The day everything changed
June 24th, 2022 has quickly gone down in history as one of America’s darkest days. It’s the day that a small handful of unhinged extremists – most of them illegitimate, some of them criminals, one of them literally a traitor – decided to unilaterally take away women’s most basic of rights. Now it turns out June 24th, 2022 has turned out to be consequential in another way.
Tom Bonier from data analysis firm TargetSmart tweeted this last night: “Among Kansans who registered to vote on or after June 24th (when the Dobbs decision was announced), Democrats have an 8 pt advantage. Compare that to the GOP’s overall advantage of 19 pts among all registered voters in Kansas. The landscape changed on June 24th.”
Let’s take a moment to think about what this means. When June 24th happened, we all expected that a number of pro-choice Americans who rarely or never vote would suddenly decide to become voters. We just didn’t know what that number would be. Midterm polling has pointed to a shift in the Democrats’ favor since June, to at least some degree. But what we’re seeing from this Kansas data is that the Supreme Court travesty has prompted Americans to register and vote in record numbers.
Keep in mind that Kansas is a red state. Most of its residents lean conservative. But a large majority of the people who turned out to vote last night voted Democrat. And now we know that an outsized percentage of them registered to vote after June 24th. This points to the likelihood of at least vaguely similar numbers in all fifty states. It’s clear now that June 24th was the day everything in America changed, in more ways than one.
