My colleague, Bill Kristol, weighs in on the last 24 hours:
Happy Wednesday. Team Bulwark was up late last night, digging through the rubble of Tuesday’s election results. We’re still waiting on some late returns, but here are the clear toplines:
 Our team takes a deeper dive into the night’s big stories: Big Red State Abortion Win For DemocratsAMANDA CARPENTER: Kansas Republicans did pretty much everything possible to rig the nation’s first post-Dobbs statewide referendum to ban abortion in their favor. They scheduled the vote on an August summer Tuesday where mostly only competitive GOP primaries were on the ballot. They wrote the language in a vague, hard-to-decipher manner. And, they sent misleading text messages to voters telling them that a vote “YES” would protect “reproductive choice” when, in reality, it would allow the state to ban abortion outright. Also, keep in mind, Kansas is a state that went for Trump over Biden by more than 14 points in 2020. That all goes to say, the odds were firmly stacked in their favor. Despite all this, the constitutional amendment to ban abortion ended in a stunning defeat. At the time of his writing, with 95 percent of the vote counted, the measure was defeated by nearly 18 points. More important, turnout for the election was incredibly high–more than double the voters were cast Tuesday than they were in the 2018 primary. Voter turnout in the state’s most populous county, Johnson County, soared to 53.65 percent. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, Democrats vowed pro-choice voters would turn out in droves to protect abortion rights. The Kansas primary is the first time that theory was tested. Judging by these numbers, it appears to be entirely correct, even in a ruby red Trump state. ** WILL SALETAN: Kansas has delivered a blow to the anti-abortion movement. And it has done so with a lot of Republican votes. Tuesday’s primary ballot in Kansas included a measure that would have allowed the state’s lawmakers to restrict abortion. By early Wednesday morning, with more than 95 percent of precincts reporting, the ballot measure was losing by nearly 60 percent to 40 percent. But that’s not the big story. The big story is the turnout. The ballot measure was supposed to be helped by the timing of the vote. It was put on the ballot for primary day, not for the general election. In Kansas, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 2 to 1, and Republican primaries are more heavily contested than Democratic primaries. So turnout was expected to be a lot healthier on the Republican side. Theoretically, that should have helped the ballot measure. But look at the numbers. As expected, turnout in the Republican gubernatorial primary was much higher than in the Democratic primary—roughly 450,000 to 275,000, with some precincts still to be counted. But turnout on the ballot measure blew those numbers away. More than 900,000 people voted on the abortion question. Even if you assume that everyone who voted in the Democratic gubernatorial primary also voted for the ballot measure, that leaves more than 250,000 “no” votes—roughly half the “no” constituency—that didn’t come from Democrats. And even if every “yes” vote on the ballot measure came from a Republican, that leaves at least 75,000 people who voted in the GOP gubernatorial primary but didn’t support the ballot measure. This wasn’t just a backlash from the left or the center-left. It’s a warning that Republicans are divided on abortion The Sane Mirage + 3 Cheers for Jungle PrimariesTIM MILLER: Around 11ET I had drafted a sunny little ditty for the newsletter. The Biden agenda and the Trump impeachers were alive while Al-Zawahiri and Kari Lake were dead. Alas, as the night wore on it was revealed that the sanity was a merely an early vote mirage. Peter Meijer's lead in the MI-3 congressional race was erased, as the election day vote in Michigan heavily favored the pro-insurrection challenger John Gibbs, While the votes continue to be counted in Arizona, the same trend apparently put Kari Lake over the top in the state's gubernatorial race. Think of how crazy that is for a second. The Republican base is so detached from reality that a majority segment no longer trusts the mail. As a result the disparity between the early vote and the election day count in some places was as much as 40 points! This is madness! There was a small green shoot in Washington, where the top-2 jungle primary system protected both of that states pro-impeachment Republicans, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse. It is likely that once all the primaries are done it will only be Herrera-Beutler, Newhouse, and California's David Valadao who survive among the pro-impeachment house Republicans. All 3 went through a jungle primary, which is the best argument for moving to that system nationwide that I can imagine. Peter Meijer’s Rightful GripeAMANDA CARPENTER: The extra dash of salt in Peter Meijer’s loss to the Trump-backed John Gibbs are the dollars the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent to make it happen. Likely sensing, at best, a close election, Meijer warned in a Common Sense post the night before the primary that those Democrat dollars could easily put his opponent over the edge. Meijer wrote:
Missouri GOP Primary: An Awkward Ending to an Embarrassing RaceJIM SWIFT in this morning’s Bulwark:
BONUS:  Meanwhile, in Wisconsin…My friend James Wigderson, an exceptionally keen observer of local politics, has started a new newsletter that’s very much worth your time. By now, you know what I think about the Senate race in Wisconsin. (I sounded off again here.) You should read James’s take here:
Cheap ShotsLadies and gentlemen, the GOP nominee for Arizona governor:
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The Good, Bad, and Very Ugly
August 03, 2022
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