? By almost any measure, Gov. Sam Brownback has been more successful at getting elected in Kansas than any other politician in state history.

Over the last 23 years, Brownback has won five statewide elections — two for governor and three for United States Senate — and one congressional race. Most of those contests were not even close.

But as the 2017 legislative session drew to a close this weekend, it is likely that his political career in Kansas did as well. Although he is still widely rumored to be under consideration for an appointment in President Donald Trump’s administration, experts say his political legacy in Kansas has been left in tatters.

“This is a guy who is very popular electorally,” University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis said. “At the same time, I don’t think there’s any question that he came back here in 2010 (to run for governor) to create this small-state economic nirvana, and socially conservative nirvana too, that would propel him into a serious run at the presidency. That clearly didn’t happen.”

The downfall, of course, did not happen all at once. It had been building for some time, as evidenced by his razor-thin re-election in 2014 against Democrat Paul Davis of Lawrence.

But it came to a head on Tuesday of last week when the House and Senate, both dominated by his own Republican Party, voted to override his veto of a bill that reversed course on the signature tax policies he had championed in 2012.

The following day, Brownback made a public statement decrying the Legislature’s vote, calling it a move in the wrong direction, and insisting his tax policies had generated new business growth, particularly in the Kansas City metropolitan area. But he declined to respond to questions from reporters about what the vote meant for his legacy.

Loomis, however, said the lesson was clear.

“In the end, it was his natural allies, people who should have been on the same side, who really turned the tide,” he said. “Jim Denning (the Senate majority leader); Ron Ryckman (Speaker of the House). These are not moderates. These are very conservative legislators. They should have been with him, just in some kind of abstract way, and yet at the end of the day, in different ways, put together the majorities that rejected his program.”

Speaking a few days after the veto override, Denning was in no mood to gloat about it.

“Raising taxes on citizens is nothing to be cheerful about or celebrate,” he said. “We just felt it was in the best interest of Kansas to stabilize our budget, and unfortunately it required a tax increase. Nothing to celebrate.”

The veto override was not the only example of the 2017 Legislature rebuking Brownback. In February, large majorities in both chambers also voted to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, a federal law he has vehemently opposed from the outset. But they were unable to override his veto of that bill.

Lawmakers also voted by large margins to roll back a concealed-carry gun law that Brownback enthusiastically endorsed in 2013. As of Saturday, Brownback had not signed or vetoed that bill.

During his 14 years in the U.S. Senate, Brownback was known more as a voice of faith-based social conservatism, whether it was his opposition to abortion or his defense of religious freedoms, both at home and around the world.

Unlike Kansas’ other senator, fellow Republican Pat Roberts, he didn’t define himself as a policy wonk in areas such as budgets, education and health care.

When he left the Senate in 2010 and returned home as governor, however, he tried to take on both roles, remaining loyal to his religious social conservatism while attempting to reinvent every aspect of state government based on fiscally conservative, market-based economic principles.

During his first term, he privatized the state Medicaid program, rebranding it as KanCare and turning over management of it to outside, for-profit insurance companies.

He reorganized the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, turning it into the Department for Children and Families, and tried to shift its focus toward promoting traditional marriage as a way to combat poverty and other social ills.

He also took on the state’s civil service system, shifting as many employees as he could into unclassified, and therefore unprotected, job categories.

And he took on the judicial system, pushing through a law that did away with the merit system of selecting Court of Appeals judges and allowing them to be directly appointed by the governor, subject to Senate confirmation. And he tried, unsuccessfully, to push through a constitutional amendment to do the same with Supreme Court justices.

But his signature policy, the one that gained him the most national notoriety, was the sweeping tax cut legislation of 2012 that eliminated income taxes altogether for more than 330,000 farmers and small business owners, slashed tax rates for everyone else and set the state on a “glide path to zero” that would eventually phase out state income taxes altogether.

Brownback himself billed it as a “real-live experiment” in government economics, and he vowed it would be like “a shot of adrenaline into the heart” of the Kansas economy.

In the years since then, however, the economy in Kansas has grown slower than in neighboring states and the nation as a whole. Job growth has been sluggish at best, and state government has been beset by constant revenue shortfalls that have forced severe cutbacks in many basic services.

Opinions differ as to why that happened. Brownback still insists it’s the result of global economic forces — low agriculture and energy prices in particular — that are beyond the control of state government. But others say it’s because the economic theories that were the basis of his tax policies were flawed from the beginning.

“Sam Brownback has been the most destructive governor in my lifetime, and that’s not the kind of legacy anyone wants,” said Rep. Jim Ward, the current House minority leader, who is widely expected to run for governor himself in 2018. “You just can’t look at state government and not see damage that will take years to repair.”

Emporia State University political science professor Michael Smith said Brownback has always been better at ideology than public policy.

“Brownback could salvage a legacy by honing in on the abortion issue, about which he is quite passionate, and some other socially conservative callings, and letting go the rest,” Smith said. “He seems to have a socially conservative majority in the Legislature. But he has given no indication that he sees his prior decisions as mistakes, so it isn’t clear he’ll do that.”

But although Brownback’s political star may be fading in Kansas, that does not necessarily mean the social and economic conservatism he represents will fade with him.

On Thursday last week, less than 48 hours after the Legislature voted to override Brownback’s veto of the tax bill, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach announced he would run for governor in 2018, carrying the same conservative mantle.

Even Rep. Ward, the Democratic House leader, acknowledged that Brownback’s wing of the Kansas Republican Party is still alive and strong.

“There are still Republicans, and a sizeable number of them in the Republican caucus, that are ideologically aligned with the governor,” Ward said. “I think Kris Kobach is even more to the right than Gov. Brownback. It’s not that that ideological strain is gone from Kansas politics.”