When abortion is on the ballot
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 August 2022
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
An abortion access victory in Kansas. Trump-backed candidates on the rise. What the results of Tuesday’s elections could mean for the midterms in the fall.
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Kansas voters delivered the first election win to protect abortion access since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Campaign reporter Hannah Knowles unpacks this surprising outcome — supporters of abortion rights overwhelmingly won — and what lessons it carries for the politics of abortion.
At the same time, many candidates backed by former president Donald Trump and those who denied he lost the 2020 election prevailed in their primary races Tuesday. Hannah says the fall midterms are expected to be a red wave even as Democrats “hope that in the end, voters will just see these candidates as too extreme and especially see their kind of campaigns against democracy itself as too extreme.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Tuesday night in Kansas, pro-abortion rights voters threw a victory party. |
| 0:12.1 | People there had just overwhelmingly rejected an amendment aimed at restricting abortion |
| 0:17.0 | rights. |
| 0:18.0 | And for us, it was really finding, coming ground around protecting constitutional rights, |
| 0:26.0 | protecting freedom to make those decisions for yourself. |
| 0:31.9 | That's Ashley All, a spokeswoman for the pro-abortion rights group, Kansas for Constitutional |
| 0:36.7 | Freedom. |
| 0:37.7 | And she was there celebrating this first big election victory for abortion access since |
| 0:43.3 | the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. |
| 0:46.1 | You know, pro-Trey's activists were already engaged. |
| 0:48.7 | Right. |
| 0:49.7 | They were already working hard. |
| 0:50.7 | And you know, what I think the decision to overturn Roe did was wake up a whole bunch of |
| 0:58.1 | modern Republican voters, moderate, you know, unaffiliated voters who really thought that |
| 1:04.1 | their constitutional rights were protected at the federal level. |
| 1:07.6 | And come June, they found that that was not the case. |
| 1:14.4 | For Hannah Knowles, a campaign reporter for the post, this was a really big deal. |
| 1:18.9 | And one that not many people expected. |
| 1:21.9 | We didn't really know what was going to happen. |
| 1:23.5 | I'm going into it. |
| 1:24.5 | You had public polling showing that this was going to be close and that, you know, maybe |
| 1:27.6 | the opponents of abortion would actually have the edge. |
... |
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