Kansas abortion rights amendment thread - "NO" wins!

[Unelectable Bystander]

What’s a normal partisan electorate in Kansas? If we use the poll cross tabs by party multiplied by these numbers, I think you come up short at like 45%. So to pass it R’s probably need to make up 55-60% of the vote (not sure if that’s realistic or not), or get to around 50% and get the percentage of R’s voting yes up to like 90% while still getting 33% of independents or so

[Unelectable Bystander]

High turnout in Johnson County means nothing. High turnout in Northern Virginia was supposed to foreclose on Glenn Youngkin winning, and it didn't.

High turnout in Johnson county means something: it means the rest of the state likely has high turnout too.

I remember in 2021 VA election day, twitter accounts like umichvoter were spamming falls church turnout reports.

umichvoter produces more spam than anybody even including atlas. But that was especially inaccurate

[Unelectable Bystander]

Something that I think hasn’t been discussed much is how Dems are far more unified in their support of abortion than R’s are in their opposition of it. We’ve mentioned the pro-choice republicans crossing over but I also think these ballot measures are hindered by the fact that average Dem enthusiasm for the issue is higher than the average R enthusiasm for it.

The R base gets the reputation for being hard core pro-life but that only comes from a small-ish minority of the party, compared to Dems who are pretty much uniformly for it. There are a lot of right wing low propensity voters who might be casually pro-life or they think abortion isn’t a nice thing but still have a nuanced opinion of what the policy should be (I know someone like this actually). These people would never be turned off by a politician’s opinion on it but are hard to get to turn out for a primary/referendum.

What this means for this year is probably that Dems will be motivated anywhere that the issue is remotely considered to be on the ballot, and R’s will need people to turn out for other reasons to have a good chance