'Your Bedroom Is on the Ballot': How Democrats See Abortion Politics After Kansas - The New York Times

A decisive vote to defend abortion rights in deeply conservative Kansas reverberated across the midterm campaign landscape on Wednesday, galvanizing Democrats and underscoring for Republicans the risks of overreaching on one of the most emotionally charged matters in American politics.

In a state where Republicans far outnumber Democrats, Kansans delivered a clear message in the first major vote testing the potency of abortion politics since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.

The overwhelming defeat of a measure that would have removed abortion protections from the state constitution quickly emboldened Democrats to run more assertively on abortion rights and even to reclaim some of the language long deployed by conservatives against government overreach, using it to cast abortion bans as infringing on personal freedoms.

In interviews, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, urged Democrats to be “full-throated” in their support of abortion access, and Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, said the Kansas vote offered a “preview of coming attractions” for Republicans.

Democrats hoped the Supreme Court decision this summer erasing the constitutional right to an abortion would change that, as Republican-led states rushed to enact new restrictions, and outright bans on the procedure took hold.

The Kansas vote was the most concrete evidence yet that a broad swath of voters — including some Republicans who still support their party in November — were ready to push back.

They argued that abortion rights are a powerful part of the effort to cast Republicans as extremists and turn the 2022 elections into a choice between two parties, rather than a referendum just on Democrats.

“The Republicans who are running for office are quite open about their support for banning abortion,” said Senator Warren.

North of New York City, a Democrat running in a special House election this month, Pat Ryan, has made abortion rights a centerpiece of his campaign, casting the race as another measure of the issue’s power this year.

After the Supreme Court’s decision, Democrats registered to vote at a faster rate than Republicans in Kansas, according a memo from Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm.

He urged Democrats to ignore polling that showed abortion was not a top-tier issue, adding that “voters take their cues from leaders” and Democrats need to discuss abortion access more.

Michael McAdams, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said that if Democrats focused the fall campaign on abortion they would be ignoring the economy and record-high prices: “the No

Malinowski, who said he was planning to advertise on abortion rights, said the results in Kansas had affirmed for him the significance of abortion and the public’s desire to keep government out of such personal decisions