominate the state’s legislature chose to put Value Them Both on the August ballot because, as local political columnist Dion Lefler notes, “August primaries have been sleepy affairs where Republicans vote and not much of anybody else does.” He also notes that “the people who wrote the initiative got to write not just the amendment, but the ballot statements for and against it.”
Lefler says that politics in Kansas have drastically changed. The Dobbs decision woke up the pro-choice majority, which had to scramble to take on the much better organized “right-to-life” movement in the state. Young people in particular were galvanized. Longtime civic activist Jane Byrnes told him she was amazed at the change. “I’ve worked primaries before and hardly anybody voted,” she said. “And they were all old people.”
The Kansas results also exposed a real fault line inside the Republican base. If you assume that literally every Democrat and unaffiliated voter who showed up yesterday voted to protect abortion rights, that still leaves about 90,000 votes against Value Them Both coming from the Republican column. At least 20% of R’s were No’s, says MSNBC political analyst Steve Kornacki.
And it also showed that independent voters will show up to vote when abortion is on the line, contrary to Republican pundits who — prior to yesterday — were claiming that the Dobbs decision wouldn’t affect the political scene. Nearly 169,000 unaffiliated voters cast ballots yesterday in Kansas, even though they couldn’t vote on any of the party primary races.
Sorry, Sam Alito isn’t handing the Democrats the election, National Review’s editor-in-chief Rich Lowry opined in Politico last month. Well, maybe he actually has.
Micah Sifry is a Medium columnist and the author of several books on tech and politics, including The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) and WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. He also writes a weekly newsletter called The Connector, where he focuses on movements, organizing and democracy. You can also follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.
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