Opinion: It’s been decades since Kansas made a difference in national politics. This time it means the world.

In just 48 hours, Kansans will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape history.

The opportunity is unexpected — and unexpectedly urgent.

I was thinking about that urgency the other day when I was part of a television panel discussion about politics at a public television station in Kansas. The set was quaint, as you might expect, and on a side table next to the host was a miniature wooden globe in a square stand. I wanted to pick up that globe, hold it to the camera and say we must meet the moment because this is what’s at stake.

I didn’t, but in my mind, I started writing this column.

This year’s midterm election has been called a “unicorn” for red America by a major political analyst. In Kansas, the surprisingly competitive U.S. Senate race has drawn the attention of the nation. For many, the race is a referendum on what may be the most corrupt administration in American history — and a repudiation of the phalanx of legislative quislings that keeps it in power.

While pundits have treated the dead-heat between incumbent Roger Marshall and challenger Adam Hamilton as a political singularity — after all, no Kansas Democrat has been elected to the U.S. Senate in nearly a century — the close race isn’t being held in a vacuum. It’s a sign of the growing resistance to authoritarianism, and not just in America.

In the past week, a student-led movement against corruption toppled 14 years of a repressive regime in Serbia. In Brazil, the beleaguered incumbent made a surprising political comeback against the far-right candidate who was expected to win. What happens in Europe or South America isn’t a prediction of what will happen here, but it is a semaphore of change.

We are witness to a historic political realignment in America. It’s difficult to see the outlines while being tossed about in the middle of it, but it appears to be on the same order that shook the nation over slavery in the 1850s or the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century. Every election is a throw of the dice, but even if the midterms don’t reshape the balance of legislative power — and two days out there is reason to believe it will — neither party will emerge from the fray unchanged. The cult of Trump is collapsing, leaving Republicans with empty sails and no rudder, while Democrats are learning again how to navigate by the brightest and most constant stars.

The ancient stain of slavery and the fight for equality are still problems Americans struggle with today. But if we do not put out the immediate fire in the kitchen of democracy, there may be no house left standing in which to debate anything other than the depth of our misery.

The American experiment, battered these last two years by a regime that has thrown away the hard-won lessons of two centuries and surrendered its humanity for a few crypto-coins to rub together, may yet be renewed.

We stand at the threshold of that renewal.

Kansas has oft been the wheel upon which American history has turned, beginning with its admission to the union as a free state in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War. It also produced one of our better presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was ranked fifth best by a C-SPAN survey of historians in 2021.

Eisenhower, whose hometown was Abilene, was the American general who commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II. He oversaw the invasion of Normandy in 1944, a bloody but necessary assault that eventually broke the Nazi stranglehold on Europe.

In 1952, as the Republican nominee, Eisenhower was elected president. During his inauguration he offered a civic prayer for the nation. I’m not ordinarily a fan of public prayers, but my religion is democracy and our best hopes for the future are often supplications to a higher power within ourselves.

Eisenhower prayed for the ability to discern right from wrong, to be guided by the law of the land, and for the compassion to work for all Americans, regardless of “station, race or calling.”

When Eisenhower gave his farewell address in 1961, after two terms as president, it signaled the Sunflower State’s waning influence on national politics, Sens. Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum excepted.

You can scarcely read a history of Kansas without stumbling over the famous dictum by small-town newspaper editor William Allen White that, “When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.” White, writing in 1922, was referring to movements including abolitionism, prohibition and populism.

“These things come popping out of Kansas like bats out of hell. Sooner or later other states take up these things,” he wrote.

The modern reader stumbles over this quote not only because it is now a century out of date, but was out of date just 20 years after White wrote it. As H. Edward Flentje points out in “Reform and Reaction: The Arc of Kansas Politics,” White wrote in his 1940s autobiography that his once-progressive Republican Party had become “chastened, weary, and disillusioned.”

By 1983, syndicated columnists Neal R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom had hammered a nail into the coffin of Kansas politics in their book, “The Story of America: Inside the Fifty States Today.” They described the Sunflower State as “scarcely the place where things happen ‘first.’ Indeed, nowhere on the American continent can the eclipse of a region or a state as a vital force — a focal point of creative change or exemplar of national life — be felt so strongly and poignantly as in Kansas.”

It has been a long time since any bats have popped.

This is not to say that Kansas is a hellish state. The recently released Kansas Speaks public opinion survey indicates that 77% of respondents believe the state is a good to excellent place to live. However, a deeper question about whether the state was on the right track resulted in a deep division, with 41% saying the state was on the “wrong track” compared with 37% of right trackers. The remaining 22% said they didn’t know.

The Peirce-Hagstrom obituary for Kansas influence is now 43 years old, and most Kansans weren’t even born when it was penned. The median age for the state is 37, according to the Kansas State Data Center at the University of Kansas. That means that our median-age Kansas voter has only been eligible to cast a ballot since 2007.

Their first presidential election would have been a year later, and if they voted for Democrat Barack Obama — as did 514,000 Kansans, 42% of the state total — their vote didn’t matter because of the winner-take-all Electoral College system. All of the state’s six Electoral College votes went to Republican nominee John McCain. That’s the way it has been for more than six decades, because the last time Kansas went for a Democrat for president was in 1964, with Lyndon B. Johnson.

For the U.S. Senate, the streak is even longer.

If you’ve paid even cursory attention, you’ve probably heard that when it comes to the Senate, Kansas Democrats have the longest political drought in American history. That’s one of the reasons that being a Democrat or an independent in Kansas can feel like being a small blue bubble tossed about on an ocean of red.

With state politics, it’s different.

Kansas is not averse to letting a Democrat take a turn at being governor, and three of those Democrats have been women, including the term-limited outgoing governor, Laura Kelly. It’s also historically different for the 3rd District of eastern Kansas, which encompasses much of the Kansas City metro area, where incumbent Democrat Sharice Davids is seeking her fifth term.

If you live in other parts of the state, voting for Democrats running for national office can seem futile. Among the state’s 2 million registered voters, 44% are registered Republicans and just 26% are Democrats, according to the Kansas Secretary of State.

But not all voters have declared a party, and about 29% are unaffiliated. Another 1% or so identify with small parties.

The more you look, the less red the state becomes.

Especially now.

The question that has been repeated over the last two years is this: When will Americans have had enough?

We may have found the limit.

The most distinctive feature of this satiety is anger.

There are plenty of targets at hand for this fury, from the price of a gallon of unleaded gasoline ($4.08 on Interstate 35 as I write) to the rising cost of food at the local grocery store. A roast for family dinner now costs $20. Whether you’re filling up the car or trying to put a meal on the table, these prices are being driven up by the ill-advised war with Iran, now in its eighth month. Things may get worse soon, because the Trump administration has warned Gulf States to prepare for a major U.S. offensive after the midterms. So far, the war has cost the U.S. government $47 billion, imposed death and human suffering on both sides, and wasted what remained of America’s global influence.

But voter anger is rooted in more than senseless war and rising prices.

There is a longing for the competence and decency that once guided America. If you are the aforementioned Kansan of median age, then you may remember that first vote you cast, in the 2008 presidential election. Never mind who you voted for. Think for a moment about the character of the candidates. Both Obama and McCain were motivated by a clearly articulated set of values. Even if you didn’t agree with them, you could understand them. Both men shared an essential decency, even though their backgrounds could hardly have been more different.

Remember how, a month before the election, McCain defended Obama as a “decent family man, citizen” when a voter at a political town hall in Minnesota brought up a worn conspiracy theory. Can you imagine that same kind of decency in national politics today from the Trump-addled Republican Party?

I long for the days of McCain. I think many of us do.

In 1961, Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation, and that speech is remembered today for his warning against establishing a “military industrial complex.” But the fullness of his thoughts bear repeating now.

Americans, Eisenhower said, expect their president and Congress “to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the nation.” The nation’s prestige depends not only on riches and military strength, but on how that power is used in the interests of world peace and humanity.

“As we peer into society’s future,” he said, “we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

Three days later, Democrat John F. Kennedy was sworn into office.

In that C-SPAN survey I mentioned earlier, Kennedy comes in eighth. The first spot is held by Abraham Lincoln. Trump is near the bottom, at No. 41, just above Pierce, Johnson and Buchanan. But you have to remember the survey was conducted just after Trump’s first term.

In 2024’s Presidential Greatness Project, a survey of presidential scholars, Trump came in dead last.

Trump came to Kansas on Oct. 19 in a panicky rescue. A second trip, a Halloween rally planned for Salina, was canceled and then rescheduled for Sunday.

In the Park City visit nearly two weeks ago, in a speech laden with racist tropes and vulgar language, Trump declared: “When you see burning steeples and raging fires in France, just remember that is what the radical Dumocrats want to ​do to America.”

It’s too bad that Eisenhower isn’t around to give Trump a history lesson about burning steeples and raging fires in France.

In February, Pete Hegseth — Trump’s secretary of defense — attempted to move the historic globe Eisenhower used during the invasion of Normandy. Hegseth wanted it for his office, but in his haste some unskilled workers dropped the globe and broke it, according to the Washington Post, smashing Antarctica and detaching it from the mounting ring that allowed it to rotate.

It is a metaphor for the Trump administration’s misuse of American power.

That Kansas is among the few states that will decide control of the U.S. Senate is reason to hope for the future, no matter the outcome of the current contest. There are signs of a return to the progressive ideals that make human freedom and dignity possible.

There may be strife to come, but that Kansas is again at the forefront of national politics is the answer to a civic prayer whispered by many conscientious and decent individuals of both parties, or of none, for the last two years.

What will the world be after Tuesday?

It’s up to us to help decide.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.