The NPR Politics Podcast - Abortion Rights Activists Win Big In Kansas (And Other Primary Results)

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have opened the door to abortion restrictions in the state. Election turnout was incredibly high, signaling the issue may spur increased Democratic turnout in November.And in Arizona, Mark Finchem, a state representative and election conspiracy theorist who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has secured the GOP's nomination for Secretary of State, according to the Associated Press. Should Finchem win in the general, he would oversee the state's voting systems.This episode: political reporter Miles Parks, political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, and KJZZ political reporter Ben Giles.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Jen in a car at the airport on a plane at Jamaica Station, Long Island Railroad, off the train and in my sister's car, and finally in the car with my mom. Hi, NPR. It took three cars, three trains, a plane and a shuttle for me to get to my mom and drive her to her new home where she's settling in. This podcast was recorded at 10.58 a.m. Eastern Time on August 3rd, 2022. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, like my mode of transportation. Okay, here's the show. That is some audio editing skills right there. I know. I felt like I time traveled there for a second.

That was delightful. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And we've got Ben Giles here from member station KJZZ in Arizona. Hey, Ben. Hey there. And so as you all probably guessed, we are going to be talking about primaries. We had one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting primary nights of the summer so far last night. And Danielle, I want to start with you.

You're in Kansas where there was this massive referendum vote on abortion. Can you tell us what happened? Yes. Let me set the stage for you. This is the first vote on the topic of abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. And it is in a red state. Kansas is very conservative. And so what happened was this. The voters rejected a proposed amendment that would have made it explicit in the state constitution that the state constitution does not protect abortion. And that's important because currently in Kansas, a 2019 Supreme Court ruling is what holds sway. That ruling said that the state constitution does protect abortion.

And that is what allows there to still be abortion rights in the state now. Right now in Kansas, abortion is legal up to 22 weeks, though there are plenty of restrictions on that. For example, to get an abortion, a patient needs to get an ultrasound, has to observe a 24-hour waiting period. So that's where we are. I do want to play some tape for you. This is tape of a woman named Dana Corcoran, who I talked to at her door. She answered the door to Students for Life, which is an anti-abortion rights group that was canvassing heavily for this amendment. And she told them, nope, I already voted no. And she told me that she's a Republican. And when I asked her why she voted no, here's what she said.

I generally am very pro-life, but I also have a problem with the government getting in the middle of people's personal decisions. And this is not an isolated case. There is pretty good evidence that some Republicans and right-leaning independents also came out and said, you know, this amendment is just too far. I can't vote for it. Should the amendment have passed, it would have opened the door to allow the legislature to pass all sorts of restrictions and opponents of the amendment, a.k.a. abortion rights supporters. They were very worried and very much campaigning on the idea that legislators would pass a total or near total ban on abortion when they got the chance. OK, so staying with the Republican Party here, I want to turn to Arizona and bring you in, Ben. Mark Fincham, who is a very prominent

election-denying candidate, won the GOP nomination to be Secretary of State, to make it on the ballot in November as the GOP's nominee for Secretary of State, to be clear, to oversee voting in the entire state. Were you surprised that Fincham was able to pull this out? I was a little bit. There was a bit of a late push to back a conservative businessman, Bo Lane, who was seen as the best shot at preventing Fincham from making it to that November ballot. But what we've seen in Arizona so far this election is that the Trump endorsement has a lot of sway in these GOP primaries, particularly what we've known is that Trump's endorsement carries a lot more weight in crowded primary fields. So there were four Republican candidates running to be secretary

of state, running for the top election gig in the state. And Trump's endorsement carries somewhere around 35, 40 percent of the GOP base. That's enough to carry someone as extreme as Fincham across the finish line in the primary when there's three other candidates who are also splitting the vote. So I also should note that Fincham is now the sixth election denying candidate to make it on the November ballot in a state to oversee voting, which, you know, obviously has election experts pretty worried considering the sorts of policies that election denying candidates over the last two years have been shown to support things like rolling back early voting and trying to get rid of mail voting altogether. But I do want to turn to the other races that happened in Arizona. Democrat Mark

Kelly now has an opponent in the Senate race. Is that right? That's right. Former venture capitalist Blake Masters is going to face off against the incumbent Kelly in November. Masters is probably best known as being an acolyte of conservative billionaire power broker Peter Thiel. Teal. And he was able to, again, win a crowded primary for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, thanks in part to another Trump endorsement, but also thanks in part to Teal spending millions and millions of dollars to help support his former employee, his mentee, if you will. Masters is going to be a candidate much like Fincham in that he has stated he would not have certified the 2020 vote. He said in an interview that he would have, like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, objected to the Electoral College review of votes from Arizona. So we'll see, I guess, how that message plays in November.

But so far, it was a winning message for Republican candidates almost up and down the ballot. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And after, we're going to talk a little bit about that question, how this election in Iowa will play in November and the other races that were on the ballot yesterday. And we are back. And Ben, I know it's early in the day, but where are we with the GOP race for governor in Arizona? She was trailing in the polls when the first early results were released last night started to see Lake picking up, you know, 60% of this batch of ballots, 55% of that batch of ballots. And eventually, overnight, Lake actually took the lead. She's now up by just under two points as of about eight o'clock Arizona time this morning. That's an 11,000 vote lead, a slim one at that. But there's still tens of thousands of ballots to be counted, especially here in Maricopa County in the Phoenix metro area. And if the trend continues that some voters who waited to cast their ballot

on Election Day or maybe waited to turn in their ballot on Election day. They seem to be favoring Lake. And that kind of makes sense given the campaign that Lake has run bashing the 2020 election. In the recent weeks, she's even claimed that this current 2022 vote is somehow rigged against her. The early votes favored Karen Taylor Robeson. Those are people who are comfortable with the voting process here in Arizona. The late votes so far seem to be favoring Lake. So we could see Lake's lead grow in the hours and days to come. Yeah, very kind of Trumpish there. Also, Lake, it's worth noting, basically declared victory overnight in that race, even though it has not been called for her. Danielle, I want to kind of

zoom out and talk about some big picture things that we can take away from last night, starting specifically with this vote, this abortion vote in Kansas. What does that say to you about how motivated voters will be in November by the issue of abortion? This particular vote, I would say it tells us some, but not a lot. And to explain that, what it does tell us is that in isolation, when you put a single question on the ballot that is specifically about abortion and specifically about the potential to make very tight, very restrictive abortion laws, that voters turn out and some are even willing to cross the aisle. That's what it's, I mean, that is basically what this tells us. And, you know, when you really think about it, you can put this vote in the context of other ballot measures we've seen over the years, sometimes in red states where voters, even conservative voters, vote for ballot measures that are seemingly more progressive than the state's politics on things like, oh, minimum wage, marijuana laws, that sort of thing. So it tells us something about that now that said

it is hard to overestimate how very fired up abortion does make especially many particular left-leaning democratic voters or some independents some moderates who just feel strongly about reproductive rights so the one thing that I would say is that, for example, if you are a Democrat who supports abortion rights, which is most Democrats that are running for office, and you have a very anti-abortion rights opponent, I would imagine that those candidates are going to run really strongly on slamming their opponents' abortion records. Yeah, and it also seems to kind of bear out what we've been talking about over the last few weeks about kind of broadly national feelings about abortion rights, right?

Somewhere in the 60% or 70%, depending on what poll you look at, you know, the majority of people do support abortion rights in some sense. Yeah, I mean, a plurality of Americans think it should be legal in some cases, and a majority believe it should be legal in some or all cases. Okay, and then the other thing that we've been watching from overnight is there were three Republican House members who were running in primaries who had previously voted to impeach former President Donald Trump. Can you tell us a little bit about how they fared? Sure. Well, let's start with the one that we know for sure,

which is Peter Meyer in Michigan. Representative Peter Meyer was defeated in his primary by the Trump-endorsed John Gibbs. So that is the one data point we do have from last night, that this representative who voted for impeachment was ousted. But there are two more we're watching, Jamie Herrera-Butler and Dan Newhouse in Washington state. It is still too early to tell. They're still waiting on a lot of votes there.

But as of right now, in that state's top two primary system, both of them are at or near the top of their fields. So if either of those two can pull off a primary win and can get onto the general ballot, that would signal that voting for Trump impeachment is not necessarily the death knell that some may have thought in the Republican Party these days. Well, and kind of sticking with that general theme, Ben. I want to talk about the Trump endorsement. I want to talk about election denialism more broadly. We saw a lot of success last night in Arizona for candidates who have voiced sympathy to the false idea that the 2020

election was stolen. But that we know is not necessarily a winning strategy when it comes to getting independents and especially getting Democrats to vote for you. Do you think these candidates are going to move closer to the middle or to a more moderate stance on election policies? Are they going to try and convince people that, yes, the election was stolen and we need to do something about it? I see these candidates trying to pivot to talk about other issues in the general election, you know, more specifically to attack Democrats for their support maybe of President Joe Biden and his policies for the inflation that's hitting Arizona quite a bit harder than some other states. But I don't see these Trump-endorsed candidates,

and that's statewide down to legislative races, I don't see them backing down from the full buy in to, as you put it, the election lies that the president has been telling since 2020. And it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out if it if it hurts them in the general election, when, as you mentioned, especially in Arizona, independents are key to these statewide races. We've seen that with victories like Joe Biden's in 2020. And the fact that the two U.S. Senate seats in Arizona are now both occupied by Democrats who were able to appeal to their base, but also appeal to the middle, those independent voters who have started to be turned off in some races by some of the more volatile, the more extremism politics that we're seeing from candidates like Mark Fincham, that we're seeing from Kerry Lake and Attorney General candidate here, Abe Hamaday. It's just, it's tough to envision them dropping the message that, oh, the election was stolen in 2020 and Trump should still be president. All right. Well, we will leave it there. Ben Giles of KJZZ in Arizona, thank you so much for joining us. I know it has been a very long night slash week slash month for you. Happy to be here. Thank you both. And a reminder, we tape this early in the day East

Coast time. So more results, updated results will be available throughout the day and throughout the week at NPR.org. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.