It would be easy to assume Elaine Gail doesn’t support abortion rights.
She’s a lifelong Republican whose parents worked for Republican campaigns in Kansas. She traveled with “Dolls for Dole,” a group of costumed young women who sang at campaign stops for the late Sen. Bob Dole, who once supported a Constitutional amendment to ban all abortion, though he later softened his position to allow some exceptions.
But at 68, she’s old enough to remember seeing her high school classmates struggle with unplanned pregnancies. One hid her pregnancy to avoid being kicked out of school.
“She was wearing the coat all the time to kind of hide it,” said Gail, a retiree who lives in Topeka, “and one of my classmates had this great idea that we would take turns wearing coats to class, too, kind of in solidarity and … we were hoping to divert suspicion from the teachers.”
Gail graduated high school two years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision. Watching her friend hide her pregnancy and seeing two other classmates go away to give birth and put their babies up for adoption helped shape her views on abortion.
She’s one of tens of thousands of Republicans — at least 20% of Republicans who turned out in August — who voted “no” this summer on an amendment meant to remove the right to an abortion from the Kansas Constitution. Across Kansas, counties where President Donald Trump won by double digits were split on the issue of abortion. “Deep red” Kansas voted 59% to 41% to uphold women’s right to choose, stunning the nation.
“No” voters were supportive of keeping abortion rights in the constitution. A “yes” vote was in favor of removing the right.
Much of the “no” vote came, of course, from Democrats and vocal supporters of abortion rights. But Democratic ballots alone wouldn’t have been enough to kill the amendment.
To reach the total number of votes cast against the amendment, at least 91,000 Republicans would have had to vote no. And that’s assuming every Democrat and unaffiliated voter opposed the amendment. 
Some did so quietly for fear of alienating loved ones, friends or church communities. Others, like Gail, were more vocally upset with her party. And she plans to cast her vote for Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, in her reelection bid against Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt next month.
Despite the mandate on abortion rights from Kansas voters this summer, abortion has not been a centerpiece of either candidate’s campaign. Schmidt has been more cautious about abortion. Despite petitioning the Kansas Supreme Court last year to reverse its decision granting a constitutional right to abortion, Schmidt said he would respect voters’ choice following the August vote.
Kelly is running a kitchen table campaign on her administration’s success funding schools, balancing the budget and cutting the state’s sales tax on food.
Who voted no?
Abortion rights supporters’ victory in August reflected what Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, which campaigned against the amendment, was hearing from voters.
“For the most part, the people that we talked to really didn’t see abortion as a partisan or political issue,” said Ashley All, the group’s communications manager. “They saw it as incredibly complex and deeply personal, and so we intentionally approached it in a nonpartisan way.”
