It’s Not Just Kansas—Voters Nationwide Are Pro-Choice

Donald Trump won Kansas by a 15-point margin in 2020, sweeping 100 of the state’s 105 counties as the presidential candidate of a Republican Party that has for decades pledged to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that protected abortion rights. So a lot of folks just presumed, prior to Tuesday’s Kansas vote on whether to remove protections for abortion access from their state Constitution, that the anti-choice position would prevail.

But the first statewide vote on abortion rights since the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court overturned Roe didn’t go as the right had planned. Kansans voted 59-41 to maintain legal barriers to Republican efforts to ban abortions. Hailing a “huge and decisive victory,” Rachel Sweet, the campaign manager for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, which successfully promoted a “no” vote in Tuesday’s election, announced, “The people of Kansas have spoken. They think that abortion should be safe, legal and accessible in the state of Kansas.”