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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 2022 ballot initiative.
