Every so often someone rediscovers that Kansas doesn’t behave the way the map says it should, and writes something about it. William Allen White did it in 1896, mocking the Populists in a tossed-off Emporia Gazette editorial that outlived every officeholder it was written about. Thomas Frank did it in 2004, and the title he borrowed from White — What’s the Matter with Kansas? — has been doing work ever since.
Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization.
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004)
But the state that gave Frank his thesis is also the state that produced Mary Elizabeth Lease telling farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” the state whose Governor Henry Allen sued to revoke the Klan’s corporate charter in 1922 and won, and the state that rejected an abortion-banning amendment by eighteen points in 2022 while putting a Trump-aligned attorney general on the same ballot. Populist and reactionary, moderate and radical, Mainstreet and culture-warrior — sometimes within the same decade. Frank’s diagnosis is real. It just isn’t the whole patient.
I built out a longer, source-linked timeline of a hundred and thirty-six years of this — Lease to Lewelling, the Allen decade, Landon’s forty-six-state loss, the Eisenhower consensus, the Summer of Mercy, the Brownback tax experiment and its repeal, and the wide-open 2026 governor’s race. Worth a look if you want the contradictions laid out chronologically instead of argued in the abstract.
See the full timeline: What’s the Matter with Kansas? — An Interactive Political History, 1890–2026.
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