Kansas Voters Rejected an Abortion Amendment in August 2022

On the evening of August 2, 2022, election workers across Kansas began counting ballots from a primary that, in most years, would have drawn a modest crowd of party regulars. This one was different. Advance voting had run well ahead of a normal summer primary, in suburban Johnson County and in small towns on the plains alike. The question drawing people out was not a candidate but a constitutional amendment, and it had been placed on the August ballot by legislators who assumed a low-turnout primary would favor them. When the results came in, the margin was not close. In a state Donald Trump had carried by about 15 points two years earlier, the amendment to strip abortion protections from the state constitution lost by roughly 18.

In short: Kansas was the first state to vote on abortion after the Supreme Court overruled Roe, and its voters rejected an amendment that would have removed protections from the state constitution by a wide margin, with turnout far above a normal primary. The campaign showed that abortion rights could win in conservative places when framed around government intrusion and personal freedom, and it became the model for the ballot measures that followed.

How the amendment got onto an August ballot

The story starts three years earlier. In 2019 the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that the state constitution's Bill of Rights, which declares that all people possess "natural rights" including liberty, protected a right to personal autonomy that included the decision whether to continue a pregnancy. The ruling meant that, whatever happened to Roe at the federal level, Kansas's own constitution would keep abortion legal unless it was amended.

Opponents of abortion responded by drafting an amendment, called Value Them Both by its supporters. It would have added language saying the state constitution does not create or secure a right to abortion and that the legislature may pass laws regulating it. Getting an amendment on the ballot in Kansas requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature. Republicans had those majorities, and they passed it in early 2021.

Then came a choice that would matter enormously. Legislators placed the vote on the August 2022 primary ballot instead of the November general election. Primaries in Kansas usually draw far fewer voters, and many of the voters who do show up are Republicans picking nominees in contested races. Unaffiliated voters, a large group in Kansas, can vote on constitutional questions in a primary but often do not bother to come out.

When the legislature made that decision, Roe was still in force. By the time voters went to the polls, Dobbs had come down on June 24, 2022, just under six weeks before the vote. The amendment that had been designed as a long-range move suddenly became the first direct test of public opinion in a post-Roe country.

A free-state constitution from 1859

The right the Kansas Supreme Court found in 2019 did not come from a modern document. It came from the Wyandotte Constitution, written in 1859 by delegates meeting in what is now Kansas City, Kansas, during the violent years when the territory was fought over by people who wanted it to enter the Union as a slave state and people determined to keep it free. The free-state side won. Kansas entered the Union in January 1861, weeks before the Civil War began, under that constitution.

Its Bill of Rights opens with a sentence echoing the Declaration of Independence: all men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The court read that guarantee of natural rights, written by people who had just fought over whether human beings could be owned, as protecting personal autonomy, including the right to control one's own body.

Critics of the ruling said the delegates of 1859 could not possibly have had abortion in mind, and they were surely right about that. The court's answer was that the delegates wrote in broad language about natural rights on purpose, and that the job of later generations is to apply that language rather than freeze it. The same argument runs through every debate about constitutional interpretation, state or federal.

There is something fitting about the vote in 2022, though. The voters who rejected the amendment were deciding whether to keep a protection rooted in a constitution that had itself been a statement about freedom against the most powerful political interests of its day. Whatever one thinks of the 2019 ruling, the August vote meant that Kansans had now endorsed it directly.

A confusing question and a clear message

The ballot language itself was a challenge. A yes vote meant amending the constitution to remove the protection; a no vote meant keeping things as they were. Voters who supported abortion rights needed to vote no, which is not intuitive. The wording of the question was long and referred to government funding of abortion and exceptions in a way that critics said obscured its effect.

The campaign against the amendment, organized as Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, made a strategic decision that shaped everything after. It did not run mainly as an abortion rights campaign. Its ads and canvassers talked about government overreach, about politicians interfering in private medical decisions, about the possibility of a total ban with no exceptions if the amendment passed. They spoke the language of liberty and limited government, which is native to Kansas politics, rather than the language of choice that might sound like a national cause imported from the coasts.

That was not a trick. It was a recognition that many Kansas voters held complicated views. Plenty of people who considered themselves pro-life also did not want the state legislature making decisions about a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, or a teenager who had been raped. The campaign gave those voters permission to vote no without changing their identity.

The day before the vote, many Kansans received an anonymous text message telling them, misleadingly, that a yes vote would protect choice. It was the opposite of the truth, and reporters traced the message to a political group headed by a former Republican congressman who backed the amendment. It does not seem to have worked.

The turnout nobody predicted

When the votes were counted, the amendment had lost with about 59 percent voting no. More than 900,000 Kansans voted, a turnout well above what anyone had forecast for a primary and comparable to some general elections in the state.

The geography was just as striking. The no side won big in the Kansas City suburbs and in the college towns of Lawrence and Manhattan, as expected. But it also ran far ahead of Democratic candidates' usual performance in rural and small-town counties. In many places that routinely vote Republican by wide margins, the yes side won by much smaller margins than a typical Republican candidate would. Some counties that Trump had carried voted no.

Voter registration also told a story. In the weeks after Dobbs, analysts noticed a surge in new registrations in Kansas, and a noticeable share of those new voters were women. Unaffiliated voters, the group that legislators had expected to stay home, came out in large numbers.

What the opponents' strongest argument was

It is worth stating the amendment supporters' case fairly. They argued that the 2019 Kansas Supreme Court decision had taken an issue that should belong to elected representatives and locked it into the constitution through judicial interpretation. Under that ruling, they said, even modest regulations like waiting periods or limits on later abortions could be struck down. The amendment, in their framing, did not ban anything. It returned the question to the legislature, which voters could then hold accountable.

That argument has a democratic logic to it, and it is the same logic the Supreme Court used in Dobbs. Here's the response, and I am offering it as argument rather than fact. Kansas voters were given exactly the democratic choice the supporters said they wanted. They were asked directly whether to hand this question to their legislature, and they said no. The people themselves preferred a constitutional protection to legislative discretion. That is democracy working too, and it is a rebuke to the assumption that the legislature always better reflects public will than a direct vote of the people.

What Kansas signaled for everything after

The Kansas vote did not just protect access in one state. It changed how abortion rights groups and their opponents approached the question nationally.

It showed that direct democracy favored abortion rights. In November 2022, voters in Michigan, California and Vermont added protections to their constitutions, and voters in Kentucky and Montana rejected measures backed by abortion opponents. In 2023, Ohio voters added abortion rights to their constitution. By 2024, ballot measures were on the ballot in ten states. Not all passed, but the pattern was clear: when the question was put to voters directly, abortion rights usually won, often by margins larger than Democratic candidates in the same elections.

It moved the fight to ballot rules. Opponents responded by trying to make ballot measures harder to pass: raising thresholds, changing petition requirements, rewriting ballot language. Ohio's legislature tried to raise the threshold for amendments to 60 percent in an August 2023 special election; voters rejected that too.

It reshaped the message. The liberty framing that worked in Kansas became standard in red-state campaigns. Organizers learned to talk about government interference, about doctors' judgment, about families, and to meet people where they were.

It gave Democrats a political argument. The Kansas result was an early signal that the 2022 midterms would not be a typical wave for the party out of the White House, and abortion became one of the defining issues of that year's campaigns.

What happened in Kansas in November

Three months after the amendment failed, Kansans went back to the polls for the general election. Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat who had opposed the amendment, won a second term in a close race against the state's Republican attorney general, Derek Schmidt, whose name was on the 2019 case as the state's defender. Her campaign spent much of its energy on schools, roads and the economy rather than abortion, but the August vote had shown that a Democrat could hold together the kind of cross-party coalition she needed.

It is easy to overread that. Kansas remained a Republican state in most races, and the legislature kept its large Republican majorities. What the August and November results showed together is that many Kansans were willing to split their decisions: Republican for the legislature, no on the amendment, and in many cases a vote for a Democratic governor. Voters are less tribal than national coverage often assumes.

The neighbors who voted no

The most important lesson of Kansas is about people, not tactics. The no vote was assembled from people who do not agree on much: suburban parents, rural ranchers, college students, churchgoers who would describe themselves as pro-life but did not want politicians in the exam room, longtime Republicans who had never voted for a Democrat. They did not have to agree on abortion to agree on who should decide.

The campaign against the amendment also had to teach. Because a no vote meant keeping the existing protection, a good share of its effort went into explaining the mechanics of the ballot rather than arguing about abortion at all: which box did what, and why the wording read the way it did. That patient, unglamorous work is easy to overlook in accounts that focus on the final margin. It is also the part any group, in any state, can copy, because it takes volunteers and patience rather than money.

The pollsters and the legislators who chose the August date both underestimated these people. They assumed that voting patterns in candidate races would carry over to a direct question about government power. They did not, and the gap between those two kinds of votes has been one of the most consistent findings in American politics since.

For progressives, that is both an opportunity and a discipline. It is an opportunity because it shows a much broader coalition than the party's voter file would suggest. It is a discipline because holding that coalition means respecting people's mixed views rather than insisting they adopt the whole agenda. The Kansas campaign won by asking neighbors for one vote on one question, and trusting them with it.

What you can do

The Kansas result began with voters who registered, showed up and talked to their neighbors. Each of those is still the work.

• Get registered and help others do it. The voting page has registration deadlines, ID rules and mail and early voting options for every state, linked to each state's election office.
• Watch for the next measure. The abortion on the ballot page follows proposed amendments, petition drives and the legislative fights over ballot rules in each state.
• Track how your officials vote on the rules of direct democracy. The representatives lookup shows your state legislators and their latest votes, which is where proposals to raise thresholds or tighten petition rules are decided.
• Find a local campaign or group. The organizations directory lists voting and health nonprofits in every state, many of which run canvasses and phone banks around ballot questions.