Hunt emphasized that she and her colleagues achieved Thursday’s reproductive justice win with little national attention and “without a penny of support” from Democratic leadership and top party fundraisers like Emily’s List. “We’re out here scrapping, fighting, winning, and it should be a lesson to everybody that you don’t need to be noticed to do the right thing. You don’t need to have financial backing, you don’t need to be on CNN or what-the-fuck-ever. In Nebraska, we’re fighting and winning,” she said.

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Still, Hunt notes Nebraska Democrats can’t necessarily offer a playbook to legislatures in other red states. Nebraska’s legislature, she says, has a unique nonpartisan, unicameral legislature without party leadership, and the state has “a proud history of independence and libertarian values” that innately contradict abortion bans. (Speaking of libertarianism, one Nebraska Republican went as far as arguing in favor of the abortion ban because the resulting forced births would boost the labor force.)

But even if tactics in Nebraska’s legislature might not neatly work in, say, Kentucky’s, Hunt believes the mindset of doom that some tend to have around abortion and trans rights in red states sets them up for failure. Abortion rights activists in red states continue to fight back against the most jarring attacks with the least resources—and win, even still: In Tennessee last week, organizers successfully won the repeal of an 1883 law criminalizing “procurement of a miscarriage,” to decriminalize self-managed abortion and pregnancy loss. Kansas, Montana, Kentucky, and Michigan were among the states where voters upheld abortion rights via ballot measure last year.

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The loss of our rights can’t be treated as an inevitability, because it’s not an inevitability. Another takeaway, Hunt says, is that you just never know what’s going to happen—and we have to stop pretending we do. “Until the last minute on the vote, we didn’t know what would happen. That’s always how it is.”