Chain Reaction.

Kansas sends a message.

1. In a significant victory for abortion rights, Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected an effort to strip away their state’s abortion protections, sending a decisive message about the issue’s popularity in the first political test since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. The overwhelming support for abortion rights in a traditionally conservative state bolsters Democrats’ hopes that the historic Supreme Court ruling will animate their voters in an otherwise difficult election year for their party. The question presented to voters here was whether abortion should remain protected under the state constitution. A “yes” vote would allow Kansas’s Republican-led legislature to pass future limits on abortion — or ban it altogether — in its coming session in January. A “no” vote would leave those protections in place. With 89 percent of the vote counted, 61 percent of voters wanted to maintain those abortion protections compared with 39 percent who wanted to remove them from the state constitution. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab predicted that turnout for Tuesday’s primary election would exceed other contests in recent years, and possibly match that of the 2008 presidential election, when around 50 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots. (Sources: washingtonpost.com, kansas.com)

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2. The best round-up of last night’s primary results (that I could find) is here. It’s a collection of all the AP reports on the voting in Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, Arizona and Washington state. The New York Times has a useful cheat sheet on who won and who lost. The most important story, by far, is the abortion referendum vote in Kansas. I’ll have a note on that (and more!) later this week. (Sources: apnews.com, nytimes.com)

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