This August marks the twentieth anniversary of my family’s arrival in Kansas, after I was hired to teach at Friends University in Wichita. After two decades here, what have I learned?

That’s a complicated question and answering it fully would take a book (which I’m working on). But one thing that stands out is that the way the changes in Kansas’ major political parties since the mid-2000s reflect the famous statement of William Allen White: “When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.” The transformations of partisan structures in our state over the past two decades aren’t unique, but they were early, and in that way provide an unexpected national perspective.

For example, many political watchers in 2007 and 2008 were wondering about the Tea Party movement, which at the time was a broad, disorganized, vaguely Christian, somewhat libertarian collection of grievances. How would Barack Obama’s historic election to the presidency change things? If more people had paid attention to what was happening in Kansas, they wouldn’t have wondered.

Through the financial and organizational support provided by Wichita’s own Koch family, via their Americans for Prosperity organization, the Tea Party developed into a forceful coalition within the Republican parties across the country, purging moderates up the electoral ladder, completing work that Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America had begun 15 years before.

When I arrived in Kansas, pragmatists like Bill Graves, Jean Schodorf, or Stephen Morris, not to mention Bob Dole, were the dominant figures in the Kansas GOP. But by 2012, Sam Brownback had squelched most intra-party resistance to his supply-side tax experiments and his quasi-theocratic Chrisian policy tone, and in so doing brought to prominence a new kind of Republican in Topeka. (Compare the political careers of the ideologically similar, but strategically very different, Republican attorneys Phill Kline and Kris Kobach.) These sort of efforts to hollow out and rebuild a new Republican party — both more nationalist and less “conservative” in the traditional, small-c sense — arguably opened the doors to Donald Trump in 2016 and beyond.

Of course, no political transformation happens in a vacuum. Those same political watchers, who throughout the Obama administration wondered how far the emerging Democratic-city/Republican-county divide might go, could have seen a perfect real-time shift in Kansas, as rural red parts of the state continued their inevitable population decline and the few growing cities in the Sunflower State became slowly (and sometimes not-so-slowly) more blue.

The reelection campaign of Democratic Kathleen Sebelius for the governorship in 2006 was the first electoral contest I observed as a Kansan. Her running mate had once led the Kansas Republican Party, and she won over half of Kansas’s counties, including conservative, rural, far western ones. That campaign set my expectations for the state.

But those expectations, to say the least, soon changed. By the time the unpopular Brownback left after nearly eight years in office, Democrat Laura Kelly became governor in 2018 by winning outright only nine counties. Then she did it again in 2022, with an even larger percentage of the popular vote, but this time winning a majority in only eight counties, with now solidly Democratic Johnson County leading the way. Kansas thus politically exemplifies the economic and demographic urban-rural divide in America as well as any other state.

With any luck, I may have yet another 20 years of watching Kansas politics ahead of me. For the moment though, I find it all fascinating. Whether Kansas’s state parties remain leading indicators for future political transformations remains to be seen. But either way, thanks for coming along for the ride.

— Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.