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Re: Kansas referendum
After reading a bunch of analyses on the topic, the conclusion I'm coming to is that it turns out that an outright ban was the tipping point to make people sit up and notice.
Prior to Dobbs you had plenty of polls indicating that abortion rights just weren't the highest-importance issue for a large part of the electorate, including Democrats. The polling we're seeing after Dobbs, however, has very much changed. It's charged up Democrats and shifted opinions among Independents and even a small cadre of Republicans.
Which probably shouldn't be surprising given human nature and the fact that a lot of Americans really don't pay that much attention to political minutae.
On the first point, I'd posit that for most folks there's a difference between rights being restricted and rights being abolished. As long as the GOP was mainly doing the former, a lot of people couldn't bother themselves to care too much.
On the second point, I'd guess a huge number of Americans didn't really understand how GOP legislatures were restricting abortion access so dramatically. But then you have a huge news story like Dobbs and it suddenly hits home.
It remains to be seen if this carries Democrats home in this fall's mid-term election cycle, but the Kansas result (which included unprecedented turnout and huge voter registration numbers) definitely surprised a lot of people who watch this kind of thing professionally.
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