"This fall, Roe is on the ballot," President Joe Biden said in June after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
On Aug. 2, Kansas became the first state to actually have the right to abortion on the ballot since the high court ended the constitutional right to an abortion.
And by an overwhelming majority, Kansas voters beat back an amendment to the state's constitution, backed by the GOP-led legislature, which would have allowed lawmakers to restrict abortion or ban the procedure outright.
Their victory, in which “no” votes won by an 18 point margin – a 165,000-vote difference – stunned the nation. Abortion-rights advocates and activists nationwide were stunned that a state perceived as red to the roots had flipped on abortion. Kansas went for former President Donald Trump over Joe Biden in 2020 by a margin of nearly 15 points.
But the people on the ground were more surprised by the breadth of their victory than the voters’ decision. The key to their confidence, they said, was the coalition of dozens of groups within Kansas moving together in the same direction: all projects under one big tent, acting on their own to reach their people.
“No one knows your home turf like the people who are from there,” said Melissa Stiehler, advocacy director at youth and marginalized community voter rights organization Loud Light.
And though Kansas has skewed traditionally more Republican – picking Democrats for president just three times in the last century, Franklin D. Roosevelt (twice) and Lyndon B. Johnson – progressive movements are entrenched in the state's soil.
Abolitionists like John Brown called Kansas home; it was the heart of the left-wing, farmer-driven Populist Party; and for generations, Stiehler said, Kansas was a safe haven for people seeking abortion from Missouri and other nearby states, due in part to physicians like George Tiller, who operated one of the few late-term abortion clinics in the country.
But by the mid-1990s, an anti-abortion movement led by the Christian right took root. The 1991 “Summer of Mercy” saw thousands of anti-abortion rights activists descend on the state, blocking the gates of clinics and dissuading people from seeking abortion services. That summer, which saw nearly 1,800 individuals arrested and daily anti-abortion rallies, was a turning point for the state, Jennifer Donnally wrote for the Kansas Historical Society’s quarterly journal, Kansas History. And in 2009, after surviving threats, firebombs, and attacks, Tiller was assassinated: shot in the side of the head during worship services, while he volunteered as a church usher.
Then, in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in favor of a lower court’s order enjoining a ban on a procedure known as “dilation and evacuation,” which is mostly used in second-trimester abortions. That ruling centered on an interpretation of the Kansas Constitution as protecting the right to personal autonomy — including a person’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
The ruling did not restrict the legislature’s ability to pass “reasonable restrictions” on abortion, including mandatory abortion waiting periods, parental consent for minors seeking abortions, and bans on government funding.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Republican-dominated Kansas Legislature added their proposed amendment to the ballot in time for the Aug. 2 primary election. Primary elections in Kansas (and across the nation, by and large) often see far less turnout than general elections; typically, only the most motivated, partisan voters turn out.
Considering Republican voter registration is nearly 72% higher than Democratic registration, and about 52% bigger than unaffiliated voters, organizations like Kansans for Constitutional Freedom — a bipartisan reproductive rights advocacy group — felt justified in being wary. Generally, primary elections have only about half the turn out of general elections in Kansas. Had the amendment passed, the door would open for the legislature to shape abortion law as it saw fit — or even eliminate abortion outright.
And yet, as of Aug. 12, unofficial returns show that the 2022 primary swept hundreds of thousands of voters to the polls. At least 922,321 individual votes were cast regarding the constitutional amendment alone; by comparison, 636,032 voters participated in the state’s 2020 primary election.
In other words, nearly half of Kansas’s 1.9 million registered voters cast ballots on Aug. 2 — still lower than most general election years, but substantially greater than any primary within the last decade. Interest was at a fevered pitch, and making sure voters were well-informed was paramount. While the "no" vote dominated in densely populated Northeastern Kansas, it also carried a handful of rural counties toward the central and southern regions of the state. And where "no" didn't win, its numbers held strong throughout the state, even in majority "yes" counties.
One of the first tenets of political messaging is to stay on-book, and not deviate from well-crafted campaign scripts. The last thing Ashley All, the director of communications for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, wants to hear on the campaign trail is news that people were ad-libbing while knocking on doors or phone-banking. KCF’s elevator pitch to moderate conservative and unaffiliated voters was tight: the amendment was the legislature encroaching on Kansans’ freedom to make their own healthcare choices.
“However, in the organizing arena, we definitely benefitted from personalization and groups that knew their audience, and were able to push the envelope and be silly, or whatever that group needed to be,” All said, referring to "Vote Neigh," Loud Light’s youth-oriented project which took to the campaign with a playful edge. It just wouldn’t make sense to talk to young progressives the same way as they would moderate conservatives, All said.
So what is "Vote Neigh," you ask?
“It’s a hot pink, western-themed campaign getting young people and BIPOC [Black, indigenous and people of color] people educated on the amendment and mobilized to vote,” said Donnavan Dillon, a Vote Neigh organizer and incoming political science and sociology sophomore at the University of Kansas.
The campaign — best illustrated through venues like its Instagram page — blended together testimonials from young voters, and informational graphics and educational video clips with pastel-bright rally posters and hot pink T-shirts of uteruses wearing cowboy hats.
“Politics doesn’t have to be boring, and getting involved doesn’t have to seem like a chore,” Dillon said. “Meet people where they are and make them find joy in the work, and that makes it less of a chore.”
In the weeks leading up to the election, Vote Neigh pushed its useful advantage via social media, through comments and direct messages on as many platforms as possible. Rija Nazir, Vote Neigh’s lead organizer, analyzed follower interactions and reached out to people directly, asking if they wanted to join in on events. “It’s easy to share a spot on your story, but when it gets to actually showing up — even if it’s just 10 more people showing up than before — there’s a lot of good work around capturing the movement.”
The weekend before election day, Vote Neigh began horsing around. In Lawrence, near the KU campus, that meant a rally with local bands, local speakers, food and fun. Around the other parts of the state, it meant rallies, photo booths, crafts and, yes, horses. All together, the weekend campaign was called “Ponies to the Polls.”
Vote Neigh didn’t draw everyone in — Nazir remembered emails from folks who tried to correct the group’s name (“it’s spelled ‘nay,’” Nazir recalled reading), while others felt that the group’s whole vibe wasn’t right for the times.
“But I saw toward the end of it that it had a lot of impact — not just on young people, but people who wanted a more accessible campaign that was fun,” Nazir said. “At the heart of organizing is community, and once you lose that sense of it, it’s a bunch of random messaging that’s not really resonating with people … it’s easy for people to read when people are (disingenuous), or being taken advantage of, for a vote.”
Building trust was a huge issue in Southwest Kansas, a rural corner of the state that is about 47 percent Hispanic, according to the 2020 American Community Survey — a huge outlier from the rest of the state. It’s a melting pot of communities and ethnicities, with its largest age group being people younger that 20 years old.
But general, moderate-focused organizing language shared by KCF across the state missed the mark in a community of many whose families are only a generation or two removed from entering the U.S., and still bear the values of their ancestral homes.
Conversation, not commitment
When Alejandro Rangel-Lopez, of Loud Light’s New Frontier Project, was given language from Kansans for Constitutional Freedom for his Southwest Kansas community, he was in a bind.
“It was very much what you would expect out of a moderate- or conservative-leaning group: very individual, personal-freedom sorts,” which didn’t resonate in his neck of the prairies. Compounding factors was a traditional religious conservatism that’s baked into Hispanic culture. “When your priest, el padre, is going in your ear saying they’re trying to pass a law to kill babies, and we’re saying ‘protect constitutional freedoms’…there’s a mismatch.”
His solution came from Latin American history, studying the abortion-rights fights of Argentina and Chile. Last year, Argentina became the first Latin American country to legalize abortion rights up to the 14th week of pregnancy, following a decades-long movement. In March, the Chilean legislature voted to include a guarantee for abortion rights in a draft of the country’s new constitution.
“What stood out to me was, if you’re from Latin America, or have that background…you already know what a post-Roe world looks like, what banned abortion looks like, in back alleys,” Rangel-Lopez said. One message stuck with him: no aborto clandestino — no underground abortions. “Focusing on that, femicide, violence against women, and using that lens, combined with cultural references local to Southwest Kansas…that worked.”
So too did the change to canvassing, or knocking on the doors of likely voters. A typical canvassing script is short and sweet: check for a voter’s position; if they’re with you, make sure they know when and where to vote; if they’re undecided, offer a bit of education to try and sway them; if they’re against, move on. It’s all about efficiency.
Not so with these voters, Rangel-Lopez found. That script didn’t translate well into Spanish — intentions were lost, voters were turned off, and doors were shut. So they changed tactics from a canvassing blitz to a casual conversation. Instead of “will you commit to this vote,” it was “¿qué piensas?” — what do you think?
That led to more discussions about what’s best for people, and what’s best for communities, reflections on how abortion bans have affected people they’ve known, and what laws may come down had the amendment passed: including total abortion bans, without exceptions for rape, incest, or sexual violence. Those conversations, he said, made a world of difference.
The big tent that pro-abortion rights advocates developed also allowed for one-offs — people like Kurstin Gaudet, a social worker and mother who threw together one of the state’s largest rallies, at the State Capitol in Topeka, in her first-ever jump at politics. A self-professed “regular person” and organizing rookie, Gaudet and two friends drew hundreds for a march and rally to the Kansas Statehouse the weekend before the election.
A mother and wife, Gaudet has had three abortions in her lifetime, and two after having her daughter. She knew that abortion conversations rarely included people who sought abortions to protect their health and their existing family — and that pregnancy happens even to those who, like her, are “religious” in their birth control use.
Gaudet knew the financial difficulties, of the physical and emotional tolls of pregnancy, weighed the stresses of an abortion itself, and decided that another child wasn’t right for their family. “People think it makes you think you’re a bad mother, but the way I look at it, I think it makes me a better mother because I made that decision for my family.”
She and a pair of friends decided to put together their rally at the Kansas Statehous, starting with a sign-making campaign at a local bar. “We were trying to keep it fairly low and fun, to spread information. The more knowledge you have, the more prepared you are,” Gaudet said. “Ultimately, I think that’s what swayed people. They saw it from a different perspective.”
Their rally was powered by word of mouth and social media spread. Before long, larger groups, like Loud Light, took notice and offered support with volunteers and permitting experience. On July 30, more than 500 people marched around the state capitol before rallying at its foot, gathering national attention.
“I hope what I did made an impact … I hope the rest of the U.S. and the world is watching, and I hope that women and people who need abortion care are not going to go away silently,” Gaudet said.
The question is, will what happened in Kansas work in other communities that are voting on abortion rights? Four states — California, Kentucky, Montana and Vermont — will hold votes on the future of reproductive rights this November. More are sure to follow.
“There are absolutely unique aspects to this state, this campaign, this amendment,” said Ashley All of Kansans for Constitutional Freedom. “But what I do think is replicable is the intense focus we had on coalition building and organizing. This is not something where we managed everyone heavily…[it was] something that was able to grow and change and adapt to whatever community.”
Community is the key, Rangel-Lopez said, as he sought to credit everyone who helped build power in Southwest Kansas. “It takes a village, and by building community power, we have a path forward. But it has to come from us.”