Ms. Kelly’s win is notable not for being out of keeping with the political spirit of the state but for representing the end of what many Kansans woefully call “the Brownback era” — after the former governor Sam Brownback — when religious conservatism and free-market extremism made the state synonymous with far-right politics in national headlines.

Mr. Kobach is a different creature from Mr. Brownback, who for all his terrible ideas comes across as a man who believes in something larger than himself. Mr. Kobach, rather, is Trumpian — from disregard for the Constitution to grotesque displays of bravado, as when he joined a suburban summer parade in a Jeep mounted with a realistic replica of a .50-caliber machine gun. But the Kelly campaign rightly linked Mr. Kobach’s government-strangling economic vision to the unpopular Mr. Brownback, whose own voters turned against his 2012 “live experiment” with deep tax cuts once they saw what it wrought on public schools and roads.

Mr. Kobach ran ads that turned “liberal” into a pejorative and pledged to shield Kansas from outside forces like the federal government and immigrants. Ms. Kelly said she’d put political labels aside and work to build a better Kansas from the inside out.

At her election-night watch party, before Ms. Kelly’s race was called, the crowd cheered when a fellow pragmatist and the first-time candidate Sharice Davids defeated a four-term Republican in Kansas’s Third Congressional District. But a more staunch progressive did not fare as well. In the Fourth Congressional District, the civil rights attorney and military veteran James Thompson spent 20 months unapologetically championing Medicare for All and marijuana legalization. He won over leftist populists and fed-up conservatives alike but came up short in his effort to flip one of the nation’s most conservative districts, home to the billionaire Charles Koch and Koch Industries.

Kansas’s big Democratic wins, it turned out, were by women with less bold platforms who emphasized working across the aisle. It seems that if Midwestern states are bound for a return to their democratic-socialist roots — prairie populism, it was once called — they will first require a return to center in female form.

Regional wins by moderate Democrats prompted one writer to suggest that the next Democratic presidential nominee be “a steaming pot of Midwestern Nice.” Midwestern Nice, this Midwestern woman must note, is not necessarily lacking in radical ideas or competitive fire but is never mean or flustered. It is kind yet often plainly unimpressed. Think of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in September when the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh disrespected the authority of Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Her pained smile conveyed that she was having precisely none of it, but she avoided being reactive. Later, Judge Kavanaugh offered an apology, and Senator Klobuchar — who won re-election this week by a landslide — accepted.

Laura Kelly, whose campaign emphasized public schools, Medicaid expansion and infrastructure, does her job with the same steadiness. So did Kansas’ last Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius, the former Department of Health secretary and an Affordable Care Act architect. Kansas elected Ms. Sebelius twice, not so long ago, along with a lieutenant governor she poached from the Republican Party for the sake of getting things done.