The so-called Value Them Both law would have dramatically devalued women in Kansas. The bill was designed to amend the state constitution in response to a 2019 ruling by the state’s highest court, which found that abortion is protected by the state charter’s guarantee of “equal and inalienable rights” to all citizens. Unlike the US Supreme Court, the Kansas court rejected the idea that civil rights were frozen in time at the time of the document’s ratification. Instead, they extended these equal rights to women. “We are now being asked: is this bill of rights more than an idealized aspiration?” the court wrote. “And, if so, do substantive rights include a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, including whether to continue her pregnancy? We answer these questions, “Yes.” Overwhelmingly, by about 20 points, Kansan voters agreed with them. It was the first election test of support for abortion rights since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June, and the results were clear. Even in conservative Kansas, abortion rights are popular with most Americans. Even in conservative Kansas, abortion bans are offensive to them. On paper, this should come as no surprise. Americans have a wide range of views on abortion, but overall, the notion that women and others should have a legal right to end their pregnancies is very popular, with somewhere between 60% and 70% support. Accordingly, ballot initiatives asking voters to restrict abortion tend to fail, according to New York Magazine correspondent Irin Carmon. A measure that would have granted personhood rights to embryos and fetuses failed in ultra-conservative Mississippi in 2011. A municipal measure to ban abortions after 20 weeks in the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, failed by a wide margin in an unusually high turnout in 2013. When South Dakota passed its abortion ban in 2006, pro-choice advocates managed to collect enough signatures to put the measure on a popular vote. The electorate threw that out too. The US Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade is unpopular with the public and has fueled renewed passion for the pro-choice cause. According to a CNN poll, 63% of Americans – nearly two-thirds – say they disapprove of the court’s decision. Just over half of them, 51%, say they “strongly” disapprove. This public outrage clearly translates into votes. After the court overturned Roe on June 24, many states saw an increase in new voter registrations. In Kansas, 70% of those new voters were women. There were some signs that the anti-abortion side was nervous, even before their resounding defeat on Election Day. They played dirty. The vote was scheduled for a blindingly hot primary day in August, when turnout is typically low and Republicans fare better. In the days leading up to the election, a Republican-aligned company in Nevada sent messages to Kansas voters. “Kansas women are losing their choice of reproductive rights,” the texts state. “Voting YES on the amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.” A vote for the constitutional amendment would be a vote against abortion rights. Clearly, anti-choice Republicans didn’t think they could win on the ground. Turns out they couldn’t. But you’d never know how resonant popular abortion rights are from the behavior of Democrats, who for the past three decades, and specifically since the election of Donald Trump, have been allergic to full-throated defense of reproductive rights and other so-called “cultural war”. The party’s centrist leadership has calculated that only economic issues—defined, in effect, as issues affecting white men—can rally voters’ enthusiasm. The Biden administration has been flat-footed and inept in its response to Dobbs, agreeing to take only the weakest and most unpredictable measures to restore access to abortion and alienating vast swathes of its base as it tries to maintain focus on its efforts to curb inflation . Biden almost never says “abortion.” You understand that he would rather not talk about it at all. But the results in Kansas show it should be. The abortion ballot initiative drew massive turnout. Abortion rights received far more electoral support than Joe Biden in most Kansas counties. It’s a so-called “culture war” issue that has brought voters to vote in droves to vote on a Democratic agenda item. The Kansas vote shows that overturning Roe has created a moral emergency to which voters will respond. Ignoring these so-called “culture war” issues does not make Democrats look reasonable and moderate. It makes them look like cowards, running from a fight. What the Republicans want to do in America, especially on abortion rights, is unpopular. More importantly, it is undemocratic and immoral. This is a fight voters want to take on. It’s time for the Democratic party to get on board.