From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow. This is the Daily.

Last Tuesday, voters across the country approved measures to protect abortion rights,

while rejecting the presidential candidate

who claim to champion those same rights.

Today, my colleague Kate Zernigy explains that gap and what it tells us about the new

politics of abortion.

It's Tuesday, November 12th.

Kate, so much of the focus on election day was quite naturally on the race for president.

And I think as a result, a lot of us, and here I'm guilty myself, didn't quite understand how much abortion was on the ballot.

And literally, not in that spiritual way that we sometimes talk about in political reporting, that something is on the ballot. No, this was

actually on the ballot. That's right. So in 10 states and pretty diverse states across the

country, there were amendments on the ballot to establish abortion rights in the state

constitution. This was a record number

of ballot measures on abortion. In seven of those 10 states, those amendments won. So quick math,

that's a 70% victory rate in all of these states and has to be seen as a very big win for

abortion rights. Absolutely. And this is really the biggest

victory for abortion rights groups since Roe was overturned two and a half years ago. Okay. And just

explain how these 10 measures ended up on so many of these state ballots at the exact same time.

You know, between the time of Roe in 1973 and Dobbs, ballot measures were

actually something that anti-abortion groups used to their advantage. So there are 44 in that time

period, almost 50 years, and only four of them were put forward by abortion rights groups.

Huh. So basically ballot initiatives have been a tool of anti-abortion forces.

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