Bleeding Kansas? Politics, Abortion, and Abortion Politics.
Maybe the Vote in Kansas Was Only a Flesh Wound.
Last Tuesday voters soundly defeated a referendum aimed at overturning abortion protections in Kansas. The New York Times hailed the vote as “the most tangible demonstration yet of a political backlash against the U.S. Supreme Court’s [Dobbs] decision.” Bracing for impact as job approval for President Joe Biden plummeted, and suffering through month after month of alarming economic indicators, the surprising margin of victory in Kansas heartened Democrats. In the face of serious headwinds, might the decision by the High Court rally Democratic Party prospects in the coming midterm election?
Maybe.
In truth, NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING (h/t William Goldman).
Fools with more education than good sense make predictions. They are right sometimes. When, inevitably, they are wrong, these prognosticators claim unforeseen circumstances prevented their otherwise accurate forecast from coming true. Exactly. This is why Yogi said predictions were hard, especially about the future.
We are currently on the accelerated rollercoaster run of expectations. Not too long ago, you could find some Republicans predicting a 70 seat gain in the House of Representatives. Those untethered ravings were based on a passing familiarity with the two historic red waves in our memory. Republicans charted a 63 seat gain in the House in 2010 and a seismic 54 seat gain back in 1994. Both midterm elections came after a rocky first two years of a Democratic administration and overturned Democratic majorities in the House.
We are unlikely to see a repeat of those numbers based on several factors including redistricting—but mostly as a result of the Republican starting point. The 63 seat gain in 2010 began with 179 seats held going into the midterm, vaulting Republican membership to 242. Perhaps even more astonishing at the time, although slightly smaller numerically, the 1994 flip turned over 54 seats and raised Republican membership from 176 to 230. Why won’t the GOP hang 54 or 63 on the Dems in November? Notice the starting point. As a result of significant (unanticipated) gains in the 2020 election in which Republicans lost the White House and the Senate but actually netted a governorship and fourteen House seats, the GOP currently holds 210 seats going into this election.
There are 435 total seats in the House. A majority equals 218. Democrats hold 220. Republicans currently occupy 210 House seats. There are five vacant positions due to normal attrition and unexpected tragedy.
The apogee for Republicans in this Congress was 213 on the first day of the term in 2021. The high water mark for Republican seats in my lifetime is 247 in 2014 (building off the “shellacking'' in 2010). So, rather than starting in the high 170s, the GOP happily begins with 210. As you consider what is possible, and even if you are confident 2022 feels like 2010 and 1994, you should deduct 30 seats from expectations based on those former triumphs. That is, for the Republicans to reach the heights of 2010, they only need 32 seats. For Republicans to match the sweet ecstasy of 1994, they only need 20 seats. To equal their high water mark in my lifetime, the GOP would need to gain 37 seats. A 50 seat gain would place Republicans in a position of dominance not seen in over a century. Moreover, in terms of logistics, and the lay of the land now versus then, there are far fewer competitive districts even in a tsunami year.
Just for the sake of our discussion, let us set the over-under at 24. A 24-seat gain would give the new Speaker of the House 234 members in the GOP caucus and a comfortable cushion above the 218 threshold to control the chamber.
If I were a sporting man, even with all the hiccups, I would still bet the OVER. But 24 seats are not guaranteed. Fourteen seats are not guaranteed. A four seat gain (or a push or even a slight loss) is not impossible. There are myriad variables.
For amusement purposes only, see Nate Silver’s 538 House Forecast, to which the site affixes an astute disclaimer: “we use numbers to express uncertainty; upsets are surprising but not impossible.” Well said.
Abortion in 2022 is one of those myriad variables. The Dobbs decision, which restored the question of abortion back to the states, roiled the waters. On the deliciously illuminating side, the Kansas vote exposes the ubiquitous false claim that the Court outlawed abortion.
The acme of ridiculous conclusions derived from faulty assumptions may have come in the pages of the New York Times on August 4: “Defying the Supreme Court.” David Leonhardt, in the shared euphoria over the referendum, explained that progressive activists had stumbled onto an innovative tool to thwart the all-powerful Supreme Court: voting and legislating. His investigation uncovered evidence that the Constitution had not designated the High Court to wield unchecked tyrannical powers. In a Times exclusive, Leonhardt revealed that Madison and associates actually devised a federal system by which elected representatives in Congress wrote laws on behalf of the citizenry while states retained sovereign powers of self-government.
Not the Bee. Lest you think I exaggerate unfairly, submitted for examination, a full graph from the story representative of the whole:
“The founders did not design the court to be the final arbiter of American politics, anyway. At the state level, progressives still have the ability to protect abortion rights, so long as they can persuade enough voters — as happened in Kansas this week. At the federal level, Congress has more authority to defy court decisions than many people realize.”
As for the “many people” who do not “realize” basics in American civics, I can only imagine Leonhardt refers to the hundreds of Times employees who graduated from Ivy League schools that long ago stopped teaching American history and constitutional development in favor of therapeutic education.
This frank admission by the Times in the midst of their joyous celebration also puts the lie to decades of alarmist, erroneous reporting and scare headlines. No conservative Supreme Court ever threatened to outlaw abortion. In an ironic juxtaposition of facts and rhetoric, the self-titled “pro choice” faction fell into spasms of grief and remonstrance when the Court remanded the choice back to the people. Rather than the dead hand of seven justices, who imposed a national abortion code in 1973, against the will of millions of citizens and in violation of the laws of a majority of states, the Dobbs decision merely returned the intensely political question to the democratic process. And, for the first time in forty-nine years, the Times decried judicial overreach.
What’s the Matter with Kansas? Nothing, really. What’s the matter with you?
On Tuesday night 543,855 Kansans said no to the question of whether there should:
“…be no Kansas constitutional right to abortion or to require the government funding of abortion, and reserve to the people of Kansas, through their elected state legislators, the right to pass laws to regulate abortion, including, but not limited to, in circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or when necessary to save the life of the mother?”
Ugh. An oddly and unnecessarily confusing referendum drafted by tone-deaf politicians in which no means yes and yes means no. So turgid and unclear, some have argued that the vote did not reflect the true spirit of Kansas opinion. Balderdash. Take the vote at face value. Almost a million Jay Hawkers went to the polls in the heat of August in numbers that exceeded midterm election norms for the fall.
They voted decisively to maintain the status quo, a compromise position in which abortions are guaranteed up to the 22 week mark of pregnancy. Did the voters understand that handing the question to the legislature probably meant a much more restrictive abortion regime with a reduced window for elective terminations? Surely they did. Might the anti-abortion forces fared better if they had NOT gone for broke? Would the outcome be different if they had offered a shorter threshold for elective abortion more in keeping with European norms and public opinion polling in the United States? Perhaps.
What is the American consensus on abortion? Over the past fifty years, even better than a Baptist and bootleggers coalition, has been the pro-life union of Baptists and Catholics. Historically not always on the same page on abortion, and not always comfortable political bedfellows, the 1973 Roe ruling brought together the most muscular grassroots strains of popular Christianity in American culture. The combination of Catholics and conservative evangelicals (concentrated in the South and Midwest) marked the beginning of the Religious Right as a force in American politics and fueled the Reagan, Bush, and Trump victories. The Bill Clinton and Barack Obama triumphs necessarily played to this audience as well—never soliciting their endorsements directly but always aware of the need to blunt antipathy among the rank-in-file. Clinton and “abortion as safe, legal, and rare” and Obama’s assurances to evangelicals he believed in marriage between one man and one woman offer examples of political calculations necessary to mitigate Christian social conservatism.
Catholics are intellectual and rooted in tradition. The Church approaches questions of life and justice with clarity and logically consistent positions, perhaps evolving over time but always reflecting the long process of thoughtful theological inquiry. Baptists are mostly just against killing unborn babies. For Baptists (evangelical conservatives), there is a baby in the womb when you can see or feel a baby. In older times, much was made of the idea of “quickening,” the moment when a woman could feel a child growing inside her. The world can see a “baby bump.” A man can place his hand on his wife’s extended stomach and feel the life of his child on track to be born. Add the technology of an ultrasound, and we may literally look inside a woman and see a child living and growing. For a simple Baptist, it is self evident that a baby is a human being on day one (the joyous day of birth) with all the blessings and inalienable rights accorded by the Creator. Logically, birth day minus one (the day before a child enters our world) should not make a qualitative difference in her humanity—nor birth day minus two, or three, or four, and so on.
But, unlike our Catholic brothers in Christ, for a Baptist, there is a moment way back there in the process of gestation when we cannot see a baby, when we may start to lose our conviction that there really is a baby. In that instance, the Baptist religious fervor to protect the unborn may wane.
Because you have seen me, you believed. Blessed are they who have not seen, yet believed.
Harkening back to the pre-Roe world in which Baptists and Catholics respectfully disagreed on public laws related to when life begins, the post-Dobbs world may see a small fissure in the greatest political alliance of my lifetime. While Catholic teaching will consistently proclaim life begins at conception, a broadening of Baptist opinion in the wake of Dobbs might accept elective abortions (especially non surgical) in the early weeks of pregnancy. Florida recently enacted a 15-week abortion bill. Time will tell whether that is the sweet spot in the wide spectrum of American public opinion on this issue.
None of this means the abortion absolutists have won the day. Far from it. For my whole life, pro life has been pro life. The pro-abortion rights side has been pro-choice, pro reproductive freedom, pro reproductive rights, pro reproductive health, and, most recently, pro women’s health. As a variation on the old political maxim, “if you are explaining, you are losing,” if you are scrambling from euphemism to euphemism, you may have an unpopular, unsustainable argument.
Democrats are too tied to abortion extremists and unlikely to extricate themselves in the near term. Although misunderstood, Americans are revolted at the thought of late-term and partial-birth abortions. The most powerful voices in the Democratic Party today stridently call for abortion on demand during the entirety of pregnancy. “Shouting your abortion” in the public square will not prove a winning strategy in most precincts.
Pro Lifers will heed the loss in Kansas as a wake up call from the intoxicating Dobbs victory and recalculate and redraft to better coincide with a majority of Americans who favor some limits on abortion. After fifty years of court-imposed stalemate, as this battle moves back to the people and the states, the debate will enliven and evolve in ways we cannot imagine. Neither side is likely to see total victory. Get ready for a patchwork of compromise laws in all but the most extreme states.
Is Kansas the first tremor in a massive political earthquake that reverses the tide of Democratic fortune and leads to renewed electoral success in November and beyond? Not likely. The Democrats are still running on a “stagflating” economy in which gas and grocery prices are intolerably high, healthy job numbers obscure problems on the hiring and employment-seeking ends of the labor market, a border crisis that New York and the Beltway just noticed, public safety concerns, an increasing skepticism of the expert class, and an unpopular 79-year-old president much diminished from his glory days when he could launch quixotic presidential campaigns and effortlessly speechify at Senate committee hearings.
NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.
But I am still betting the over.