Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other leading Democrats on Wednesday said an unexpectedly strong vote to uphold the right to an abortion in “red” Kansas gives their party a boost over Republicans going into the fall midterm elections.
“Last night in the American heartland, the people of Kansas sent an unmistakable message to MAGA Republican extremists — back off women’s fundamental rights,” said Schumer, D-N.Y. referring to the “Make America Great Again” battle cry of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
With an extremely high turnout, Kansans on Tuesday voted 59% to 41% against a proposed constitutional amendment that would let the state’s Republican-controlled legislature either ban or severely restrict abortion.
“What happened in red Kansas last night is a reflection of what is happening across the country and what will continue to occur through the November elections,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “If it’s going to happen in Kansas, it’s going to happen in a whole lot of states.”
The strong pro-choice vote in Kansas, he said, will continue into the November elections,” he said. “And Republicans who side with these extremist MAGA policies that attack women’s rights do so at their own political risk,” he said.
The vote was the crucial first test of how voters could react to the Supreme Court’s decision in June overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion, which had existed since the same court’s 1973 ruling in the Roe v. Wade case.
The latest Supreme Court ruling effectively leaves it up to individual states to decide how strictly to regulate or outright ban abortion.
Nearly half of the states are expected to impose total or near-total bans on the procedure, despite the fact that opinion polls consistently show that a solid majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to block the enforcement of Idaho’s new abortion law, which beginning later this month would make it a criminal offense to perform abortion in nearly all cases.
Tuesday’s loss by anti-abortion advocates in Kansas was stunning because the state reliably supports Republicans, whose party opposes abortion, in national elections. The Democratic Party, in contrast, is a staunch supporter of abortion rights.
In the 2016 presidential election, the then-Republican candidate Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by more than 20 percentage points in Kansas, helping cement his victory in the national election for the White House.
Trump also defeated President Joe Biden in Kansas by nearly 15 percentage points in 2020.
Anti-abortion groups spent millions of dollars promoting the Kansas amendment,
But as of Wednesday morning, the “no” vote on Kansas’s anti-abortion amendment was outpacing “yes” voters by about 18 percentage points with 99% of the vote counted.
Ever since Biden’s national victory in 2020, Democrats were expected to face tough odds in the November elections to retain…
Read More: Kansas abortion rights vote helps Democrats in midterms, Schumer says