Five Kansas legislators — four Republicans and one Democrat — stand out as potentially the most vulnerable in next year's elections because their voting behavior is at odds with their districts, and they won their last elections by narrow margins.

Topeka ? The 2016 elections are a year away, set for Nov. 8, 2016, but already, an unusually large number of candidates have filed to run for state legislative seats, and more have formed committees to start raising money.

Kansas Democrats have no illusions that they can win control of either the House or Senate next year, but they are focusing in on a few districts that they think are ripe for an upset.

Likewise, Republicans know that most Democrats in the Legislature are in safe Democratic districts, mostly in the urban centers of Kansas City, Lawrence, Topeka and Wichita. But they are not giving up on the chance that they could expand their super-majorities in both chambers.

And while party officials are reluctant to say exactly which seats they plan to target, Kansas University political science professor Patrick Miller thinks he has a pretty good idea.

Miller spent much of the last several months compiling data on all 125 House seats and 40 Senate seats, analyzing how the voters in those districts voted in the 2014 gubernatorial election and the last two presidential races.

What he came up with was a list of 33 “mismatched” districts: those that are held by one party, but where voters lean toward the other party in larger races.

And what’s especially tantalizing for Democrats is that the vast majority of them lean in their favor: 23 House districts and eight Senate districts that are held by Republicans, but which Democrat Paul Davis carried in the 2014 election, and where Barack Obama fared better than average in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races.

But there are also two House districts currently held by Democrats where Republican Gov. Sam Brownback won sizable majorities and where Barack Obama was trounced in both of his elections.

Not all of those districts are likely to be competitive next year. Many of the Democratic-leaning Republican seats are held by moderate Republicans whom Democrats have little interest in challenging, including Rep. Tom Sloan of Lawrence, who, at least on paper, appears to occupy the single most mismatched district in the state.

But a handful of districts stand out as anomalies because they are held by solidly conservative Republicans, and in one case a liberal Democrat, even though voters in those districts lean solidly in the other political direction.

Miller said there are a couple of factors that explain mismatched districts. The first, and most obvious, is that the other party simply has never put up a quality candidate to challenge the incumbent.

The other factor, he said, is that most voters in Kansas really don’t know much about their state legislators. And in a solidly Republican state like Kansas, they simply default to whatever Republican is on the ballot.

“If you look at that Kansas Speaks poll (from Fort Hays State University), a majority of Kansans don’t know the name of their senator or representative,” he said. “Maybe they recognize the name if they see it on the ballot. But they don’t have a solid perception of their legislators. They probably don’t know, for instance, that (Rep.) Amanda Grosserode’s profile as a legislator is substantially different from (Rep.) Stephanie Clayton.”

Grosserode and Clayton are both Republicans from neighboring districts in Johnson County. But Grosserode is a solid conservative who supported bills in 2015 banning certain abortion procedures, allowing people to carry concealed handguns without a permit, and the GOP’s tax plan that raised the state sales tax rate while leaving in place a total income tax exemption for some 330,000 business owners.

Clayton, by contrast, voted in the opposite direction on those and many other conservative-backed bills.

The Journal-World examined Miller’s data and added two more variables that help identify how potentially vulnerable an incumbent might be next year: their margin of victory in the last election; and an index to measure how conservative or liberal they are, based on their votes on seven key bills in 2015 where moderate and conservative Republicans tended to split.

Using that, five legislators — four Republicans and one Democrat — stand out as potentially the most vulnerable because their voting behavior is at odds with their districts, and they won their last elections by narrow margins.

Top five districts

Those five most vulnerable seats are:

• Rep. Lane Hemsley, a first-term Republican from Topeka whose district partially overlaps with a better-known Democrat, Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley. Hemsley narrowly won his 2014 race in a district that went solidly for Davis, and which Obama carried in 2012. Yet he voted in favor of most of the high-profile conservative bills in the 2015 session, such as legalizing concealed carry of handguns without a permit or training, banning a certain abortion procedure, and support of Brownback’s tax policies.

• Rep. Joe Scapa, a Wichita Republican who first won his seat in 2010, then lost to a Democrat in 2012, only to win it back by in 2014 by a mere 28 votes. In a district that went for both Davis and Obama, Scapa voted in 2015 in favor of Brownback-supported policies such as school finance overhaul, expansion of concealed-carry gun rights, new restrictions on abortion, rescheduling local elections to November, issuing bonds to fill unfunded retirement liabilities, and Brownback’s tax policies.

• Rep. Charles (Chuck) Smith, a Republican from Pittsburg. A well-known figure in southeast Kansas, he works as a teacher and coaches the Pittsburg High School football team. But in a district that has leaned Democratic in the past, he voted in favor of most of the conservative-backed legislation in 2015, including abortion restrictions and Brownback’s tax policies.

• Sen. Michael O’Donnell, a Wichita Republican who was part of the conservative sweep in the 2012 GOP primaries. With help from conservative-backed groups, he defeated incumbent Sen. Jean Schodorf, a moderate Republican who has since switched parties to become a Democrat. Before that, Democrats had never invested in recruiting candidates in that district. O’Donnell narrowly won the general election with less than 50 percent of the vote against a Libertarian candidate and a Democrat who had a criminal record.

• Rep. Ed Trimmer, a Democrat in an otherwise strongly conservative district that includes his hometown of Winfield in south-central Kansas. Voters in his district went strongly for Davis in 2014, and for Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. He voted in favor of a controversial anti-abortion bill, but voted against the Republican agenda on virtually all other issues in the 2015 session. He was initially declared the loser in his 2014 race, but when provisional ballots were counted days later, he edged out his Republican opponent by a mere 17 votes out of 6,665 votes cast.

“I think you’ve accurately identified the districts that will be competitive, both in terms of picking up new seats for Democrats in the House, plus the Democratic district most at risk,” said Abbie Hodgson who is coordinating House campaigns for the Kansas Democratic Party.

Clay Barker, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, also agreed that those districts are likely to be among the most competitive races.

“They would be on our watch list,” he said, adding that there may be as many as six Senate districts and as many as 23 House districts that GOP officials believe “are in the range where they could be challenged.”

Of those five, O’Donnell is the only one who has drawn an opponent so far. Lynn W. Rogers is a Wichita school board member and a former Republican who switched parties to challenge O’Donnell as a Democrat.

And Elizabeth Bishop, a Wichita Democrat and neighborhood activist, has announced that she intends to file against Scapa.

Hodgson said Democrats are optimistic about the 2016 races and believe they can pick up as many as five to seven seats.

But Barker said the GOP is also optimistic, and his party is eyeing more Democratic seats where Republicans can make gains.

The Brownback factor

KU’s Miller said the keys for either party trying to capture an opponent’s seat are recruiting quality candidates to run against them and educating voters about the incumbent’s voting record.

But he said there’s another factor that could work in favor of Democrats: Gov. Brownback’s low popularity. He noted that the Kansas Speaks poll showed only 18 percent of Kansans were satisfied with Brownback’s performance in office.

“Legislative elections often have a lot more to do with the governor than the president,” Miller said. “Going into a legislative race when Brownback is very unpopular, Republicans are going to have a harder time knocking off Democrats in mismatched districts.”

But Barker challenged that assumption.

“I don’t think it will be a drag at all because he’s not running,” he said. “Democrats have tried to tie Brownback to Republican candidates in the last two elections, and it didn’t stick.”