The division that threatens to split this country in two is not between red and blue states, or between rural and urban areas – it is between the way we discuss politics and the realities of American lives, none of which fit into tidy categories. Contrary to popular narratives, you can be a progressive populist, a wealthy and college-educated Trump supporter, a rural laborer of color, a provincial urbanite, an open-minded midwesterner.



And, as first-time Democratic political candidate James Thompson proved this month in Kansas, you can give conservative Republicans a run for their money as an army veteran, a rifle-owning marksman, and a civil rights attorney who has fought on behalf of black victims of police brutality. Whose first college major was theater, and who named his daughter Liberty.

All at once. In a “red” state.

When conservative congressman Mike Pompeo vacated his Kansas seat to head the CIA earlier this year, conventional political wisdom said the special election to replace him was in the bag for the Republican state treasurer, Ron Estes. The district had gone for Trump by 27 points and is home to Koch Industries, the global, $100bn conservative moneybag whose famous family routes hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative candidates across the country.

But a small band of prairie progressives saw something else: Kansas Democrats had picked up 13 seats in the state legislature in 2016, while moderate Republicans had unseated conservatives.

They saw people angry at far-right governor Sam Brownback’s destruction of the state economy. They saw racially diverse Wichita. They saw the same people who twice elected previous governor Kathleen Sebelius, who went on to design the Affordable Care Act as Obama’s health secretary. They saw a state where socialist Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic caucus. They saw a district that had, perhaps, gone for Trump less because they agreed with him than because he was a wrecking ball who had acknowledged their existence.

Thompson, who has lived in Kansas for 20 years, saw it too. His grassroots campaign quickly aligned itself with post-Trump resistance movements while focusing on jobs, education and veteran issues.

The underdogs canvassed to such effect that Republicans put an estimated $150,000 toward heading them off with an abortion-themed smear TV ad and robo-calls from Trump and Mike Pence. Ted Cruz went to Kansas to rally the base. The president bleated an Estes endorsement on Twitter for good measure.

Democrats, well … the day before the election, they paid for some calls.

They were investing in Georgia’s sixth congressional district (which soon would be a two-point miss for the Democratic challenger) but not in Kansas – a poor use of resources according to strategists, apparently. Even the party’s state organization refused to pony up $20,000 for a mailer.

On the homestretch, it was liberal blog Daily Kos that drummed up close to $250,000 in personal donations for Thompson from across the country. Our Revolution, the organizational offshoot of Bernie Sanders’ presidential run, endorsed the campaign as well.

Ultimately, for the scrappy, local progressives who energized southern Kansans across party lines, it was victory in loss: Thompson came within seven points of winning a US House seat that has been held by Republicans for a quarter of a century. He also turned Sedgwick County, the state’s most populous area, blue for the first time since 1996. Such a swing would unseat Republican representatives in more than 100 districts.



James Thompson, or how to destroy a pundit’s stereotype

The underdog: Thompson with his wife, Lisa, and his daughter, Liberty. Photograph: Travis Heying/Associated Press

National pols and pundits, struggling to reconcile their ideas about a “deep red” area with the hard numbers before them, seemed more astonished by the Kansas special-election results than interested in learning something from them.

It is likely that most members of that chattering class have never lived in Kansas –which may be filed somewhere in their brains as a red square rather than 82,000 square miles of 3 million people. (One Washington Post congressional reporter dismissed the results for being in a “rural” district – never mind that Wichita is the largest city in the state and a manufacturing hub that probably built the airplane he was tweeting from.)

Around the turn of the millennium, cable news networks came to a consensus that “red” meant Republican and “blue” meant Democrat. Since then, most of us have settled into a destructive habit of envisioning entire states as political monoliths, our country two disparate sociopolitical lands.

We’ve seen this sort of bifurcation myth before: during the civil war, northern whites were the good guys, southern whites the bad. In fact, most whites in the north were on the right side of history because of where they happened to live, and they too benefited from slavery and white supremacy.

Yet, with our notoriously short-term American political memory, we have no problem again constructing two pat sides: educated urban America and socially backwards “Trump country”.

I find Kansas more apolitical than conservative, more concerned with personal freedom than with telling women what to do

I am not surprised by Thompson’s near-win in the district I know well. My family has farmed wheat crops, raised and butchered livestock, worked on factory assembly lines, and hammered together buildings there for five generations. I find the area to be more apolitical than conservative, more concerned with personal freedom than with telling women what to do with their bodies or transgender kids where to pee.

Most Kansans I know loathed extreme conservative Sam Brownback before the 2014 gubernatorial election, yet he eked out re-election. I suspect the state legislature’s swing to the right to be a symptom of ignored moderates and liberals staying home, while extremists rallied social conservatives to the polls in local elections.

Like “blue” people find themselves called to do in every “red” state, meanwhile, many Kansans were resisting when resisting wasn’t cool.

As a professor at a state university and a fundraiser for nonprofit social-service agencies, I have rallied with them during the Brownback era – our state portender of the national Trump era.

I have seen Kansas small bookstore owners set up write-your-representative tables and pay for the postage.

I have seen Kansas social workers drive pregnant, poor teenage girls to abortion clinics.

I have seen Kansas artists paint murals about peace on walls built before the civil war.

I have seen my former college students paint rainbow stripes across a residence next to the hatemongering Westboro Baptist church in Topeka and call it Equality House in defiant celebration of LGBT Kansans.

When Brownback demolished state funding for the arts during his first term, the New York Times reported, a small-town Kansas woman – who could have chosen to move – kept her art gallery financially afloat by canceling custodial services and scrubbing the toilets herself.

To render such efforts invisible with a single stroke of red is an insult I won’t abide.

‘Don’t expect anybody from the outside to come in and help us’

About an hour after the special election was called for the Republican candidate, Thompson’s campaign manager – Colin Curtis, a 27-year-old native of Kansas City – spoke with me via phone from a Wichita bar. He had just sent Thompson and his family home after the concession speech, but morale was high. Like a proper midwesterner, Curtis – who was a toddler the last time a Democrat won the seat – abstained from making a single complaint.

Much of the left’s national social-media sphere, however, had already devolved into a whine-fest. Thompson could have won if neoliberals in Washington had given a damn! The party is useless! The party is on track – Georgia’s sixth is where it’s at because national strategy is all about suburbs! Kansas is a bunch of idiots anyway! Curtis said flying under the national radar had been to their benefit for most of the campaign.

“As soon as it became about national politics and Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Ted Cruz,” Curtis said, “the [Republican party] was just able to use that to ramp up their people.”

But Curtis dispelled a theory going around that national Democrats stayed away because they were concerned their brand might be toxic to Thompson’s cause in Kansas.

“We would have welcomed them,” he said. “There were never any discussions like, ‘Don’t get involved, you guys won’t help us’.”

Thompson gets a hug from supporter Djuan Wash at the Murdock Theatre in Wichita. Photograph: Travis Heying/Associated Press

The day after the election, Thompson – sounding tired but upbeat, having just announced that he will vie for the House seat again in the 2018 midterms – said it had been just as Curtis predicted.

“[Curtis] told me at the very beginning, ‘Look, don’t expect anybody from the outside to come in and help us’,” Thompson said.

He admitted it was frustrating to be written off by potential funders and boosters due to the perception that the race was an unwinnable waste.

“I got very sick of this terminology of ‘political capital’,” Thompson said. “Why won’t this person send out a tweet? Well, they don’t want to spend that ‘political capital’. Pardon my language: that’s bullshit.”

Thompson sighed.

“I understand maybe not wanting to invest a bunch of money,” he said. “But the idea that somebody can’t send out a tweet or do something to help somebody to me is ridiculous.”

While national party investment in his campaign was negligible, national grassroots unity proved essential. Curtis estimated that 90% of their donations came from individuals across the country, with an average amount of $20. In the final days before the race, Curtis estimated, 75% of phone calls to district voters were made from other states – crucial for freeing up local volunteers to knock on doors. Those face-to-face contacts are what allowed them to flip Sedgwick County, he said.

“It’s absolutely critical that, moving forward, progressives continue to invest in states like Kansas where they see opportunity,” Curtis said. “Hopefully the parties do that with the 50-state strategy, but if not I really hope the people keep it up. Because they made it as possible as we could have made it here.”

For me, it was heartening to watch even moral support pour in from across the country. On the campaign’s Facebook page, hundreds of comments chimed in not with judgment or dismissal but solidarity and emojis of hearts and United States flags:

It’s absolutely critical that progressives continue to invest in states like Kansas where they see opportunity

“I’m rooting for you from Arkansas!!!!”

“Watching from Oklahoma. I grew up in Wichita and still have family there. I’m rooting for you!”

“I can only imagine the excitement you locals are feeling! I can’t stand it and I live in CA. So happy I could help from a distance. My mom and her family are from KS. She would be so proud. Keep us posted!!”

“Wishing you the best from Maryland. I went to KU and I have been pained to see what has happened to my adopted state.”

“So nervous in New Mexico!”

“All the best from Maryland! [crab and lobster emoji]”

“Watching (and praying) from Nevada … Congratulations on an outstanding campaign!”

“Good luck from NJ! We all need you.”

“Praying in Texas.”

“Go blue from Indiana!!”

I teared up reading the comments. As a progressive in a “red state”, one gets used to feeling unacknowledged or misunderstood at the national level. But here were Americans from all over the map, including “blue” strongholds, saying they had invested their money, their time, and their hope in our cause.

The Thompson campaign found a similar spirit of human connection across supposed divides on the campaign trail, Curtis said.

“As you go around Kansas,” he said, “they’re not concerned about which friends of theirs are Republicans and which friends are Democrats. They care about which friends listen to them, help them out, do good things, are good people.”

Democrat? Republican? Labels reveal little about people and places

I grew up mostly on a farm west of Wichita but spent several years in that city’s public schools and have lived in both rural and urban settings across the country. I find the “rural v urban” narrative as misleading as “red v blue”.

For instance, the terms have become shorthand for racial demographics, but rural Kansas’s meatpacking industry – which employs thousands of immigrants from around the world – is more ethnically diverse than some gentrified neighborhoods of coastal cities.

Rural whites, however, indeed have swung right in my lifetime – an issue Thompson believes he can surmount with more time. “One of the reasons I want to run in 2018 is that I’ll have 18 months to go and talk to people instead of 60 days,” Thompson said, speculating that rural areas have settled along the Republican party line because they are ignored by Democrats.

Salina, Kansas. Photograph: Jeff Cooper/Associated Press

Another assumption about rural America is that it’s brimming with religious zealots obsessed with abortion rights. But, aside from agricultural issues such as farmers’ concern about water rights, Thompson found rural Kansans cared about the same things Wichita did: paying the bills, personal freedom.

Curtis said abortion is a juggernaut issue not because most Kansans are fixated on it – a poll they did two months ago found that 51% of the district identified as pro-choice – but because the Republican party is so good at getting pro-life voters to the polls.

Thompson was proud to be endorsed by and speak up on behalf of Planned Parenthood, local Black Lives Matter activists, and other groups with liberal social missions. But just about everyone he spoke with wanted to discuss healthcare, education, jobs.

“I was talking about working-class people and understanding what’s it’s like to try to put food on the table and make a decision between paying the rent or buying food,” Thompson said. “All those things that somebody that grows up poor understands.”

Thompson, 46, may be new to politics, but he has lived many of his platform’s issues in a way that creates a sort of expertise too often lacking among legislators. He grew up in poverty in Oklahoma City with a stay-at-home mom and his stepdad, a carpet-layer. By the time he was a teenager, he was out of his mother’s care, living in a van with his stepdad and brothers.

He filed for emancipation, graduated from high school, and got a theater scholarship to the University of Central Oklahoma. It wasn’t a full ride, and he struggled to make ends meet. Joining the army, he figured, would provide financial security, a paid education, a chance to get out of Oklahoma, the honor of serving his country.

Thompson went to basic training on 31 July 1990. Two days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Rather than being sent to combat, though, Thompson was selected for the presidential honor guard, which performs ceremonial duties at the White House and Arlington cemetery. Four years later, he enrolled at Wichita State University on the GI bill. He went on to law school at Washburn University in Topeka and has been a civil rights attorney in Wichita ever since.

Those labels of Democrat or Republican should be a guideline, but it shouldn’t define how you vote or define a person James Thompsom

Thompson’s life experience has offered him a window into what he sees as the underlying issue of unrest throughout the country: a need for security. When security is lacking, the fear that might arise can be volatile.

“I’ve been in more fights than I care to remember, growing up as a kid in a rough place,” he said. “People have a fight-or-flight instinct. My instinct is always to fight.”

While that individual gumption was essential to his climb from poverty to the middle class, Thompson does not support the American edict to pull yourself by your bootstraps.

“It was progressive programs that allowed me to get out of poverty,” he said. “I had [free school] lunches growing up. We were on welfare a lot of times. I can remember standing in line for government cheese and butter.” His college education, too, was supported by public programs such as Pell grants and government-backed school loans.

Thompson’s liberalism is rooted in a desire for a more equal world in both economic and social terms.

“I saw racism in my own family growing up, and I didn’t like it,” he said. He recalled a night out in Washington DC with black friends he had made in the military. To his astonishment, they couldn’t hail a cab, but cabs came right to him.

His first civil rights case was against the Wichita police department, whose officer had beaten a black male teenager so badly he was in intensive care for six weeks. Thompson settled the case for just under $1m, and similar cases started coming his way.

It wasn’t until Sanders’ populist run for president, though, that Thompson was inspired to run for office. With a 12-year-old daughter, Brownback for governor, and Trump newly in the Oval Office, he felt a call to action.

Before running as a Democrat, for years Thompson had been registered as an independent, then as a Republican in order to influence that party’s Kansas primaries. He wished party labels would be removed from ballots so that people had to educate themselves about the candidates rather than blindly check boxes for their team.

“Those labels of Democrat or Republican should be maybe a general guideline, but it definitely shouldn’t define how you vote or define a person,” he said. “Because there’s going to be lots of different shades in there.”

One of the political left’s most important contributions to social progress is its persistent dismantling of rigid identity structures: racial stereotypes, strict gender roles, the validity of a gender binary to begin with.

The great political irony of the 21st century, then, is the childlike pride with which many members of the left trade in stereotypes about places like where I’m from. Many “progressive” Americans rightly reject the notion that one’s fate or value in society should be decided by race, gender, or sexual orientation. One’s place, however, has become the acceptable signifier for separating the righteous from the scourge.

The truth is that many “blue” people live in “red” states, and vice versa. About a third to two-fifths of American voters are thus.

So why doesn’t a liberal person in a place governed by dangerous conservative extremists crawl out of what people see as her backwards little hole?

Out of love for home. Out of civic responsibility, even, to a place she knows is worth fighting for.

Besides, the brakes are probably out on her car anyway.

‘I told him to shut the pie hole three feet above his ass’

In a recent episode of the podcast On Being, host Krista Tippett moderated a conversation between millennial progressive leader Heather McGhee and libertarian Tea Party organizer Matt Kibbe. Tippett asked the two, so opposed to one another in their politics, what good they saw in the other’s position and what troubled them about their own.

Kibbe admired progressivism’s defense of community and care for all its members and admitted that a hyper-focus on personal liberty can appear uncaring about our most disadvantaged citizens. McGhee appreciated the libertarian movement’s activism against the mass incarceration state and lamented class-based disconnects within the Democratic party.

The animosity we presume to exist in people our political labels suggest as enemies often dissipates in the space of direct communication.

As for the media’s role in framing the national conversation, journalist Faria Chideya called for more expansive storytelling during a recent public forum at Harvard University on race and class in the 2016 election.

“Let’s look more deeply into the deep social conservatism in the black and Latino communities,” Chideya said. “Let’s look more deeply into how certain progressive ideals in working-class white communities meet up against certain regressive ideals.”

The test for a relatively young nation being forced to grow up is whether it can recognize simultaneous truths.

Thompson shows the way for Democrats in areas they’ve long failed at the polls by being a walking integration of categories: a gun-rights defender who goes hunting, a liberal activist, a commonsense graduate of the school of hard knocks, a fighter who doesn’t mince words with wonky policy talk but shows up as an ally for his local Jewish community, people of color, the LGBT community.

At a recent Wichita rally supporting transgender rights, a couple of hecklers wearing masks used a blow horn to try to drown out event speakers. When Thompson went to the microphone, one of the disrupters tried to talk over him.

“I told him to shut the pie hole three feet above his ass – over the speaker system,” Thompson recalled and cracked up. “My director of communications asked me later, ‘Please don’t ever say that again.’”

But Thompson’s vernacular would have gained the admiration of my straight-talking family, who rarely engage in activism because it often speaks a language they didn’t get to learn.

At this perilous moment in America, the only victory to be had is not on the red and blue map but above it, not with clever strategies but through human connection.

Thompson’s progressive, populist momentum in “deep red” Kansas – where he respected people enough to knock on their doors and look them in the eye – is proof of that. His showing at the polls echoed bipartisan resistance seen in recent months at town hall meetings and marches in seemingly unlikely places and suggested a playbook for Democrats aiming to reclaim districts vacated by Montana, South Carolina and Pennsylvania Republicans in special elections yet to come.

America is one place. Every state shares in her sins, and every state shares in her progress.

An hour after Thompson’s narrow loss, from a bar a few miles from Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas, campaign manager Curtis asked that progressives, Democrats, and resisters remember what it felt like to almost break through to the other side that night that Thompson almost won.

“Keep fighting,” Curtis said. “Keep going.”