Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by the original crew. Steve Hayes, David French, Jonah Goldberg, and boy, do we have action packed show today?

Obviously we had the primary elections last night, including the Kansas abortion ballot measure to talk about plus plenty on the foreign policy side to discuss Nancy Pelosi goes to Taiwan, the Biden administration with a big victory targeting Al Zawahiri and

the NATO vote that happened in the Senate last night. One Republican voted no on Finland joining.

Let's die right in David. I'll start with you about the vote in Kansas.

What do you feel like you actually learned about how abortion will affect the midterms politically?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And a lot of what I learned about it is from this newsletter called the sweep that had some really really good points on this.

Let me put it like this. It isn't the outcome that I think was surprising. It was the turnout.

And that is what I think is significant. So what happened is there was a pro life measure put on the ballot in Kansas because Kansas had Supreme Court state Supreme Court authority that limits the ability of the legislature to regulate abortion.

So the purpose of the amendment and the ballot measure was to give the legislature the authority to regulate and perhaps even ban abortion.

The amendment itself was kind of a mess. It was a poorly written, but it was specifically put on the ballot in this period to help ensure its passage because it was, you know, Kansas is a red state.

This was in a primary. So you're going to have fewer voters normally. And so the thought was this was a sure thing turns out it wasn't and that it was pretty

resoundingly rejected and it was resoundingly rejected with a really large turnout, a turnout that was above the turnout that voted in both the Democratic and Republican primaries in on Tuesday.

So what does that say what it does is it gives me pause about a thought of had really since dobs and in the lead up to dobs, which was that while broadly speaking Americans support abortion rights.

In other words, my position is in the minority broadly speaking Americans don't prioritize voting on that that the people who really prioritize voting on abortion are more concentrated on the wings of the debate and more pro lifers tend to prioritize it than pro choice folks.

But what told me that what gives me pause here was that turnout told me that perhaps that's wrong. Perhaps what's happening after dobs is these issue polls that indicate that abortion is pretty low are not reading the room correctly and that in fact more people are focused on abortion.

And the more people who are actually focused on abortion and vote on abortion, you're going to get a sort of a broadly pro choice outcome not an extreme pro choice outcome but a broadly pro choice outcome.

Now the caveat to that is this was sort of the ultimate issue poll. It was a it was a ballot measure. It was you put that issue in front of the voters.

It did not necessarily tell us how voters are voting when on the one hand they want to send a message about inflation or want to do something about inflation.

But there are also broadly pro choice which one of those things is going to to be most important to them.

But at the end of the day when I look at this and I think about it from a pro life perspective, the thing that was most sobering to me was the was the turnout and the election.

Steve I've you know was saying up until now that all the data we had didn't seem to support the idea that abortion was going to make much of a difference in the midterms.

This is the first data point I think that shows that perhaps it is having already some political effect.

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