The GOP may retain a majority in both chambers, but Brownback most definitely does not. “What we’re having is a standoff with the governor holding on to the old days where he had all these people elected,” said Senator Barbara Bollier, a moderate Republican who voters promoted from the state House last year. “They aren’t there anymore, and he can’t let go and follow the will of the people.”

As for Brownback’s legacy, Bollier said: “It’s going down in flames.”

The governor has fiercely defended the tax cuts, arguing that they stimulated job creation while it was the decline in oil and agriculture prices—the “rural recession,” as he calls it—that caused the budget shortfall. “They worked!” Brownback told my colleague Emma Green at the D.C. March for Life last month when she asked if he regretted signing the tax policies in 2011 and 2012. “The target of the tax cuts was job creation and new business formation. That was the target. And that it has done,” the governor said. “We’ve had record new business filings in Kansas and we hit record employment last year in spite of a commodity crisis.”

“The left media lies about the tax cuts all the time,” Brownback added. (His critics note that Kansas still lagged behind all but five other states in job growth last year.)

But it’s no longer merely journalists or even elected Democrats who criticize the governor in Kansas. Many Republicans have turned on him, too. When I spoke to Bollier and another GOP state lawmaker, Representative Stephanie Clayton, by phone on Thursday, both of them brought up the governor’s unpopularity without prompting. “The people can’t stand him here,” Clayton told me.

The backlash against Brownback is extending far beyond tax policy. The Kansas House this week passed bills to restore teacher tenure and expand Medicaid, and it blocked an amendment to deprive state funds to Planned Parenthood—a longtime target of the governor and other conservatives. The measures still face hurdles making it into law, but their approval by wide margins in a chamber controlled by Republicans illustrates just how much the political terrain has shifted away from the staunch conservatives who won decisive victories in 2010 and 2012. “All of those had been way off the agenda for the last four years,” said Burdett Loomis, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. “Basically the far right had controlled the legislature for the last four years, and now it’s back to a moderate Republican-Democratic coalition, which is the way it operated in the ’80s, the ’90s and into the 2000s.”

The stakes for Brownback’s fiscal policy were always high, because the governor himself had set them there. The original tax plan, he said, was a “real live experiment” in conservative fiscal policy—the kind small-government Republicans in Washington had dreamed about but had never fully implemented. The goal in Kansas was to phase out the income tax entirely over time in favor of levies on consumption. As revenues shrunk, so, too, would the size of government.