In a conference room at the Sheraton in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, people screamed, whooped, cheered and cried as a vote to protect abortion rights in Kansas’s state constitution came down late on Tuesday night.
And it wasn’t just Democrats.
James Quigley, 72, a retired doctor and a Republican from Johnson county, sat on his own drinking a glass of white wine after hearing the news. “Abortion is a much more nuanced issue than anti-choice individuals would have you think,” he told the Guardian. “It is deeply personal, sometimes tragic, but also sometimes a liberating decision – and we should trust women, their physicians, and their God on that,” he
We could feel it – we’ve been feeling it for weeks,” said Marcia Corbett, 71, a swing voter and local business owner, before the vote came in.
The result had been eagerly awaited, as Kansas was the first state in the country to put abortion rights on the ballot since Roe v Wade, which federally guaranteed them, was overturned by the supreme court. It came after weeks of uncertainty, in a race in which misinformation abounded and tactics got ugly.
The victory – and its sheer scale in a usually reliably Republican and socially conservative state like Kansas – has sent shockwaves through the United States and provided a shot in the arm for efforts to protect abortion rights under siege across America.
In Kansas, that fight had gotten dirty. On Tuesday, a former Republican congressmanwas linked to messages targeting voters with an anonymous, misleading text encouraging people to vote yes to protect abortion – when in fact a yes vote would have overturned a constitutional right to abortion. Vandals also spray-painted the walls of a Catholic church weeks earlier, with the phrase, “My body, my choice.”
Nor had victory seemed certain on the day of the vote.
On Tuesday, as voting began, the mood seemed amicable in Douglas county on a hot, sticky day, where temperatures consistently threatened to hit the hundreds. Polling booths in Lawrence and Eudora saw a steady drip of voters, even in the middle of the day, with dozens of voters lining up to vote at any given time. Many were unaffiliated, but turned up just to vote in the referendum.
We’re a Republican state. And we don’t generally vote that wayPatrick Perry