In Kansas, the liberal Republicans who have run the party for the last half century or so have discovered they can no longer win in primary elections. Most Republicans are conservative, after all. So when they want to run for office, more and more of them follow their hearts and simply come out as Democrats. In general elections, liberal Republicans (aka “moderates”) and Democrats together are usually enough to prevail over Republican conservatives. That’s why Kansas has never had a conservative governor, for example, and why the governor’s mansion’s been occupied by Democrats for most of the last 50 years.

Predictably, the state press is deeply entrenched on the side of the Left. Here, for example, is how the Olathe News, a suburban paper owned by the Kansas City Star, opened a story about a liberal Republican’s switch to try to snag a state senate seat:

The day before the Fourth of July, Ron Wimmer, former superintendent of the Olathe school district, did something patriotic that he felt led to do. Wimmer and his wife changed their party affiliations from Republican to Democrat because Wimmer intends to run for the 9th District Kansas Senate seat.

If you want to know just how right Samuel Johnson was about patriotism, you have to read the papers in Kansas.