Author: News Polite

There was every reason to expect a close election.

Instead, Tuesday’s resounding victory for abortion rights supporters in Kansas offered some of the most concrete evidence yet that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has shifted the political landscape. The victory, by a 59-41 margin in a Republican stronghold, suggests Democrats will be the energized party on an issue where Republicans have usually had an enthusiasm advantage.

The Kansas vote implies that around 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject a similar initiative to roll back abortion rights, including in more than 40 of the 50 states (a few states on each side are very close to 50-50). This is a rough estimate, based on how demographic characteristics predicted the results of recent abortion referendums. But it is an evidence-based way of arriving at a fairly obvious conclusion: If abortion rights wins 59 percent support in Kansas, it’s doing even better than that nationwide.

It’s a tally that’s in line with recent national surveys that showed greater support for legal abortion after the court’s decision. And the high turnout, especially among Democrats, confirms that abortion is not just some wedge issue of importance to political activists. The stakes of abortion policy have become high enough that it can drive a high midterm-like turnout on its own.

None of this proves that the issue will help Democrats in the midterm elections. And there are limits to what can be gleaned from the Kansas data. But the lopsided margin makes one thing clear: The political winds are now at the backs of abortion rights supporters.

A surprisingly decisive outcome

There was not much public polling in the run-up to the Kansas election, but the best available data suggested that voters would probably split fairly evenly on abortion.

In a Times compilation of national polling published this spring, 48 percent of Kansas voters said they thought abortion should be mostly legal compared with 47 percent who thought it should be mostly illegal. Similarly, the Cooperative Election Study in 2020 found that the state’s registered voters were evenly split on whether abortion should be legal.

The results of similar recent referendums in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia also pointed toward a close race in Kansas — perhaps even one in which a “no” vote to preserve abortion rights would have the edge.

As with the Kansas vote, a “yes” vote in each of those four states’ initiatives would have amended a state constitution to allow significant restrictions on abortion rights or funding for abortion. In contrast with Kansas, the initiatives passed in all four states, including a 24-point victory in Louisiana in 2020. But support for abortion rights outpaced support for Democratic presidential candidates in relatively white areas across all four states, especially in less religious areas outside the Deep South.

It’s a pattern that suggests abortion rights would have much greater support than Joe Biden did as a candidate in a relatively white state like Kansas — perhaps even enough to make abortion rights favored to survive.

It may seem surprising that abortion supporters would even have a chance in Kansas, given the state’s long tradition of voting for Republicans. But Kansas is more reliably Republican than it is conservative. The state has an above-average number of college graduates, a group that has swung toward Democrats in recent years.

Kansas voted for Donald J. Trump by around 15 percentage points in 2020, enough to make it pretty safely Republican. Yet it’s not quite off the board for Democrats. Republicans have learned this the hard way; look no further than the 2018 Democratic victory in the governor’s race.

Even so, a landslide victory for abortion rights in Kansas did not appear to be a probable outcome, whether based on the polls or the recent initiatives. The likeliest explanations for the surprise: Voters may be more supportive of abortion rights in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe (as national polls imply); they may be more cautious about eliminating abortion rights now that there are real policy consequences to these initiatives; abortion rights supporters may be more energized to go to the polls.

Abortion rights supporters may not always find it so easy to advance their cause. They were defending the status quo in Kansas; elsewhere, they will be trying to overturn abortion bans.

Whatever the explanation, if abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much more conservative than the nation as a whole — and the result was not close. There are only seven states — in the Deep South and the Mountain West — where abortion rights supporters would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative.

A shift in turnout

If there’s any rule about partisan turnout in American politics, it’s that registered Republicans turn out at higher rates than registered Democrats.

While the Kansas figures are still preliminary, it appears that registered Democrats were likelier to vote than registered Republicans.

Overall, 276,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary, which was held on Tuesday as well, compared with 451,000 who voted in the Republican primary. The Democratic tally amounted to 56 percent of the number of registered Democrats in the state, while the number of Republican primary voters was 53 percent of the number of registered Republicans. (Unaffiliated voters are the second-largest group in Kansas.)

In Johnson County, outside Kansas City, Mo., 67 percent of registered Democrats turned out, compared with 60 percent of registered Republicans.

This is a rare feat for Democrats in a high-turnout election. In nearby Iowa, where historical turnout data is easily accessible, turnout among registered Democrats in a general election has never eclipsed turnout among registered Republicans in at least 40 years.

The superior Democratic turnout helps explain why the result was less favorable for abortion opponents than expected. And it confirms that Democrats are now far more energized on the abortion issue, reversing a pattern from recent elections. It may even raise Democrats’ hopes that they could defy the longstanding tendency for the president’s party to have poor turnout in midterm elections.

For Republicans, the turnout figures may offer a modest silver lining. They might reasonably hope that turnout will be more favorable in the midterms in November, when abortion won’t be the only issue on the ballot and Republicans will have many more reasons to vote — including control of Congress.

A day after Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Taiwan, celebrating it as a bulwark of democracy, China launched three days of military exercises around the island, which its forces may use to press in closer than ever, honing their ability to impose a blockade.

A barrage of Chinese propaganda said the drills, which started at midday Thursday, would serve as punishment for Ms. Pelosi’s visit, and as a shock-and-awe deterrent against opponents of Beijing’s claims to the self-ruled island. But more than that, the six exercise zones that the People’s Liberation Army has marked out in seas off Taiwan — one nudging less than 10 miles off its southern coast — could give Chinese forces valuable practice, should they one day be ordered to encircle and attack the island.

“Use the momentum to surround,” read a slogan used by People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s main newspaper, as it announced that the drills had begun. Taiwanese military observers said they did not detect any immediate upsurge in Chinese naval activities.

The six zones were chosen for their importance in a potential campaign to seal off Taiwan and thwart foreign intervention, Major General Meng Xiangqing, a professor of strategy at the National Defense University in Beijing, said in an interview on Chinese state television. One zone covers the narrowest part of the Taiwan Strait. Others could be used to block a major port or attack three of Taiwan’s main military bases, he said.

The zone near Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, where there are crucial bases, “creates conditions to bolt the door and beat the dog,” said General Meng, using a Chinese saying that refers to blocking an enemy’s escape route.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has said that he hopes to eventually unify Taiwan and China through peaceful steps. But like his predecessors, he has not ruled out force, and China’s military buildup has reached a point where some military commanders and analysts think an invasion is an increasingly plausible, though still highly risky, scenario. The exercises could help Chinese forces test their readiness for that.

“They’re definitely going to use this as an excuse to do something that helps them prepare for a possible invasion,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University who studies China’s military and its potential to attack Taiwan.

“It’s not just about the messaging,” she said. “Under the guise of signaling, they’re trying to basically test their ability to conduct complex maneuvers that are necessary for an amphibious assault on Taiwan.”

It remains unclear how close Chinese forces will come to Taiwan during the exercises, which are scheduled to end on Sunday. In one possible sign of what to expect, China’s Liberation Army Daily said on Thursday that the Eastern Theater Command was holding its own practice operations that included the navy, air force and rocket force. They were focused on “joint enclosure and control,” assaults on sea and land, and air domination operations, it said.

The Chinese military could also test Taiwan’s responses by firing into the territorial waters directly off its coast. Three of the exercise zones have corners jutting into those waters.

“It signals that, since Taiwan is part of China, it doesn’t get a 12-nautical-mile zone,” said William Overholt, a senior research fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, referring to the sea perimeter by which Taiwan defines its territorial waters. “Taiwan either has to defend its zone like an independent country or cave.”

Kinmen Island, a Taiwanese-controlled island a little over six miles off China’s coast, reported that on Wednesday night, flying objects of unclear origin — probably drones — flew overhead. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said that its website was paralyzed by “denial of service” cyberattacks late on Wednesday night.

“We haven’t seen anything unusual in the Kinmen area, but their movements near Taiwan are more obvious,” Major General Chang Jung-shun of Taiwan’s Kinmen Defense Command said by telephone. “Some of their ships used for exercises have been detected.”

China is trying to reinforce its influence over Taiwan by upgrading deterrence after the visit by Ms. Pelosi, who praised the island’s people for standing strong against Beijing, several Chinese analysts said.

“The tendency of external forces exploiting Taiwan to contain China has become increasingly clear,” Wu Yongping, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who studies Taiwan, said in written answers to questions. “The Chinese government has adopted some unprecedented military operations in response to this.”

One of the People’s Liberation Army’s designated exercise zones lies off the eastern coast of Taiwan, at the farthest point from the Chinese mainland. When China held intimidating military exercises off Taiwan during a crisis 25 years ago, the People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., did not go that far.

“It’s an intentional message meant to highlight the P.L.A.’s heightened capacity to project power farther from the Chinese mainland, and it’s a visible signal that China can surround the island,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It will also complicate traffic to and around the island from all sides.”

Global Times, a swaggeringly nationalist Chinese newspaper, raised the possibility of missiles being fired from the mainland into that eastern zone, arcing over Taiwan. “If the Taiwan military responds, the Liberation Army is entirely able to trap the turtle in the jar,” one Chinese commentator, Zhang Xuefeng, told the paper, using a Chinese saying for catching prey with ease.

But Mr. Hart said China was unlikely to fire missiles over Taiwan. “That would be extremely escalatory,” he said. “They will more likely fire ship-based or air-launched missiles into that area without flying missiles over the island.”

After decades of tensions and several military crises with China, many on Taiwan have become inured to threats. But even if China does not take the most potentially incendiary steps this time, experts and officials on the island worry that the operations could spark an incident — a collision at sea or in the air, or a misfired missile — that inflames tensions into a full-fledged crisis.

A monitoring service run by the U.S. Naval Institute reported on Monday that a strike group led by the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier was in the Philippine Sea, some distance east of Taiwan, and that the U.S.S. Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship, was also in that area.

“Previously, the Chinese Communists carried out military exercises at a distance, now they’ve become close-up,” Chang Yan-ting, a retired deputy commander of Taiwan’s air force, said in an interview.

“The Chinese military exercises around Taiwan will put our national military in a very dangerous position,” he said. “They’re already at our doorstep.”

Jane Perlez and John Liu contributed reporting. Claire Fu contributed research.