Republicans might finally be giving up on their tax-cut fever, Meet the Press reported this morning, because it’s finally come back to bite them in Kansas. NBC correspondent Kevin Tibbles went to Kansas and found what he called “dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, taking aim at their governor, Sam Brownback” and choosing to support his Democratic challenger this fall because his tax cuts have left the state’s budget a mess.

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But is Brownback really being abandoned by his party? Not exactly. NBC would have done well to provide an ounce of context: Kansas has a longstanding liberal Republican tradition, where many members of the party have just partisan loyalty, not conservatism, dyed in the wool. In fact, one of the Republicans Tibbles interviewed as evidence of this revolt against Sam Brownback was opposing a Republican gubernatorial nominee way back in 2002. Former state senator Wint Winter Jr., who’s quoted as saying Brownback’s tax cut is driving the state into bankruptcy, supported Kathleen Sebelius in her race for the governorship against Republican nominee Tim Shallenburger, working with a group called “Republicans for Sebelius.” Winter was also treasurer for the campaign of Democratic Senate candidate Tom Wiggans when he tried to unseat Republican Pat Roberts in 2006.

At points, the report speaks for itself: At a breakfast in the most liberal city in the state, college town Lawrence, Tibbles asked another Republican against Brownback, Alice Ann Johnston, whether it was difficult to say she plans to vote for the Democratic candidate. Her answer? “A little,” which doesn’t seem to be quite the words of a reluctant secessionist. (She and her husband also supported the more liberal Republican primary challenger to secretary of state Kris Kobach.)

As John Miller recounted in an October 2013 article for National Review, and Eliana Johnson reported here last week, Brownback is more conservative than many prominent members of the Kansas Republican party, and in order to get his agenda through, he had to unseat a number of liberal Republican politicians. Now those people, essentially, are airing their grievances on Meet the Press, and that program is pretending they might portend something for Republicans nationally.

Brownback’s tax plan does have problems, including ones right-leaning commentators will acknowledge; the Kansas economy is not booming; and the governor is in real trouble this fall. But no political observer should present the Kansas Republican establishment as a bellwether.

There were at least two other things amiss about the segment: Host Chuck Todd characterized the anti-Brownback backlash as ”a Kansas prairie fire that’s threatening to spread to other states,” yet the report indicated that plenty of states have considered aggressive tax-cut measures, with some of them going through. The evidence of backlash elsewhere is wanting, not least because states aren’t considering cuts as aggressive as Brownback’s.

The report also linked Brownback’s effort, which aims to gradually eliminate the state income tax, to Colorado’s 1992 Taxpayers Bill of Rights, which is quite a different policy that involved revenue limits and required tax rebates. Colorado’s “TABOR” had to be suspended when the state, for totally unrelated reasons, ran into serious economic trouble in the early 2000s at the same time that a separate initiative was forcing education spending up. Now, however, as Michael New explained on NRO earlier this year, the measure is now reinstated and working again, returning popular rebates to taxpayers. Viewers of the Kansas segment, meanwhile, were essentially informed that Colorado has a similar policy and that it’s still a mess — neither is true. State tax policy, and state politics, are complicated, but Meet the Press could do better.