On Tuesday night, Kansans were the first to take abortion rights to the ballot box since the fall of Roe v. Wade, and they resoundingly voted against removing the right to abortion from the state constitution. By Wednesday morning’s count, the ballot initiative that would have ultimately allowed lawmakers to strip abortion protections was losing by double digits. Abortion is protected under the Kansas state constitution for up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. The fear ahead of the vote was that if the amendment succeeded, the conservative-majority legislature—with the power to overrule a veto from Kansas’s Democratic governor Laura Kelly—would have passed draconian antiabortion legislation, including an outright ban. Instead, Kansans delivered their clear support for abortion protections in the state—“a sign of just how unpopular overturning Roe v. Wade is nationally,” election watcher Dave Wasserman wrote on election night.

“I think in this post-Dobbs moment, we are all coming to grips with just how wide the gulf is between what popular opinion is on where and how and when abortion should be legal, and the actions that we are seeing proliferate in any given state, and whether that’s because deeply antiquated laws are coming back into effect or because of recently passed trigger laws or new legislative action—it has been swift, it has been galling. It has been shocking to many people,” Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, a group that campaigns for progressive ballot initiatives, said in an interview.

That the measure was on the primary ballot, as opposed to the general election ballot, was unusual. “[The conservative legislature] wanted this to be among a small group of voters who generally lean conservative and have more competitive primaries in Kansas. But here we are, and people know what’s on the ballot and I think they know what’s at stake,” Emily Wales, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said in an interview. “I think the plan backfired and they ended up with a vote on abortion only weeks after the fall of Roe. And people understand that this issue is really unique in this moment.”

Ahead of the primary, abortion-rights advocates I spoke with were optimistic that the constitutional amendment would fail. “I think that people are kind of getting in touch with how they actually feel about abortion rights in this state and that it is something that they value, and that it is something that most people view as a public good that they want meaningful local access to, even if they never intend to use it,” Zack Gingrich-Gaylord, a spokesperson with Trust Women, an organization that provides abortion care, said in an interview. That neighboring states Missouri and Oklahoma lost access to abortion in the wake of the Dobbs ruling likely also contributed to turnout.

But even before Roe fell, there had been an influx of patients to Kansas as other states imposed tighter and tighter restrictions on access to reproductive health care. Gingrich-Gaylord said that the passage of Texas S.B. 8, which bans abortions at six weeks without exception, marked a “pivotal critical change in access in this region,” as patients began traveling north seeking care. “Kansas doesn’t have to be in that same crisis, and they have the opportunity today to ensure that doesn’t happen,” Wales posited. 

One concern among reproductive-rights activists ahead of the Tuesday primary was that voters would not understand what exactly a “no” or a “yes” on the measure meant. “It is convoluted. It’s confusing,” Hall said. “If there is a poster child for that complexity and convoluted nature of asking the question, Kansas is it.”

But as Gingrich-Gaylord put it, “What we’re seeing here is a very strong galvanization of local communities who are kind of waking up.”