Kansas has entered the chat as a Senate battleground. Deep-red Kansas. The state that exists primarily as a geographic inconvenience between Colorado and Missouri now matters in national politics.
A combination of local, national, and international events made this happen. That's the official line. What actually happened is someone in Kansas did something so spectacularly stupid that both parties noticed and decided to spend money there. The state that gave us Sam Brownback's tax experiment—a fiscal policy so disastrous it became a case study in how not to govern—now gets to pretend it's a swing state.
Retail traders are already pricing this into their wheat futures positions. They think Kansas Senate races move agricultural commodity prices. They're buying call options on sunflowers and putting their kids' college funds on soybean spreads because a politician in Topeka said something about tariffs once.
The international events part is my favorite. Kansas voters are apparently swayed by international events. The same voters who think geography is a liberal conspiracy now care about global affairs. They're watching the news. They're forming opinions about foreign policy. They're pretending to know where countries are on a map.
The Democratic candidate must be thrilled. Nothing says "winnable race" like needing a perfect storm of local, national, and international crises just to make your state competitive. That's not a campaign strategy. That's a cry for help.
Republicans are panicking because they have to actually campaign in Kansas now. They're spending money defending a seat in a state where the corn outnumbers the Democrats forty to one. That's not a political shift. That's a tax on incompetence.
The Senate race is one to watch, apparently. Translation: it's close enough that both parties will waste millions in ad spending trying to convince seventeen undecided voters in Wichita that they give a sh*t about Kansas.
Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash
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