Topeka ? In the wake of crushing losses in Tuesday’s general election, Kansas Democrats have begun the painful process of trying to figure out what went wrong, and some are pointing the blame at top leaders in the state party and major campaign organizations.

The rift between some factions within the Democratic Party came into full view Thursday in a blog post on the liberal website The Daily Kos under the headline, “How the Kansas Democratic Party Drove Itself to Near Extinction (Pt 1).”

“There will be many who look at the state of Kansas today with a shrug, writing it off as another victim to the big Republican wave,” wrote Chris Reeves, an Overland Park Democrat who blogs under the pseudonym tmservo433. “At the end of the night in Kansas, though, Democrats were routed in a way that hasn’t been seen in years, and now there are no Democrats in Kansas serving in office west of Highway 177, and only one with part of their district past 81.”

Those are the highways that generally mark the western two-thirds and western half of Kansas respectively.

Reeves also co-owns a political consulting firm, Smoky Hills Strategies, with Tom Witt, executive director of the gay rights advocacy group Equality Kansas. Their firm did consulting work this year for Jim Sherrow, the Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Congress against 1st District Rep. Tim Huelskamp.

In the lengthy essay, which he says is the first in a series of at least two, Reeves criticizes the Kansas Democratic Party for focusing too heavily on urban areas, for not doing enough to reach out to Hispanic and Latino voters who work in the meatpacking industry in southwest Kansas, and for having weak organization at the county level, particularly in Wyandotte County, which has the highest concentration of Democratic voters.

“It spent no money. It raised no money,” Reeves said of the Wyandotte County committee. “Field services had to be brought in to try and capture Wyandotte county after the fact. Despite being told in meetings that ‘Wyandotte County is Solid’ the leadership in Wyandotte County no-showed in a way that should be near unforgivable in the party.”

Scott McKey, chairman of the Wyandotte County Democrats, could not be reached for comment Thursday. Calls to his phone number were answered by a voice mail system saying his mailbox was full and he did not reply to emails seeking comment.

Reeves’ essay was circulated widely in social media circles. And while many Democrats openly challenged some of Reeves’ complaints, there is widespread agreement among Democrats — including party chairwoman Joan Wagnon — that things did not work as planned, particularly in Wyandotte County.

“While we had some good volunteers in Wyandotte County, we didn’t have the level of volunteer activity that we needed,” Wagnon said.

According to unofficial election returns, gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis got 66 percent of the vote in Wyandotte County. Third District Congressional candidate Kelly Kultala got 60 percent.

But voter turnout there was only 35 percent, compared to the statewide turnout of nearly 50 percent. And in Johnson and Sedgwick Counties — the state’s two largest counties, both of which Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts carried — turnout was over 50 percent.

Wagnon openly rejected Reeves’ criticism that Democrats didn’t do enough to reach out to Latino voters, or to western Kansas in general.

“I had staff on the ground hired to do Hispanic outreach,” she said. “We had Carlos (Lugo, Hispanic outreach and field director) make I don’t know how many trips. I was in Liberal and Dodge City (numerous times). But there are more Hispanic voters in Sedgwick and Wyandotte Counties than in all of western Kansas.”

Exit polling from the election showed Kansas Democrats did not attract large numbers of Hispanic voters.

While Hispanics make up about 11 percent of the state population, exit polling showed they made up only 6 percent of the voters who cast ballots in the election, and those were almost evenly split between Davis and Brownback.

By contrast, in 2012 President Barack Obama received 71 percent of the Hispanic and Latino vote nationwide.

Wagnon said the party did make some strategic decisions that some may find fault with, such as the decision to focus on mobilizing existing voters instead of trying to register new ones. She said that would have required “thread the maze of voter registration under (Secretary of State) Kris Kobach,” a reference to the proof-of-citizenship requirement which he championed that prevented nearly 22,000 people from completing their registrations.

And the party chose not to produce and distribute Spanish-language material in targeted Hispanic areas because, Wagnon said, most voters in those areas speak English.

Wagnon did say, however, that the party would examine closely everything it did in the 2014 campaign to find out what worked and what didn’t, and to start making plans for 2016.