Kansas is the first battle in the post-Roe abortion war

“Vote ‘No’” canvassers knocking on doors every weekend have noticed that organizers are sending them to more and more Republican households—a decision based both on necessity and what they say is a growing opposition to the amendment among moderate GOP voters. “I’ve talked to a lot of Republicans who don’t want the amendment to pass, because they think it’s government overreach,” Kim Biagioli, a 38-year-old lawyer who’s been canvassing in Johnson County multiple times a week for months, told me.

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Opponents of the amendment were always planning to mount an aggressive campaign to defeat the measure, but any chance they have at victory is probably due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in June. “Post-Roe, there’s just been a huge shift,” Chuck Cordray, 59, a real-estate investor who serves on his local Democratic committee in Leawood, Kansas, told me. “There are a lot of ‘Vote No’ signs, and they’re not only in Democratic yards.”

Although Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since the 1930s, the state has occasionally rebelled against conservatism. Kelly, a Democrat who appealed to independents and moderate Republicans, won the governorship in 2018 after the two-term conservative Sam Brownback decimated the state’s budget in a failed experiment in ultra-low taxation. Nor is the state quite as crimson as it used to be: Trump’s healthy 15-point win in 2020 was the smallest margin of victory for a Republican presidential nominee there since 1992.

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