This week’s primary elections in five states generated all kinds of attention, and for good reason. There were important and captivating contests up and down the ballot in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia and Washington.

But as the dust settles on one of the most closely watched primary days of the year, it’s important not to overlook voters’ choices on several statewide ballot measures, which were every bit as interesting. Three of them stood out for me.

First, in ruby-red Missouri, Republican officials have grown deeply frustrated in recent years by citizen-initiated ballot measures that advanced a series of progressive policy goals, including expanding Medicaid, raising the minimum wage, protecting abortion rights and legalizing marijuana.

In response, GOP policymakers in Missouri this year championed Amendment 4, which was designed to make it harder for voters to circumvent the Republican-led legislature.

How did that work out? Not well. With just about all of the votes counted in Missouri, Amendment 4 lost by a lopsided margin: 80% of the state’s voters opposed the proposal, while only 20% supported it.

Missouri Republicans also backed Amendment 5 this year, which would have eliminated state income taxes. This proposal fared even worse: 83% of the state’s voters opposed the change, while 17% supported it.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, Republicans championed Amendment 1, a proposed constitutional amendment to change how state Supreme Court justices are chosen, in the hope that it would ultimately lead to new restrictions on abortion rights.

This failed too. The New York Times reported:

Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected a ballot measure that would have required state Supreme Court justices to be popularly elected rather than appointed by the governor, dealing another setback to Republican lawmakers trying to overturn a decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

That ruling in 2019 has preserved Kansas as a significant abortion provider for women in a wide swath of middle-American states that banned abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The final tally was also not close. With nearly all of the votes counted, 61% of Kansans voted against Amendment 1, while 39% supported it.

The vote came almost exactly four years to the day after Kansans also rejected a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed the GOP-led legislature to ban abortions.

Republican officials and candidates were already facing a tough election cycle this year, but the party’s lopsided setbacks in statewide ballot measures make matters quite a bit worse for the GOP.

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