Everything was going according to plan. Consistent with American political history, and therefore expectation of events’ outcome forever, the Republicans (the party outside the White House) would wipe the floor with the Democrats (the party in the White House) in the 2022 midterms. The groundwork was already observed: an economy on the edge of a recession, if not partway through one; a stubborn supply-chain bottleneck contributing to higher prices for anything and everything; a president whose mein and optics were uninspiring, and at times flat-out dispiriting; and a general malaise hanging over the country, stinking like a burn pit in Iraq. The Dems would pay the price this November, the GOP leadership strategized, and they’d pay it again in 2024.
Well, sometimes, the best laid plans get flattened by reality. The people guiding the electoral destinies of those within the Republican Party know this firsthand, thanks to the seismic Aug. 2 election results from the Pantone-red state of Kansas. In the first test of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court’s let-the-states-decide overturning of Roe v. Wade, the people of Kansas voted by a resounding margin (58-41) not to end the state constitution’s extant protections of a woman’s right to abortion on demand.
Because SCOTUS reversed Roe on June 24, effectively washing its hands of abortion as something worthy of the protections of unifying federal oversight, Kansas voters’ decision to stand pat on its current constitution repudiates the contraction of personal rights approved by Dobbs, the SCOTUS decision that overnight created a patchwork of states whose laws on abortion access literally change from one state borderline to the next.
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Kansas’ full-throated rejection of curtailed abortion rights didn’t fit the narrative for a deep-red state that went all-in for Trump in 2016. Abortion has long been an issue Republicans were comfortable running on, in the midterms or the general cycle.
The GOP going back years has eagerly enlisted the red-meat passions surrounding abortion because it’s been a reliable tripwire issue, one that Republicans used to their advantage, constantly whipping the issue for their voters, inflaming it, and defining it on their terms.
Kansas just kicked the partisan rulebook to the curb. The vote in the Jayhawk State tweaks the historically convenient left-right paradigm of the debate equation. The outcome of this vote, made largely by and certainly for women of childbearing age across the usual demographic lines (and the unusual political boundaries), sends a signal to the politically complacent on both sides of the aisle: “Don’t be complacent.”
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The prevailing dynamic of the midterm elections has always been as a referendum on the economy, and the ruling party’s stewardship of that economy. More than during the runup to a presidential election, the midterms let Americans retreat to the proverbial kitchen table and take stock of their personal finances, to decide how potholed the streets are, how well things work in the quotidian context, the realpolitik of the everyday.
If the 2022 midterm vote is based strictly on historical expectations, the Democrats may be fated to lose seats in the House and the Senate— the latest version of the self-fulfilling prophecy that is the midterm election forecast.
But as surely as conservatives (and their enablers on the Supreme Court) overreached with Dobbs, the more centrist, moderate, progressive Americans among us should be poised to capitalize on that overreach, by engaging with the abortion issue in a way midterm voters can get their heads and hearts, and votes, around.
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So if abortion rights advocates and their allies and champions in Congress sharpen their messaging accurately, and start playing the long game conservatives have played for years, those advocates will find power in reframing the abortion debate into one largely driven by economics, as much a potholes-and-pocketbook issue as anything else in Americans’ lives.
It’s not a stretch. In the weeks since Roe was overturned and red states rushed to enact restrictive abortion and reproductive rights laws just short of the stuff of The Handmaid’s Tale, the news has yielded stories of severe inconvenience: women in need of abortion or specialized reproductive care forced to travel hundreds of miles to get it, at great personal expense.
Women of color, already on a knife-edge of survival, have to come out of pocket for the cost of gas, food, and accommodations — just to get to an abortion provider in the next county, or the next state, replacing the one who had been just across town. That’s for single women. Women with children have to navigate those costs along with the expenses of a sitter for maybe days at a time. And they’ll all reckon with how to balance those personal needs against taking time off work, and the risks of failing to satisfy the demands of an employer.
Food. Work. Family. Few things are more pocketbook issues than those three.
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The inability of young and working women to obtain reproductive services from Planned Parenthood and other providers of those services places a profound financial burden on those women. The fact of that burden, pertinent to women and, more generally, to their families, should be a viable political resource for the midterms this November, a talking point that views abortion through the lens of economics, and not the foggier lens of the table-pounding culture warriors on the right.
And the same Republican overreach that made the Kansas vote so surprising may be a highly exportable force multiplier for Democrats in November. Writing in The New York Times on Aug. 4, Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn found that, simply put, what happens in Kansas may not stay there by itself for very long.
He writes: “The Kansas vote implies that around 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject a similar initiative to roll back abortion rights, including in more than 40 of the 50 states (a few states on each side are very close to 50-50). This is a rough estimate, based on how demographic characteristics predicted the results of recent abortion referendums. But it is an evidence-based way of arriving at a fairly obvious conclusion: If abortion rights wins 59 percent support in Kansas, it’s doing even better than that nationwide.”
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Cohn continues: “It’s a tally that’s in line with recent national surveys that showed greater support for legal abortion after the court’s decision. And the high turnout, especially among Democrats, confirms that abortion is not just some wedge issue of importance to political activists. The stakes of abortion policy have become high enough that it can drive a high midterm-like turnout on its own.”
The Kansas outcome was not a slam-dunk by any stretch of the imagination. On Aug. 12, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that the state’s almost-total abortion ban — ushered in with Dobbs — could go into effect on Aug. 25, while legal challenges to that ban go forward.
Any attempts to templatize the Kansas vote as the same as the outcome of other races are likely doomed to failure. Midterm elections are, as much as anything else, an opportunity to vote on people’s representatives over the intractable local issues that affect the wider cohort of a state’s population — and every state in the nation has a priorities list of its very own. Abortion rights won’t necessarily vault to the top of local concerns in many states whose citizens grapple with infrastructure matters, gun violence, drug abuse, and other pressing issues.
But you can talk about a lot of economic things around a kitchen table, and abortion is definitely one of them, now more than ever. The women of Kansas understand that. The people of Kansas understand that. Democrats seeking office, or re-election, nationally in November better remember that. Their constituents will. Since Roe was dismantled on June 24, the forces of choice, in pursuit of the expansion of freedom and options, have been struggling to find their voice again, to re-hit their stride.
That just happened, the game just changed, however incrementally, and the stage is set for more change in November, when those voters can push back against the political diktat that the midterms are obligated to be an incumbent disaster; when those voters — and sympathizers in other states — can tell the country: “We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.
Today, we are Kansas.”