Voters in Kansas gave the first evidence of the backlash against the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, voting against an effort to strip abortion rights from that state's constitution. Fifty-nine percent of Kansans voted to keep abortion rights in the state's constitution in an Aug. 2 referendum issue despite Kansas being an overwhelmingly Republican state: Since 1993, Republicans have controlled both houses of the state legislature.
The New York Times headline spoke to the way Democrats think the abortion issue might play out: " 'Your Bedroom Is on the Ballot': How Democrats See Abortion Politics After Kansas."
The headline in a Politico story looking at the primary results — "Roe jolts the midterms – 5 takeaways from a key primary night" — announced the same verdict.
These are exaggerations. Once you got past the "political earthquake" language, both The Times' and the Politico report made the obvious and important point about the difficulty extrapolating from the Kansas referendum to the midterms.
"And the result in Kansas isn’t a perfect indicator of how voters will treat abortion in candidate races," the Politico report states. "The question voters were deciding there was a state constitutional amendment that would have cleared a path for the state legislature to ban abortion, not a candidate race where multiple issues and personalities are at play."
Inflation will likely still be the top concern among voters come November, not abortion, and candidate names, not individual issues, will be facing voters.
Might the credibility of the church's witness have been more persuasive if some of that money had gone to implement robust paid family leave policies at Catholic institutions?
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