People stand outside the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in Washington, Tuesday, June 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Paul Holston)

Topeka ? Anyone who has studied electoral maps over the last several cycles has seen an unmistakable trend: Democrats have dominated national elections in the major population centers of the Northeast, West Coast and parts of the upper Midwest.

But in the vast interior of the country, from the Deep South through the Great Plains and much of the Rocky Mountains region, Republicans have formed what appears to be a giant “red wall” that Democrats have been unable to penetrate and, some have argued, are uninterested in doing so.

Particularly in the Great Plains, it’s an area made up largely of working-class, blue-collar white voters, the type of voters who once made up the core of the Democratic Party’s base.

The polarization has been so strong in recent years that most voters in Kansas and the rest of the Great Plains never see a presidential campaign in person. Republicans don’t campaign here because they don’t need to, and Democrats don’t campaign here because they see it as a lost cause.

But in the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning upset victory in the 2016 presidential race, many people are asking whether Democrats haven’t made a huge strategic mistake by not making more of an effort to appeal to voters in middle America.

“I can tell you, there is a debate going on at the national level,” said Chris Reeves, Kansas Democratic Party national committeeman. “It’s between the ‘purists’ – like those who supported Bernie Sanders – who don’t feel like compromising on anything, and others who want to reach out to rural voters.”

National trend

Reeves was just elected to the national committeeman post in June, shortly before the Democratic National Convention.

Well before that, however, he was a kind of anti-establishment voice within the party who was arguing that even at the state level, Democrats had become too focused on the urban voters in Kansas City and Wichita, and that the party wasn’t spending enough time trying to build a Democratic base in the rural and western parts of the state.

“I took a lot of (grief) for proposing one time that we move the state party headquarters to Salina or some place like that,” he said.

One person who agrees that Democrats have done the same thing at the national level is Kelly Arnold, chairman of the Kansas Republican Party.

“My grandfather was a major Democrat Party player here in Kansas back in the day, when (George) Docking was governor,” Arnold said. “He was a kind of Blue Dog Democrat – what I call a former southern Democrat.”

Since the 1960s, Arnold said, the white, blue-collar, working-class voters who once made up the base of the Democratic Party have, for the most part, shifted to the Republican Party, especially in the South and Midwest. And he said that was especially evident in Trump’s victory Tuesday night.

“Because the Democratic Party has shifted so much in what they try to attract,” he said, “they’ve gone so far progressive, appealing to these little coalitions. We (Republicans) appeal to the average American that’s just out there trying to earn a living and make a better life for themselves.”

Arnold acknowledged, however, that Republicans have had their own problems trying to compete in major urban population centers like New York City, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco that have leaned heavily Democratic for the last several election cycles.

But he also said state and national GOP officials have been working to address that.

“Maybe the public doesn’t see it as much during a presidential campaign cycle, but that’s what parties do in the off-election cycle,” he said. “We get people registered as Republicans and try to make inroads into some of these Democratic blue areas. What you see with Trump, he was really able to attract some of those non-typical Republican voters. We will capitalize on that. Donald Trump winning Pennsylvania, that wasn’t even on my radar screen.”

Arnold said he thinks the pattern of blue states on the east and west coasts, and red states across the nation’s interior, will be around for a long time to come.

“You’re always going to see some purple states,” he said. “But the overall part of America, especially in Midwest, our values, the values that people stand for, are not changing. And neither will they on the east or west coast. I don’t predict seeing a shift in the next 30 years.”

But Kerry Gooch, executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, sees it otherwise. He noted that the so-called millennial generation, those now between the ages of 18 and 35, are overwhelmingly Democratic, and as they continue to make up a larger share of the voting-age population, Democrats will become a more powerful party.

“I’m not saying we’re just waiting for the demographics to come around,” he said. “The Democratic Party is known as a party of a large base. As one part of that base is getting smaller, we’ll pick up with another part.”

Kansas mirroring nation

Discontent within the Kansas Democratic Party came to a boiling point during a state committee meeting in Topeka last year, shortly after Rep. Paul Davis’ loss to Sam Brownback in the gubernatorial race.

There, former Rep. and former State Treasurer Dennis McKinney of Greensberg openly complained that the state party appeared to have given up on rural Kansas.

During that meeting, McKinney declined attempts to draft him as the next state party chairman, and the job went instead to Larry Meeker of Johnson County.

Meeker, however, lasted only a few months on the job and was forced to resign in August after making public statements suggesting the party should appeal to a broader base of voters, including those who didn’t necessarily favor same-sex marriage.

That controversy illustrated the struggle between the centrist and “progressive” wings of the party, similar to the split nationally between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders wings.

Since then, though, Kansas Democrats have tried to regroup, organizing more county-level party committees and recruiting more candidates to run for the Kansas House and Senate.

And while Democrats made some significant gains in the 2016 elections, picking up 13 new House seats while losing only one, those wins came largely from the urban metropolitan areas: four in Johnson County; two each in Leavenworth and Sedgwick counties.

But they also managed to make gains in some non-urban areas, including seats in southeast, central and western Kansas.

But Kansas Democrats saw a big drop in their voter registration numbers – more than 35,000 since 2008 – while Republicans gained almost as many over that same period.

“That’s not a good trend,” said Kerry Gooch, executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party. “But I think this election has given us the perfect opportunity to start reversing that trend.”

Electoral College question

The 2016 election also represented the second time in 16 years when the winner of the popular vote ended up losing the electoral vote. And both times, including George W. Bush’s win in 2000, it has worked to the advantage of Republicans.

According to unofficial returns so far, Clinton received about 49 percent of the popular vote, compared to 48 percent for Trump, a margin of more than 336,000 votes. But Trump appears to have won the race with 290 electoral votes.

The reason for that is, most states cast their electoral votes as a block for the popular-vote winner in that state, regardless of the margin of victory.

Many people also blame the Electoral College system for making states like Kansas irrelevant to presidential campaigns, because even though there are pockets in Kansas where Democrats do well – notably Douglas and Wyandotte counties – votes in those areas are outweighed by the rest of the state, which is predominantly Republican.

University of Kansas political scientist Burdett Loomis has spent years writing and arguing that the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced with something that more closely matches the popular vote.

“I think there will be discussions about it,” Loomis said. “What I’ve been fascinated by so far is how little that has been discussed.”

Loomis said there are numerous options to the Electoral College, such as requiring a runoff election if no candidate passes a certain threshold of popular votes, or allowing voters to rank all of the candidates in order of preference.

“There are dozens of ways to do it where eveyone’s votes count equally,” he said.

Arnold of the Kansas GOP, however, said he remains a fan of the Electoral College.

“I’m very much appreciative of the Electoral College because it gives smaller states an opportunity to be campaign targets,” he said. “Without it, candidates would only be in cities with 1 million population and above. Swing states, smaller states, would never be visited by either candidate. It puts all states in play.”

Loomis, however, said he thinks that’s a weak argument.

“They don’t come here anyway,” he said.

“I do think we might not get a huge number of visits, but we’re not going to get any fewer visits than we’re getting now. We’re not going to get less attention,” Loomis said.