Goldstone’s most recent book is "On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights."
On Aug. 2, staid, conservative Kansas gave the United States one of the biggest jolts in an election season in which Democratic disaster and Republican ascension had been such an accepted fact that left-wing media’s denial of inevitability sounded more like prayer. President Biden’s approval rating was lower than Donald Trump’s, inflation was raging, war in Ukraine was sapping public will, and Democrats were desperately thrashing about for some issue, any issue, they could use to limit the carnage.
Justice Samuel Alito, of all people, may have given them one.
In the wake of Alito’s smug, pompous opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, gleeful conservatives felt free to mount a full scale assault on reproductive rights in every red state, and some blue ones, in which the ability to have an abortion had not yet been outlawed.
Where better to start than Kansas?
The task appeared simple. In what seemed an anachronistic quirk in a state Donald Trump had won by 15 points, the Kansas Constitution contained a provision that protected a woman’s right to obtain an abortion. In order for the deeply conservative Legislature to enact restrictive abortion legislation, or even outlaw the procedure altogether, Kansas voters needed merely to approve a change to the Constitution in a statewide referendum. By a happy coincidence, such a ballot initiative was already in the works.
The anti-abortion side, although confident of victory, tried to remove any element of risk with a couple of technically legal but morally questionable moves. First, they scheduled the vote for primary day, Aug. 2, rather than in the general election, to capitalize on traditionally low Democratic turnout for primaries that rarely resulted in them choosing a candidate with any chance at victory in November. Next, in the spirit of George Orwell, they jiggled the wording of the referendum to make “Yes” a vote to restrict abortion and “No” a vote to retain the constitutional guarantee to abortion rights. Anti-abortion advocacy groups even ran ads with light-fingered phraseology, trying to convince gullible pro-choice voters that a “Yes” vote would protect women’s access to abortion providers.
The vote was preceded by the predictable spending war, with each side investing about $6 million. The “Yes” contingent was largely represented by a group called Value Them Both, which received most of its funding from the Catholic Church and affiliates; the “No” side was led by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, which received hefty funding from Planned Parenthood.
Although polling was limited and some predicted a close race, most pro-choice advocates did not express much optimism about actually winning, but were instead hoping for a sufficiently narrow defeat to indicate that sentiment in Kansas was trending in their direction. Even when the vote tallies began to come in, analysts on CNN and MSNBC warned that mail-in votes, skewed to Democrats, were counted first and the early lead would likely not hold up when the in-person votes were added in.
But it did.
As the night wore on, it became apparent that not only would “No” win, but that it would do so by an astounding margin, which turned out to be 170,000 votes or almost 20 percentage points, a 35-point swing from 2020. In addition, Republicans’ attempt to limit turnout backfired — 900,000 Kansans cast ballots, more than twice the number that generally voted in the state’s primaries. To say that every single prognosticator was left slack-jawed would not be an overstatement.
An upset of this magnitude is as irresistible to pundits as it is rare. Some pore over the electoral map and attempt to discern changes in voting patterns county by county or even town by town. Some examine the ads to hypothesize on the reasons some were effective and some failed to motivate voters. Others look at endorsements and outside influences, both financial and personal. Theories based in either quantitative analysis or sociological phenomena abound. What will be common to almost all of them is that, because they are generated by political theorists, they will have a political basis.
But perhaps the explanation is not political at all. Perhaps the conservative voters of Kansas simply chose not to blindly follow the dictates of either Republican Party leaders or Donald Trump (although the two terms have recently been redundant) Supreme Court justices, or even leaders of the Catholic Church. Perhaps they rejected the notion that powerful men and the occasional powerful woman in public office and on the Supreme Court should be allowed to ignore their oaths of office and follow their own agenda regardless of whose rights or freedoms they trample on in the process.
And finally, perhaps they decided that the forces that call themselves “pro-life” but would bully a woman into dying in the process of giving birth to a child sired by a rapist are too filled with hypocrisies to be honorable. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Perhaps the voters of Kansas decided honor was indeed sacred after all.
If this be so, it is a far more positive development than mere success at the ballot box. While Democrats are certainly heartened over the rejection of a measure that would have allowed the Kansas Legislature to take total control of what they consider a personal decision and a vital component of health care, this may well have been a nonpartisan statement by both Democrats and Republicans that they do not wish to be ordered about, lectured to, or manipulated into providing political advantage to either party by depriving some Americans of their rights or their freedoms.
If, by some wondrous happenstance, this is the true meaning of the Kansas vote, Kansans may have helped set the United States back on the road to democracy, from which it has recently strayed so grievously.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.