Analysis: Red-state voters said no to ballot measures backed by anti-abortion groups | CNN Politics

A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. The big headline out of Tuesday’s primaries was the slim victory of former public health official Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — proof that progressives are ascendant in the party, even in a key swing state. But two other results that barely registered in the national news chart another trend in US politics: the increasingly complicated relationship between Republican state legislatures and direct democracy. In Kansas, voters rejected a proposal placed on the ballot by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature that would have taken the power to appoint state Supreme Court justices away from a merit board and the state’s governor, a Democrat. Instead, the amendment would have given voters power to elect state Supreme Court justices, who have been a thorn in the side of the GOP-dominated legislature. That might sound like voter empowerment, but the longer-term intent was to elect judges opposed to abortion rights so the court might eventually overturn the right to abortion in the state’s constitution, which was affirmed by voters in a