The outsiders’ image of Kansas is of wheat fields and superhighways, but more Kansans now live in the greater Kansas City metro area than anywhere else. The largest county in the state is suburban Kansas City’s Johnson, where Sprint is headquartered and which is populated by upscale professionals. Johnson County has also been one of the most intense battlegrounds in the war between Kansas’s moderate Republicans and ultra-conservatives.

In 1998, as a result of the split between the Republicans, Democrat Dennis Moore was able to narrowly win the congressional seat that represents Johnson County over a far-right opponent. Moore only won 45 percent or so of Johnson County, but combined with neighboring Wyandotte County, the state’s only minority-majority county, and parts of Douglass County, which include liberal Lawrence, he was able to keep getting elected until he retired in 2010. The Republican state legislature then removed Lawrence from the district, and non-Tea Party Republican Kevin Yoder has held it securely ever since.

But the struggle goes on. The state Republican Party is currently in revolt over the extreme conservative politics of Governor Sam Brownback and his allies in the legislature. The leadership of the moderate Republican opposition comes out of Overland Park, the largest city in Johnson County. Olathe, the second largest city in Johnson County, remains a bastion of the religious right. (Peter Beinart wrote about Olathe’s politics in The New Republic in 1998.) But as is happening in other exurban areas—think of Loudon County in Northern Virginia—a more liberal, tolerant attitude, characteristic of young professionals, is beginning to gnaw at the edges of Olathe’s social conservatism. This fall, the struggle for Olathe’s soul will focus not only on the governor’s race, but on a race for the state legislature’s 30th district, which is concentrated in the northern part of the city and in neighboring Lenexa.

The district was held by Lance Kinzer, the Republican leader of the anti-abortion forces in the state legislature. Kinzer sponsored, among other things, a bill that required doctors to warn women who wanted an abortion of the medically unproven claim that it could cause breast cancer. Kinzer decided to retire this spring, and endorsed fellow social conservative Randy Powell to succeed him. In 2012, a Democrat, Liz Dickinson, former lobbyist for the National Organization for Women in Topeka, won 46 percent of the vote against Kinzer. That was partly the result of Dickinson’s indefatigable door-to-door campaigning, but also of growing moderate Republican dissatisfaction with Kinzer’s social views. Dickinson is now running against Powell for the seat.

I met Dickinson at the weekly meeting at the Tropicana restaurant in Lawrence (the home of the University of Kansas) of Drinking Liberally, a social event that began in New York last year and now takes place in 42 states. Dickinson, a 30 year old with short brown hair, glasses, and an engaging smile, was asking for support from the 25 or so people who had gathered that evening. Dickinson is a professional photographer who has a small business with her husband that does weddings and other special events. She is married and has two children, and said during her first campaign, in answer to a question about why she cared about gay rights, that she is bisexual. She told me that no one has raised the issue during her campaign, but I can’t imagine it plays well among some of Olathe’s Republicans.