 |
| New York Times map |
Here's how the New York Times explained the abortion rights referendum in Kansas:
The ballot referendum was rooted in a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that found that the right to an abortion was guaranteed by the State Constitution. Abortion in Kansas is legal up to 22 weeks but requires a waiting period and parental consent for minors.
* * *
Abortion rights supporters used conservative-sounding language about government mandates and personal freedom in their pitch to voters, and made a point of reaching out to independents, Libertarians and moderate Republicans.
* * *
The abortion rights victory included overwhelming margins on Kansas’ few patches of left-leaning political turf: 81 percent to 19 in the county that includes the college town of Lawrence; 74 percent to 26 in the county that includes Kansas City; and 68 percent to 32 in populous Johnson County, a suburban area that was once reliably Republican but that has trended rapidly toward Democrats since Mr. Trump’s entrance into national politics.
But the abortion rights side also won convincingly in the county that includes Wichita, a more conservative place with a long, sometimes violent, history at the center of America’s abortion debate. Abortion rights supporters won in Topeka, the politically mixed state capital, and in Republican-leaning areas around military bases. Perhaps most surprising, they carried several rural and exurban counties where Republican candidates routinely trounce Democrats. (emphasis added)
Here's a paragraph from a different New York Times story (the one featuring the map above) also from yesterday:
And in some rural areas that overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump, Kansans’ margins in favor of amending the Constitution to remove abortion protections were much less decisive than their presidential votes. In Hamilton County, which voted 81 percent for Mr. Trump in 2020, less than 56 percent chose the anti-abortion position on Tuesday. In Greeley County, which voted more than 85 percent for Mr. Trump, only about 60 percent chose the anti-abortion position. (Around 90 percent of the votes have been counted in each county.). (emphasis added)
This tack of comparing a county's vote on an issue to how that county responded to Trump's candidacy is something we increasingly see in political analysis, making Trump's support in 2020 a baseline for how conservative (or extreme) a county is. We also saw this analytical frame here.
I remember feeling disheartened leading up to the Kansas abortion vote, and was flabbergasted at the result. As noted in this post, it represents the formation of an interesting coalition of both urban and rural, liberal and conservative alliances that stood up for women's rights. It speaks to the reality that many women and pregnant persons rely on abortion services in the many forms they take. It's also indicative of an emerging realignment for the political parties as the Democratic and Democratic Socialist Parties continue to make advances into rural communities by reframing many of their policies in ways that speak to those communities.
ReplyDelete