I'm a clinical social worker who has moved about in the past. Previously I lived in Texas and California. I came to Kansas for a job. One of my first friends here was the Democratic County Chair. I told her I had read Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" She said, "And you came anyway."
Except for San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Galveston, places I lived in Texas were highly Republican. In California, we lived in San Bernardino County, which is also heavily Republican. But in all those places we joined Democratic groups. We made an impact even though we lost more races than we won. In San Bernardino County, our bete noire was an up and coming Republican County Commissioner, but he had to resign when he went to prison on drug offenses. The Texas counties where we lived were ancestrally Democratic. In the 1980s and 1990s they gradually switched to Republican dominance. Race and religion were the main factors.
Kansas' ancestral Republicanism comes from the Civil War and the posturing before it: this is where John Brown made his stand first, though he later met his Waterloo at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia (how's that for a mixed metaphor?). Pro-Slavery irregulars from Missouri coveted Kansas and they and the abolitionists waged a form of guerilla warfare over much of eastern Kansas that was termed "Bleeding Kansas" in the late 1850s. I heard a guy who was from South Carolina remark, "You know, we started the Civil War," to which an adopted Kansan who's my friend replied, "No you didn't, we did!"
My friend was right - the pro-Union sentiment here led to pro-Republican sentiment after Lincoln was martyred. The Republicans milked it for all they could. It was called "Waving the Bloody Shirt". From the late 1860s to early 1900s Union Veterans dominated the electorate north of the Mason-Dixon Line and voted accordingly. Ironically we saw a remnant of this in the electral college results of 1976 - when Southerner Jimmy Carter swept "The Solid South" except Virginia. In Dixie they joked about how nice itn would be to have a President without an accent for a change. But several states which are solidly blue today could not stomach voting for a Southerner.
This sentiment continues to prevail in the northern Plains and Rocky Mountain states. But that's of course not all that makes them vote Republican. There's more history to it, certainly. In the 1890s Kansas like other Plains states flirted with Populism. It was not the sort of populism the pundit class means when they speak of Rush Limbaugh as a populist orator: it was real, ground-up poor farmers and tradesmen rising up against the railroads, banks, and other big business of the day. That was what William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazzette [name of paper corrected per a commenter - thanks!] and voice of sensible small town Republicanism railed against when he wrote the first "What's The Matter With Kansas?" Populism died out, in no small part because it was a regional movement and to expand in the South it allied itself with racist elements. The Jim Crow laws of the Southern states date from that decade too. William Jennings Bryan led a semi-populist caucus of the Democratic Party which led him to the Democratic nomination in 1896, 1900, and 1908, but no wins, not even close, in no small part because businesses threatened to close and fire employees if he did (just like some did over Obamacare!). Bryan had to settle for Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, which he resigned when he saw Wilson was leading the U.S. into World War I, and finally as a laughingstock defender of Tennessee's anti-evolution law in the Scopes trial in 1925.
The Dakotas and Montana remained somewhat populist, as did Iowa and Minnesota, but all these states have strong right-wing movements as well. Now, the Dakotas are more right-wing than before as is Nebraska and Idaho. Wyoming is more business-conservative.
Kansas and Nebraska - some would say the same about the Northern Rocky Mountain states - turned conservative as the economy improved and expanded. In 1936, Kansan Alf Landon was the Republican nominee but failed to carry his own state against FDR. Landon was a conservative in the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover mode. After FDR though, Kansas went back to being reliably Republican, casting its electoral votes for the GOP nominee in every election since except the LBJ landslide in 1964. Yet Landon's daughter, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, a moderate Republican, served several terms in the Senate.
Follow me below the squiggly for more of Kansas' political history in the modern era.
