What I'm reading: The Kansas abortion vote

A huge win for bodily autonomy

The Republican Party’s position on abortion is incredibly unpopular. Don’t take my word for it: more than 900,000 Kansans turned out for yesterday’s primary election, and they voted down a constitutional amendment that would have allowed Republicans to ban abortion by 58.8 percent to 41.2 percent.

I’ve never seen a more confusingly worded ballot initiative than what Republicans concocted in Kansas. Alvin Chang walked through the many problems at The Guardian.

Someone in the “yes” camp tried to muddy the waters further by sending thousands of text messages on Monday, designed to fool pro-choice voters into supporting the constitutional amendment. The dirty trick was legal, according to the Kansas campaign regulator.

I stayed up late last night to pull together some thoughts on what Iowa Democrats and Republicans should take away from the lopsided Kansas vote.

GOP lawmakers should think hard about whether they want to press ahead with a state constitutional amendment on abortion in Iowa. Like their Kansas counterparts, they phrased the proposal to mislead voters about their intentions. Instead of admitting they want to ban abortion in Iowa, Republicans pretend the amendment is needed to “protect unborn children from efforts to expand abortion even to the point of birth.” Last night’s result showed that voters are not easily fooled.

In addition, Republicans may not need constitutional amendment to ban abortion in Iowa, because our state Supreme Court already reversed their own abortion rights precedent. If you missed it in June, here’s my piece analyzing the Iowa Supreme Court’s abortion decision and its implications.

Other posts worth reading:

Steven Mazie and Mary Ziegler broke down the Kansas results at The Economist.

The CBS News desk showed how the “no” vote outperformed Joe Biden’s share of the 2020 presidential vote in every Kansas county.

Philip Bump and Lenny Bronner of The Washington Post found that the vote for and against the abortion amendment was correlated with the percentage of older residents in a given county.

The Daily Kos Elections team discussed some of the messaging for and against the amendment.

Last week, the Kansas Reflector’s Clay Wirestone covered the “three biggest lies” coming from the “yes” camp.

Feel free to message me with your favorite reads about the Kansas vote.

UPDATE: Great take by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: “Kansas Voters Were the First to See the Brutal Reality of Abortion Bans—and Rebuke It.”

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