In the wake of last week's spate of primary elections that saw voters in five states head to the polls, pundits on the national cable news outlets - including conservative Fox News - were focused on ... Kansas, of all places. Not 2020 swing states like Arizona or Michigan, which also held primaries that day, but Kansas, which went for Donald Trump in 2020 by a 56-42 margin, with the former President carrying all but five of the state's 105 counties.
Why?
On the ballot in Kansas was Amendment 2, which related to abortion. In a nutshell, all the amendment would have done would have been to eliminate the right to an abortion from the state's constitution - a "right" that was put there by the state Supreme Court - and place the power to regulate abortion in the hands of the people, through their duly elected legislature (and subject to the veto power of their duly elected Governor), rather than leave that right in the hands of a largely unelected group of seven judges.
However, the amendment was couched in language that confused many of the few voters who bothered to read its actual language. And the opposition movement - which drew thousands of supporters from both coasts - used a campaign of lies to battle the amendment. Yard signs said, "Vote No - Stop the Ban," even though the amendment would not have banned abortion by any stretch of one's paranoid imagination. Campaign ads featured more lies, and scare tactics. Mailbox stuffers bore dire warnings reminiscent of the kinds of religious tracts handed out by the Westboro Baptist Church loonies. The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri - a little despot who let his mandate powers go to his head in 2020, to the point that he came to see himself as the sovereign of the entire metro area - crossed the state line to knock on doors to persuade Kansas suburbanites to vote no.
Uninformed voters took to Facebook to proclaim that a vote for the amendment meant that a pregnant woman couldn't terminate an ectopic pregnancy, which - if one actually understands what an ectopic pregnancy is - is so laughable a falsehood that the only people who would fall for it probably shouldn't be having children in the first place.
In the end, the campaign of lies was a smashing success. Nearly two-thirds of voters voted "No," and the amendment failed. Thus the Kansas Supreme Court remains sovereign over all Kansans, a sobering fact that could have implications that make this Kansan shudder (and consider moving outside the state he has called home for 62 of his 64 years).
So, back to the national news pundits. All eyes were on Kansas, because, in their deep analytical view, the Kansas vote is a harbinger of things to come in the November mid-terms. They reckon that, in a post-Dobbs world, the pro-abortion-on-demand crowd (and let's face it, that's what they are; no lipstick-on-a-pig terminology like "pro-choice" here, please) is so up in arms, so rabid, that they'll come out in force across the land, and the Dems will retain control of the House and the Senate.
Good, I say. Keep thinking that. Because the Kansas vote doesn't mean what you think it means.
First, those pundits are sitting there in Washington and New York, not understanding the dynamics of the Kansas vote. They don't know how the amendment was worded; heck, they didn't even read it themselves. (I did.) They themselves referred to it as a "ban." So they don't know that a number of voters voted against it because they were confused, and that large numbers voted against it because they were swayed by the campaign of lies.
See, most voters - and especially Democrats - don't read source documents. They vote on the basis of the news they watch, campaign ads, and maybe yard signs and mailbox stuffers. They vote with their hearts, not their heads.
Now, you may be crying "foul," especially if you're a Democrat. How can I say that "especially Democrats" don't read source documents, and instead base their vote on the news?
Easy. The covid pandemic gave me all the evidence I need to make that assertion with a high confidence interval. You watched the news and panicked; I dug into the data and did not. I called out the media for their hysteria on the basis of sound research using source documents and real data. You bought the hype. And by and large, the people that bought into the hype hook, line and sinker, the ones who panicked the most, were on the left, while the skeptics were on the right. Dems believe what their beloved media outlets tell them.
The pundits don't get all that. They think that these were informed voters who went into that vote eyes wide open. They were not. They were emotional voters fueled by misinformation who reacted to it.
The second thing the pundits don't get is the numbers. Again, I look at the data. If the Kansas amendment vote really were a harbinger of things to come in November, that would have played out in the numbers in other races in the state. Let's look at some of those races.
Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, is running for re-election. She won her primary handily, winning 94% of the Dem vote against a challenger most of us have never heard of. Her opponent, Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt, also easily won his primary, but by a narrower margin: 81% to 19% over an equally relatively unknown challenger.
However, let's look at the vote count, and here's where it gets interesting: Schmidt got 367,604 votes to Kelly's 264,857. Kelly's opponent got just over 17,000 votes, so in total, the Dems had about 282,000 votes on offer. Yet you know they came out in droves to vote on the abortion amendment, so low turnout on the blue side wasn't a factor. Yet Schmidt got nearly 100,000 more votes than the total votes cast by Democrats. And his primary opponent got another 88,000 votes.
Think Laura Kelly views the amendment vote as a harbinger of things to come in the fall? Think again. Her camp hustled up more than 5,000 signatures on a petition to get a far-right state legislator's name on the ballot as an Independent in the general election, in hopes of splitting the Republican vote. Why? Because she knows she can't beat Schmidt in a fair fight.
See, Kelly burned her bridges in 2020 by acting like a little tyrant, wielding her mandate powers using false information (yes, the same false information her Democrat followers swallowed whole, without questioning the data provided by her KDHE Director - but which data I dug into, and debunked), and Kansans got sick of it. So, no more experiments with a Dem governor running this red state. Hence her resorting to dirty politics to try to split the vote and beat Schmidt. She'll have to hope that her Independent lackey can get about 170,000 votes. It's not likely, as he's less well-known than Schmidt's primary opponent was.
Oh, did I mention that Schmidt opposes abortion?
Then there's Kris Kobach. Remember him? Former Kansas Secretary of State, former Chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. Known for his strong stance against illegal immigration. Hated by the left. Lost the 2018 gubernatorial election to Laura Kelly. Rumored to have been considered for the post of "immigration czar" by President Trump.
Kobach ran in the primaries against first-term State Senator Kellie Warren for Attorney General. Kellie Warren: Nice. Suburbanite. Woman.
Kobach, who was seen as more conservative than Warren, won. Who won the Democrat primary?
Chris Mann, whoever the hell he is. Who was unopposed. No one else bothered to run, because the Dems know they'll be crushed in November.
See? The numbers show that, even though the Democrats came out in force to "stop the ban," and a number of Republicans who don't want a ban on abortion were swayed by the campaign of lies voted against the amendment, the Republican votes in the actual races still clearly point to a red wave in November.
Now, Kansas is a red state. But, across this great nation, there are two things I know.
First, there aren't likely to be a lot of abortion amendments on ballots across the country come November 8 (which, by the way, is my birthday, and I'm expecting one hell of a celebration).
And second, the issues that Americans care more about than abortion - the ones that touch every man, woman, and born child in this country - still demand change. Inflation is 9.1% year over year, and rising. GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters. 401(k) balances are shrinking. Prices are rising nearly twice as fast as wages. Crime is soaring. Our southern border is wide open, and every state is now a border state. Property rights are becoming non-existent: a Portland homeowner recently listed his home for sale as-is, because it's occupied by squatters and he can't afford the legal fees to get them out. He went to the house to persuade them to leave, and they put him in the hospital. He's hoping an investor will take the risk, or will have the resources to remove them.
("Lack the resources to remove squatters from your property?" I'd call that an ammo shortage.)
More people - mostly young people - are dying of fentanyl overdoses, thanks to the free flow of drugs across our southern border, than died with covid. And more people died with covid under this administration than under the last, even though the last administration left this administration with vaccines, treatments, and a plan. Neither our President nor our Vice President can string two coherent sentences together, and we're the laughingstock of the world. We're afraid of our enemies, and our allies don't trust us. Our first family is corrupt to the core, but so are the agencies that should be investigating them. We're about to spend another trillion dollars in an inflationary environment, raise taxes in a recession, and increase IRS enforcement on people who can't afford to buy gas or groceries.
And these pundits think that, come fall, voters will forget all that and keep this party in power because some uninformed knuckleheads in Kansas voted against a poorly-worded amendment based on yard signs and mailbox stuffers?
Good. Keep thinking that.
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