What messaging worked in Kansas? Let's look at the ads from the winning "NO" team...
One theme: labelling the proposed amendment as a "government mandate." In this ad the word abortion is not said:
"It's a strict government mandate designed to interfere with private medical decisions ... Kansans don't want another government mandate."
This ad features a male doctor:
"Do no harm. That's the oath we take as doctors. But now the government wants to force doctors ...to break that oath ...It's a government mandate that could ban all abortions with no exceptions, even rape and incest"
This ad features a mother talking about an abortion needed to save her life:
"It's an impossible choice ... I had a three year old son at the time and a husband ... if I didn't have an abortion they would be without their mother and their wife"
This ad emphasizes existing abortion rules to suggest the amendment is "extreme and goes too far":
"Abortion is already highly regulated in Kansas ... Taxpayer funding for abortion: outlawed. Abortion after viability: banned. Parental consent: required."
This ad features a Catholic grandmother:
"Growing up Catholic, we didn't talk about abortion. But now it's on the ballot ... If it were my granddaughter, I wouldn't want the government making that decision for her."
This ad is a response ad poking holes in the pro-life ad campaign: "supporters aren't telling you the truth"
Here's another that doesn't mention abortion directly:
"It gives government more power over your privacy and your personal medical decisions. Don't let politicians take away your freedom."
And this one features "a pastor for over 50 years"
"As Christians we are instructed to love one another. We do so when we respect and trust women as God does. I'm voting No ... because it replaces religious freedom with government control."
There are a lot of plot points that led to the 5-4 majority that overturned Roe.
But what looms large in my mind, perhaps of greater significance than the Garland blockade, is the 2005 conservative revolt over the Miers nomination that gave us Alito…
…Miers’ abortion record was murky but a speech she gave in 1993 sounded pro-choice enough to enrage pro-lifers and intensify the pressure on Bush to pull the nom…
…if conservatives were deferential to Bush, his two SCOTUS picks (the other being Roberts) would likely not have been supportive of a quick kill of Roe (whereas Alito had been plotting to kill Roe his entire adult life)…
You can hear Blake Masters talk about the Unabomber here
He's asked to name a "subversive thinker" who is "underrated" and would "influence people in a good direction," and he volunteers "Theodore Kaczynski"...
...Masters gives the perfunctory "he's a terrorist, he shouldn't hurt people, obviously" and "there's a lot" in his views "that I disagree with." But "there's a lot of insight there, there's a lot that is correct."...
..."He's sort of, like, a left-wing eco-terrorist in some sense, but he had a lot to say about the political Left and about how they all have inferiority complexes and fundamentally hate anything like goodness, truth, beauty, justice. It's a politics of envy and resentment."
Here's a depressing thread of things I've written over the last eight years about the politics of guns...
After last year's King Soopers shooting: "The chronic problem afflicting Democrats is that they always shift into gear after a public mass shooting but shift out of gear between mass shootings."
During the 2020 campaign, as litigation threatened the existence of the NRA: "Even if the NRA is gone ... [a] fervent gun rights culture of hunters, collectors, open carriers, militia members and self-defense enthusiasts would still persist."
As I write today in the @monthly, the “Romney Wuz Right” talk hangs solely on the Number One Foe line; it doesn’t bother to look at what Romney proposed to *do* about Russia.
…Mitt’s Russia policy proposals were pretty thin. He mostly complained that Obama scrapped Bush’s missile defense system and told Russia (caught on a hot mic) that he’d be more “flexible” on missile defense post-election…
…what Romney left out what that Obama *replaced* the Bush missile defense plan with his own. The main difference was Obama (at the urging of Bush holdover Defense Sec Bob Gates) focused on short/medium range missiles, not long range…