When Kansas lawmakers overrode Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and reversed course on the tax policies he championed in 2012, it was predictable that the story would be front-page news in all the Kansas papers. What was less predictable was the extent to which the story would resonate nationally.

Much of the attention was certainly due to the fact that President Donald Trump is expected to roll out his own plans for federal tax reform soon, and many believe it will be modeled on the Kansas experiment.

Writers at POLITICO made that connection back in May, when the White House released a one-page summary of Trump’s tax plan. “As the White House and Congress begin to debate tax reform and how it could affect the country, they should pay close attention to the plains, where Kansas has suffered fiscal and economic setbacks,” the website reported May 4.

“The Kansas Experiment Is Bad News For Trump’s Tax Cuts,” a headline on the fivethirtyeight.com blog proclaimed after the override vote. It went on to say the action in Topeka was possibly the most interesting policy news to happen all week, even outperforming former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to a congressional committee two days later.

Money magazine’s Ian Salisbury also drew a link between the Brownback tax cuts and the upcoming Trump plan when he wrote, “the Republican-led legislature’s reversal makes it trickier for Kansas to serve as a template for national tax reform.”

“Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Would Turn the Whole U.S. Into Kansas,” proclaimed another headline on Slate.com.

Other news outlets, however, saw the Kansas Legislature’s action as a final verdict on the “supply-side” economic theories — dubbed “trickle-down” economics by some and “voodoo economics” by then-candidate George H.W. Bush — that economist Arthur Laffer first sold to the Reagan administration in the 1980s before bringing them to Kansas in 2012, theories that are now said to be forming the basis behind the Trump tax plan.

The New York Times editorial page, which was never a big fan of either Reagan or Laffer, seemed to chortle with its headline, “Kansas Rises Up Against the Trickle-Down Con Job.”

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post even declared that Kansas “proved” how “Trickle-down economics is a nightmare.”

But it wasn’t just the left-leaning editorial pages that sat up and took notice of what happened in Kansas last week. Even the Brookings Institution, the living definition of centrism, called the vote in Kansas a verdict on supply-side economics.

“The Brownback tax cuts were one of the cleanest experiments the country has ever had in measuring the effects of tax cuts on economic growth, and it showed that they were a failure, wrote William G. Gale, a Brookings senior fellow in economic studies.

“Kansas’ experiment with tax cutting failed spectacularly — on its own terms,” proclaimed another editorial in Business Insider.

West coast newspapers also took notice.

“It’s the end of the road for the GOP’s big tax experiment in Kansas,” read a Los Angeles Times headline over a story that began, “The grand economic experiment on the prairie has ended.”

It’s not often that Kansas politics receives so much national attention, and usually when it does it’s because of something the rest of the country frowns upon, like when the Kansas State Board of Education tried to downplay the concept of evolution in state science standards.

In 2014, Kansas briefly drew significant national attention when it looked like Republican Sen. Pat Roberts might be on the ropes for re-election, but that faded pretty quickly after he won by more than a 10 percent margin.

What’s different about the tax story is that national news outlets are actually using Kansas as a source of objective facts and data to tell a cautionary tale for the rest of the country. And you can tell they’re taking the task seriously by the fact that none of the articles mentioned above made any of the corny “Wizard of Oz” references that are usually obligatory in stories about Kansas.