Sharice Davids called her reelection historic. How much did abortion rights factor?

Shortly after it became clear that Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids would easily win reelection in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, she giddily took the stage in a hotel banquet room in Overland Park Tuesday night.

Toward the end of her victory speech, she placed her 12-point reelection in an historical context and thanked her supporters for rejecting what she described as serious threats to the United States’ institutions, rights and future.

“When history called on us, this community answered proudly,” Davids said. “When we had people calling our elections into question, we stood firm in defense of our democracy. When they were trying to take our rights and put women and families in danger, we voted no. And when they sought to divide us, we came together.”

Davids closed her campaign with a warning about extremism. In campaign stops throughout the district, she described a Republican Party that was too extreme for Kansans, and linked her Republican opponent, Amanda Adkins, to controversial figures like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback because she campaigned with the former and worked for the latter.

In Kansas and across the country, undergirding the Democrats warning were threats to abortion rights. After the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, Democrats leaned into the issue, galvanized by trigger laws in about a dozen states, including Missouri, that banned the procedure. Ballot measures in multiple states intended to limit protections for the procedure, including Kansas in August, further fueled the party’s focus on the issue.

In a final push before Election Day, President Joe Biden mentioned abortion rights on the campaign trail, saying he would veto a federal ban on abortion and calling for Congress to codify abortion protections, a proposal that’s unlikely to get the votes needed to pass the U.S. Senate.

On Tuesday, Democrats’ messaging on preserving abortion rights appeared to be a large factor in helping Democrats beat expectations in an election year where Republicans were supposed to make large gains. While Republicans are still expected to win the U.S. House, it appears likely they’ll have a narrow margin. The Senate also remains a tossup and could be determined by a runoff election in Georgia, similar to 2020.

In an Election Day poll, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Associated Press found that a majority of women between the ages of 18 and 49 said that the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was a major factor in whether they decided to vote (51%) and who they supported (55%).

In Vermont, Michigan and California, voters elected to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions. Even in Kentucky, a state Republicans won easily, voters rejected a ballot measure that would have guaranteed no constitutional right to an abortion — as they did in Kansas months earlier.

“Even during this heartbreaking time for reproductive rights, we continue to see the power of the voters in places like Kansas, where the people took action to protect abortion just months ago,” said Emily Wales, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains. “Last night was yet another reminder that the voters trust and believe in leaders who trust and believe in them.”

Abortion rights were particularly vital in Kansas, a state that has become a sanctuary for women as bordering states in the region have banned the procedure.

After Davids’ campaign spent the primary canvassing for the campaign to reject a ballot measure to eliminate the right to an abortion from the Kansas constitution, she continued to run on the issue in the general election, portraying Adkins as out-of-touch with a district that just voted to protect abortion rights.

Adkins said repeatedly over the course of the campaign that she did not support a federal right to an abortion. But she was chairwoman of the Kansas Republican Party when it supported an abortion ban and endorsed a Republican policy plan that included a federal ban on abortion.

“The amendment got everybody fired up, but what it should have shown is, ‘hey, we’ve got power,’” said Jan Kessinger, a former Republican state representative from Overland Park. “And it wasn’t just Democrats and independents, 30 percent of Republicans or more got out there and voted.”

EMILY’s List, a national abortion rights group, spent $275,000 trying to help Davids get elected. But it paled in comparison to the $5.9 million national Democratic groups spent attacking Adkins over the course of the campaign. While many of their television ads focused on tying Adkins to Brownback — who was a staunch anti-abortion advocate — and his tax cuts, the House Majority PAC, which is closely aligned with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ran an ad in the final weeks of the campaign calling Adkins too extreme on abortion.

“Victims, facing the unimaginable,” a narrator said in the ad, “And Amanda Adkins would make it harder.”

Davids, too, ran an ad about abortion rights that featured three women raising concerns about Adkins’ abortion stances, including one who described herself as a mother of teens.

The emphasis on abortion may have also helped Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who shied away from the issue as she tried to attract moderate voters in her statewide campaign. Kelly expanded her margin in Johnson County — which contains the highest number of voters in the state — by about 3 percentage points. Johnson County is the heart of the 3rd Congressional District and she performed better than Davids by about 4 percentage points.

While the Republican Party’s success in removing the right to an abortion in the federal constitution was a years-long effort by activists, it appeared to come with a political cost. Once on the offensive on the issue, able to reliably count on anti-abortion voters to show up on Election Day, Republicans were placed in the defensive position of having to spell out where lines should be drawn for the bans, given they were now a legal reality.

“I get the abortion messaging but that is really just for a certain subset of voters,” said Jeff Colyer, the former Republican governor of Kansas, last week. “That would be an issue for them but also I think Johnson County we like people to be independent. They want people to show they can get things done.”

Some Republicans dismissed the issue as a major factor in the race, saying Democrats were using abortion rights at the expense of other issues.

“They’re trying to distract from the real problems that are out there, which is the inflation, cost of living,” said state Rep. Chris Croft, an Overland Park Republican.

But in a district specifically drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature to make the race more competitive for Adkins by removing Democratic-leaning voters and adding Republican-leaning voters, Adkins’ repeated focus on the economy wasn’t enough. Davids attracted an even larger margin of victory from when the two faced off in 2020.

“Even though I think you heard a lot of people say that inflation and the economy were important to them, people always say the economy is important to them when they’re talking to pollsters because they want to sound smart,” said state Rep. Stephanie Clayton, an Overland Park Democrat while she was picking up yard signs the day after the election.

“What people really do care about are those red meat issues. And taking way a woman’s right is a pretty red meat issue.”

Star reporters Jonathan Shorman, David Hudnall and Katie Bernard contributed reporting.