(Dobbs) Good News from Kansas. But Maybe That's As Far As It Goes
Passion for issues doesn’t always translate to passion for candidates.
Americans on the left had good news this week. It came from Kansas, which is a right-leaning, if not in some ways a right-wing state. Trump won there by nearly 15 percentage points in 2020. Both its senators and three of its four representatives in Congress are Republicans. Yet despite its conservatism, voters on Tuesday said no when asked to amend their constitution, which until now has protected a woman’s right to an abortion. In fact emphatically they said no, by almost a 60/40 margin. Had they gone the other way, they’d have opened the door for their lawmakers to impose ruthless restrictions on abortions, possibly even a total ban.
So I’m thrilled, but unlike many Democrats, I’m not excited. Yes, what happened in Kansas probably is a positive portent for abortion rights advocates in other states— California, Kentucky, Michigan, and Vermont are due to have similar referenda on their ballots in November— and it means one less state where a woman’s right to end an unwanted pregnancy can be taken away. But issues and candidates are two different things. A big turnout, a big blowout to support abortion rights might have little bearing on the prospects for candidates who support abortion. Which mainly means Democrats.
There’s a parallel with guns. In poll after poll, Americans want some kind of gun reform. But does that mean those same Americans will oust the politicians who fully support the NRA and its shamelessly inflexible positions? If history is any guide, the answer is no.
Passion for issues doesn’t always translate to passion for candidates. As Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told the Associated Press, “It's much more complicated to run against a candidate than a single-issue ballot measure.”
And Kansas just proved it. On the same ballots voters used to protect the right to choose, they selected Trump-endorsed candidates for statewide offices. The winner of the Republican primary for attorney general, a guy named Kris Kobach, is an election-denier and what’s worse, he has been dubbed by the director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project as the “king of voter suppression.” The winner of the Republican primary for governor, Derek Schmidt, praised the Supreme Court when it killed Roe v. Wade. He got 100,000 more votes in his Tuesday primary than his November opponent, incumbent Democratic governor Laura Kelly, got in hers.
What’s more, as important as civil rights are in the minds of Americans, they rarely top the list of issues that drive people to the polls. Elections for seats in Congress and the statehouse are only three months away in all fifty states, and the problems that plague people in their everyday lives— crime, inflation, the economy— aren’t going away, even though President Biden has made inroads against each. Abortion in November will be an issue, but it’s not on everyone’s minds day to day. For many voters and probably most, it won’t be their top concern on Election Day.
Then again, if the vote in Kansas for abortion rights is not a game-changer, it might be a game-shaper. In a Forbes story titled “New Research Says Abortion Motivates Voters, Suggesting Kansas Election May Foreshadow Midterm Results,” the president of Kaiser Family Foundation says, “Lower-turnout midterm elections can be a game of inches.” So if the abortion issue motivates some abortion rights advocates not to sit this one out, it can help.
But there also is this caveat: it might just as likely motivate anti-abortion activists to turn out to protect the gains the Supreme Court gave them.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the morning after the Kansas rout, the political winds are “blowing at Democrats.” To be sure, with public sentiment about abortion on their side— two-thirds of Americans have told pollsters they opposed the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade— Democratic candidates will remind voters that they are the ones, including President Biden, who are fighting to combat the draconian decision to kill it.
But November’s midterm elections will be about a lot more than Roe. And while Americans support abortion rights, that doesn’t mean they support everything else the Democrats stand for. As a Republican consultant said on CNN, "The midterms are not going to happen in a vacuum.”
I can only hope that between the economy and climate change and healthcare and the muscle the U.S. is showing overseas, the Democrats can stay on the roll they’re on now. And that defending abortion rights will push voter turnout. And that the ever-spreading cloud over Donald Trump and those who enable him will continue to darken the prospects of copycat candidates. And that my pessimism is ill-conceived.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
It seems both parties lose track regularly of what the masses care about most. Therefore it’s nice to see them reminded regularly too. They remind me of teenagers: short attention spans, misplaced priorities, easily swayed, overly dramatic, truth fudgers. It’s wise to try and keep them on track with constant nudging.
Perhaps, now that the total hysteris is calming, we will see a more reasonable and responsible approach to an issue that brings us all in.