The abortion vote may not mean what you think it means
Did we just learn something about the ravages of partisanship?
You’ve probably heard the news: Kansas voted down a state constitutional amendment that would’ve paved the way for an abortion ban — and it did so by a rather stunning margin.
Democrats see this as a big opportunity. If voters in an overwhelmingly Republican state reject the party’s stance on abortion, it’s probably a loser just about everywhere else, right? Dems — who have often been timid on the issue — should stick out their chests and run on an unabashedly pro-choice platform. They should lead with it.
Maybe, but let me offer an alternative — or, at least, adjacent — hypothesis:
The Kansas abortion vote shows us what can happen in the rare case politics is shorn of its partisanship. The tribal markers disappear, the (R)s and (D)s on the ballot are nowhere to be seen, and the only question is: Do you favor this thing or not?
The NYT’s analysis of the vote might start to hint at why:
Consider far western Kansas, a rural region along the Colorado border that votes overwhelmingly Republican. In Hamilton County, which voted 81 percent for Mr. Trump in 2020, less than 56 percent chose the anti-abortion position on Tuesday (with about 90 percent of the vote counted there). In Greeley County, which voted more than 85 percent for Mr. Trump, only about 60 percent chose the anti-abortion position.
Now here’s the thing: If you held a presidential vote in those counties today — right after the abortion vote — you’d probably see the GOP margins rebound to something like their Trumpian heights. He’d get all the hardcore anti-abortion voters, sure, but he’d also get the people who think Dems are too hoity-toity, or the farmers who prefer the GOP’s environmental policies, or the people who just associate the Republican Party with a certain kind of patriotism. A lot of those folks would vote for Trump even though they voted against the abortion amendment. The abortion vote lost because patriotism and hoity-toityism and a whole miasma of subliminal associations didn’t really come to play, for once. We weren’t voting for the suggestion of a thing, or our feelings about what the thing sort of looks like, but about the thing itself. We were voting for a policy.
Our parties aren’t just vehicles for our policy preferences. For many of us — on both sides of the divide — they are part of our very identities. And we don’t shed our identities very easily.
Here’s another data point for my hypothesis: The existence of “jungle primaries,” which are non-partisan primary elections to select the top two candidates who face off against each other in the November general election. That means two Republicans can end up facing each other, or two Democrats, as long as they’re the two most-popular candidates in a district. And, not incidentally, it reduces incentives for politicians to play to extremist base voters.
How did that work out in this round of primaries?
There was a small green shoot in Washington, where the top-2 jungle primary system protected both of that states pro-impeachment Republicans, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse. It is likely that once all the primaries are done it will only be Herrera-Beutler, Newhouse, and California's David Valadao who survive among the pro-impeachment house Republicans.
All 3 went through a jungle primary, which is the best argument for moving to that system nationwide that I can imagine.
It’s a small sample size, but it again suggests that politics shorn of its tribal markers can occasionally deliver more sensible results than rabid partisanship.
But of course the sample size isn’t going to get much larger. Partisanship isn’t going away.
The two major political parties dominate our discourse and our political races. And while the abortion question will probably carry the day for Democrats in a number of those races this fall, there will still be limits. Abortion itself isn’t on the ballot, in most cases, but candidates — with party affiliations and all the aforementioned tribal markers — will be. And “the thing” will be just one thing among many that influences voter decisions.
Odds and ends
My latest for McClatchy, also about the abortion vote: “In democratic politics, no victory is ever complete and no defeat is ever permanent. That’s especially true where abortion is concerned. There is no reason to believe that pro-life activists in Kansas will simply accept the will of the voters — no matter how clearly expressed — and move on.”