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TOPEKA, KS—The clouds are dark and muscular over the sweep of pastureland and over the state capitol here, and you realize that it's really the only place to be as we finally stagger toward whatever's going to happen on Tuesday. Certainly, there are shiny stories elsewhere but, if Tuesday really is going to be a verdict, one way or the other, not only on Trumpism, but also on all the conservative policy poison that made Trumpism possible—voter suppression, supply-side economics, deregulation, abandonment of the idea of political commonwealth, weaponized splinter Christianity—then Kansas got there on all of those things ahead of the rest of the country, and long before the current president* decided he wasn't a Democrat any more.

Kansas was the lab rat, even more than Wisconsin was. Its departed governor, Sam Brownback, a religious and economic fanatic, got elected and then re-elected despite the fact that his policies pretty much had murdered the state's economy, decimated the state's institutions of higher learning, and generally transformed the state into a political wasteland. From Forbes:

Since Kansas enacted tax and spending cuts in 2012 and 2013, Brownback and his allies have argued that this fiscal potion would generate an explosion of economic growth. It didn’t. Overall growth and job creation in Kansas underperformed both the national economy and neighboring states. From January 2014 (after both tax cuts passed) to April 2017, Kansas gained only 28,000 net new non-farm jobs. By contrast, Nebraska, an economically similar state with a much smaller labor force, saw a net increase of 35,000 jobs...



The tax cuts did produce one explosion, however. The state’s budget deficit was expected to hit $280 million this year, despite major spending reductions. Kansas falls well below national averages in a wide range of public services from K-12 education to housing to police and fire protection, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute’s State and Local Finance Initiative. Under order from the state Supreme Court, the legislature has voted to increase funding for public schools by $293 million over the next two years.



The more troubling lesson for Republicans in Congress: While Brownback was reelected in 2014, his popularity has since plummeted and his approval rating now hovers at around 25 percent, second lowest among all sitting governors. And while the GOP enjoyed tremendous national electoral success in 2016, the party lost seats in the Kansas legislature. At least in one deep red state, the Trump formula of big tax and spending cuts is no longer the path to political success.

(Of course, the Republicans in the Congress paid no attention to Forbes and passed those ruinous tax cuts the president* wanted anyway, believing it would give them something to run on without mentioning the vulgar talking yam in the White House. This is a strategy that has not worked.)

Sam Brownback and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in 2017. MIKE THEILER Getty Images

In June of 2017, a coalition of Democrats and actual semi-moderate Republicans in the Kansas legislature repealed the whole Brownback economic concoction and practically threw themselves a parade doing it. Brownback vetoed the repeal and the legislature danced on his head to override it. Brownback fled into the sweaty embrace of the administration*—he is presently the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom—and Kansas set about the task of repairing even more of the damage he'd left behind.

Meanwhile, over in the Secretary of State's office, one Kris Kobach was making a national name for himself as not only a leader in organized xenophobia, but also as the Napoleon of legal ratfcking. He helped to write the notorious "Papers, Please" immigration law in Arizona, and he was the nation's leader in pumping air into the phantom "voter fraud" scam that remains central to Republican efforts to suppress the ballot. Through the years, Kobach's efforts in this regard have brought him to the chairmanship of the president*'s "Ballot Integrity" commission that collapsed of its own weight in pure ridicule, and also brought Kobach into court with a case so weak and badly argued that the judge commanded Kobach to attend six weeks of remedial law school.

Kris Kobach meets with supporters in October. Mark Reinstein Getty Images

Now, Kobach is running for governor against a Democratic state legislator named Laura Kelly, and their race, which is as razor-close as are so many others around the country, is a measure of whether Kansas will continue to climb out of the abyss into which Brownback dropped it, with the able assistance of Kobach's talent for disenfranchising inconvenient voters.

Laura Kelly at a gubernatorial debate in September. Mark Reinstein Getty Images

This dynamic has carried over into at least two extremely tight congressional races. In the Third Congressional District, Sharice Davids, a gay, Native American lawyer and former MMA fighter, has run a brilliant campaign against incumbent Republican Kevin Yoder, so much so that The Kansas City Star has endorsed the rookie candidate, saying:

There’s one other reason Davids is the choice for 3rd District voters. His name is Donald Trump. The first two years of the president’s term have been the most disruptive in memory. Trump has a reasonably good economic story to tell, yet he has chosen to bury that narrative in an avalanche of lies, tweets, accusations and incendiary claims. The 3rd District, which includes Johnson and Wyandotte counties, is familiar with the tragic consequences of divisive, intolerant rhetoric. Sadly, the president refuses to learn those lessons. Many of his regulatory reforms threaten the health and safety of Americans. His order to send troops to the U.S. border to stop immigrants with asylum claims is provocative, dangerous and politically motivated. His lack of understanding of the most basic facts about America’s government is appalling.

Sharice Davids, far right, talks to supporters at a July 4 event in Prairie Village, Kansas. The Washington Post Getty Images

In the Second Congressional District, which includes Topeka, Democratic candidate Paul Davis has edged ahead of Republican Steve Watkins, in a race that's gotten exceptionally nasty—and increasingly weird—in the last week. From The Topeka Capital-Journal:

Watkins, a U.S. Army veteran and former Alaska resident who never previously sought public office, said Democrats and their allies would “stop at nothing to halt our agenda and put liberals like Paul Davis in office regardless of whose lives they destroy.”



A major thrust of Watkins’ campaign has been a pledge to rely on Kansas values, Christian faith and military leadership skills to transform the political culture in Washington, D.C. In many campaign appearances, he has shared some version of this: “I’m a Christian. I’m a family man. I’m a patriot. And I’d love to serve you and never let you down.”...

Steve Watkins gives a speech at a fundraiser on October 19. Mark Reinstein Getty Images

In a series of interviews, sources said Watkins confided to people in Topeka that his wife, a Boston physician, was tolerant of philandering as long as Watkins didn’t share details with Liu.



Topeka resident Ellen Backus, who first became aware of Watkins while attending Topeka public schools and socialized with him over the years as an adult, said she attended a party with Watkins in October 2017 that illustrated the open-marriage dynamic. A woman who cuddled with Watkins at the party told Backus he was engaged but that Liu “understood what it was like to be in a long-distance relationship” and tolerated his affairs.



In the months before that party, social media posts celebrated the engagement of Liu and Watkins, who announced his campaign for Congress in November. The couple married in May.

However, Davis hasn't come through this unscathed, either.

Meanwhile, Davis’ former mother-in-law said Davis had an affair with a work colleague that resulted in her daughter divorcing him...In an interview, Charlene Rogers said Kansas voters ought to know Davis betrayed her daughter, Shelley. Davis and Shelley Rogers married in 2000 and divorced in 2003. In between, Charlene Rogers said, her daughter told her that Davis had an affair with a colleague at the Kansas Bar Association. The daughter couldn’t be reached.



“She and Paul divorced. She didn’t want to cause a scandal,” said Charlene Rogers, a Missouri Republican. “I’d have a lot more venom.”



Charlene Rogers said her daughter eventually moved to the East Coast and is estranged from her parents. Davis remarried in 2008 and speaks on the campaign trail about his wife, Stephanie.

Paul Davis. Mark Reinstein Getty Images

On Sunday night, in a strip mall off SW 17th Street in Topeka, it was all hands on deck at the Shawnee County Democratic Headquarters. Laura Kelly, the gubernatorial candidate, was there, and so was Davis, and so were two former Democratic congressfolk from the Second District: Jim Slattery and Nancy Boyda. As minority leader in the state senate, Kelly has been an integral part of a bipartisan effort to pull the state back up the cliff off of which Brownback and his ideological chop shop entrepreneurs drove it.

"The thought of Kris Kobach as governor is frightening," Kelly said. "Because of Sam Brownback and his ideological allies, nothing in this state government is properly functional. It's going to take a great deal of patience on your part if we get elected because it's going to take a while to fix everything."

For example, because of Brownback's purely ideological objections to expanding Medicaid in his state, Kansas left $3 billion in FREE MONEY! on the table in Washington, a decision that astonished, among other people, Jim Slattery. He served six terms in Congress, and he was first elected in 1982, in the first Reagan midterm, when the deep recession caused by the first Reagan budget was still deepening. His was one of 26 seats the Democratic Party picked up that year, and Slattery walked into the fading flush of the Reagan revolution. He watched as the Republican Party, which was considered extreme when Reagan was elected in 1980, went sailing off into the the Land of the Lost.

"I'm tired of seeing my tax money [for Medicaid] going to California and New York and Connecticut," he said. "I'd rather see it going to Atchison, and Fort Hays, and Pittsburg. We lost the World War II generation. We lost the generation of people who had personal memories of the Great Depression, who had personal memories of World War II, who had personal memories of America without Social Security and Medicare. And they had a deep respect for the idea, and this included Ronald Reagan, that the government had a role to play in improving the lives of our people.

Jim Slattery on C-Span in 2015. C-Span

"That's an idea that's not liberal. It goes all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. The Reagan people had a similar view of the role of government. They wanted to pare government down. They didn't want to destroy government. Today, we have a whole group in Washington that really would like to dismantle the federal government. That's a dangerous crowd that's in there. To me, it's unbelievable that the state of Kansas rejected seven or eight billion dollars from the federal government that could have been used to expand affordable health care for working Kansans who are struggling to make ends meet. For the life of me, I'll never understand why our Republican leadership in Kansas—Governor Brownback and now, Secretary Kobach—are still rejecting this money."

All that being said, and all the mysteries of the mind of Sam Brownback aside, it's no surprise that the knives are out late in the game. More than a governor's office and some seats in Congress are on the ballot. An entire governing philosophy, and the tactics that allowed it to run amuck in a single state, are on the line here. Kansas has a long history of being central when the country gets to brawling with itself. There is heat in the land here that never leaves, not even when the ground begins to freeze.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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