It’s your rights, stupid. How Kansas showed Dems a roadmap to ‘22 victory.

It’s said that there’s literally nothing that America’s liberals and conservatives can agree upon in 2022, but that overlooks this simple truth: Nobody on either side of the political chasm likes the government telling them how to live their everyday life. In a recent high-profile election in Kansas, a brilliant political ad drilled into that mindset and struck gold.

“They call it a constitutional amendment. The truth? It’s a strict government mandate, designed to interfere with private medical decisions — a slippery slope that could put more of your individual and personal rights at risk,” begins the 30-second spot, as pictures of concerned-looking citizens appear on the screen. “The ballot language is confusing but one thing is clear — Kansans don’t want another government mandate.” The ad ends with a plea to reject “government control.”

Last Tuesday, voters in the Sunflower State took that message — from the Kansas Abortion Amendment PRO NO PAC, although “abortion” is never mentioned in this spot — to heart. By a landslide margin of 59-41%, Kansans rejected a ballot question to remove reproductive rights protections from their state constitution, in the first pure test of voter sentiment on the hot-button issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

The stunning size of the defeat for conservative antiabortion activists had political pundits scrambling to read a new batch of tea leaves, as America turns its focus to a midterm election less than 100 days away. To be clear, any newfound Democratic energy from anger over the new abortion landscape has to be balanced against other crosscurrents, including lingering voter angst over inflation and the long history of midterm election backlash against the party in power.

But the political earthquake that shook Kansas did bring both a critical new data point and a lesson about political messaging that the tone-deaf Democratic consultant class — who so far has made some strange and dubious decisions about 2022 midterm strategy — can no longer ignore.

The data point is that registration numbers from the heartland state confirmed a theory that rage over the loss of national abortion rights after the Supreme Court ruling would electrify Democratic voters who’d once seemed demoralized by the ups and downs of the Biden presidency, and thus boost turnout in a nonpresidential election year. A stunning 70% of voters in Kansas who registered after June 24 — the date the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe came down — were women, according to one analysis. And Democrats enjoyed an 8% advantage among the new registrants, in a heavily Republican prairie state.

But the big question now for Democrats is how to make the most out of this sudden change in the political zeitgeist. The ad campaign mounted by the abortion rights political action committee in Kansas was spotlighted by writer Bill Scher in Washington Monthly, who argued that framing the election around government mandates and the notion of overreach clearly resonated with persuadable voters. Some responded on Twitter to Scher’s argument by questioning whether the ads he cited were actually seen by that many voters. That’s a valid quibble, but I do think Kansas revealed a winning message for Dems, encapsulated by the word on T-shirts worn by the “vote no” coalition.

“Freedom.”

Ever since 1992, when Bill Clinton finally broke the fever dreams of the so-called Reagan Revolution, and his campaign was captured in a then-state-of-the-art documentary called The War Room, one phrase has become the unbreakable mantra of the Democratic Party: “It’s the economy, stupid.” For better or worse — but too often worse — Democrats have stuck with appealing to voters on bread-and-butter issues, even though by the 21st century our “culture wars” have become so all-consuming that folks vote against their economic interest just to spite the opposing tribe.

For Republicans, the obsession with controlling the culture through political means — even, or especially, when that means exploiting the loopholes of the American Experiment for minority rule that can enable them to strangle democracy altogether, if that’s what it takes — has exploded in recent months with a massive overreach. Yes, the erosion of a fundamental right for 51% of the U.S. population handed down from a right-wing high court picked by popular vote-losing presidents is the top-line item, a game changer.

But consider the GOP’s push for abortion restrictions — including this weekend’s passage of a fairly comprehensive ban on the procedure in Indiana — of a piece with other increasingly audacious rights rollbacks, including snowballing bans on books that people can read in school or community public libraries. In Michigan, voters in a small rural town defunded the local library over an LGBTQ book while school districts from Utah — where the state’s largest system just yanked 52 books by 41 authors — to Bucks County just north of Philadelphia are enacting book-banning policies.

» READ MORE: How Americans angry over abortion rights, guns can turn rage into a mass movement | Will Bunch

Or think about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his increasingly authoritarian rule, taking revenge on reporters, corporations or even elected officials who dare cross his path. This week, DeSantis shocked the body politic by ordering the ouster of the progressive, elected prosecutor in the large county that includes Tampa, citing a dispute over enforcing abortion laws.

The move ratcheted up the GOP’s war on democratic election results, from the move in Harrisburg to impeach Philadelphia’s prosecutor Larry Krasner to the surge of state election candidates willing to take radical actions around Donald Trump’s Big Lie of 2020 election fraud. It’s an assault on the most fundamental right we have — counting our votes — and the foundation for future attacks on our other rights, big and small.

This weekend, the New York Times published a remarkable profile from the writer (and podcaster) Sam Adler-Bell of Arizona’s extremist GOP Senate challenger Blake Masters, who totes a rifle in his ads and employs violent rhetoric in promising to crush the liberal media and universities, as well as Big Tech. The piece positions Masters as the avatar of a New Right that “see[s] coercive state power as an indispensable tool for achieving conservative ends: mandating patriotic curriculums in schools, supporting the formation of “native-born” families, banning abortion and pornography, and turning back the rights revolution for L.G.B.T.Q. Americans.”

That is a radical shift for a conservative movement that not long ago promised (with wild contradictions, of course) a brand of libertarianism that sought to depict Republicans as the heroic defenders of freedom, not its jack-booted destroyers. In fact, it’s such a sea change that I’m not sure that it’s sunk in yet with a lot of voters. This is where opportunity exists for the Democrats: to position themselves as the defenders of your constitutional rights — in your doctor’s office, at the library, or in the voting booth — against this “coercive state power.”

That strategy feels like a no-brainer, but the Democrats have largely adopted a duck-and-cover strategy to the culture wars since the Reagan years. That was a long time ago. Sure, pocketbook issues for the middle class can be a part of a winning strategy. But nothing drives people to the polls more than a sense that their fundamental liberties are slowly eroding. It’s time to erase that old message on the blackboard and replace it with a new one: It’s your rights, stupid.

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