Debating incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan pulled one of his classic moves. Reagan summed up decades of political science research with a pithy, homespun-sounding question. Once thought impossible, inflation and unemployment were both high at the same time, so the economy was on everyone’s mind. In his trademark style, Reagan looked directly into the camera and addressed the voters themselves, not his opponent or the moderator, asking “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Economists may scoff. The ups and downs of the economy are too complex to attribute to politicians’ actions, but political scientists know the score. Reagan was encouraging viewers to use a strategy called retrospective voting. This explains why the economy is usually the single biggest deal-maker (or -breaker) for undecided voters.

Reagan won the 1980 election easily.

Four years later, the economy in recovery, Reagan again asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Reagan then pulled off only the second 49-state landslide in American history.

This year, in Kansas, it is time to revisit Reagan’s question.

In 2012, Gov. Sam Brownback was frustrated with moderate Republican leaders in the Kansas Senate. He and his political allies pulled off a first-in-Kansas-history moment: a well-funded, professionally organized campaign targeting these obstinate moderates in the Republican primaries. They sought to oust 12 and succeeded in removing nine. Then Brownback hit the gas: Having passed tax cuts earlier that year, Brownback proceeded to privatize Medicaid, drain the state highway and children’s health trust funds, abolish the school base funding formula, and refuse federal money to expand Medicaid and set up an Affordable Care Act marketplace.

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

How are the schools that your children or grandchildren attend? How likely are they to stay in Kansas after they graduate? How is their teachers’ morale?

How is your local hospital doing? Is it solvent? Is it closing?

How about your area’s roads? Are repairs on schedule?

Finally, comes Brownback’s signature act: the 2012 tax cut. How much of that have you seen, personally? How much job growth have you seen in your community and workplace as a result?

Sen. Forrest Knox’s, R-Altoona, primary-election defeat last month spells trouble for Brownback. Knox was a Brownback ally and conservative firebrand known for his outspoken advocacy of, among other things, giving adoption preference to traditional, heterosexual, two-parent families like the ones on the 1950s TV show “Leave It to Beaver” (he actually said that). I spoke with some of Knox’s former constituents, unhappy that he was ignoring district matters. One local mayor got no help from Knox on an environmental variance needed to build a new water-treatment plant. Knox’s constituents expected responsiveness, but they did not get it. Now Knox is out, along with other Brownback allies like Rep. Virgil Peck, R-Tyro, who made national headlines for attacks on immigrants and even on the authors of these newspaper columns, yet Peck did nothing while a hospital closed in his district.

Voters may have wondered, are they better off than they were four years ago?

Kansans will have another chance to revisit Reagan’s famous question again this November.

— Michael A. Smith is a professor of political science at Emporia State University.