Republican U.S. Senator Pat Roberts campaigns at a conservative rally in Gardner, Kansas on Oct. 11.DAVE KAUP/Reuters
For a place as famous as Kansas, it certainly is an under-appreciated state. This is where you'll find the Wild West towns of Dodge City and Abilene, where the likes of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Wild Bill Hickok once kept the peace.
It's the place to which Superman's parents sent him when the planet Krypton was about to explode, where he'd be raised by a farming couple Jonathan and Martha Kent who called their adopted son Clark.
Most famously, it was home to Dorothy of Wizard of Oz fame, the place she said she'd never leave again because "there's no place like home."
Despite all that, and in spite of the suddenly resurgent Kansas City Royals baseball team, which plays across the river in Kansas City, Mo., this still is the state with the lowest level of tourism in the entire United States.
Even the U.S. immigration official who grilled me before I boarded the flight from Toronto two weeks ago wondered, "Why the hell would you want to go to Kansas?" when I told him I was heading to the state to report on a particularly interesting race for the U.S. Senate.
The thing about Kansas, it seems, is that it is so... ordinary.
It sits smack dab in the middle of the continental United States and is known far and wide as middle America. It's the place where pollsters try to capture the viewpoint of the man in the corner barbershop, and where candy companies test out new chocolate bars.
In its colourful and often violent past, Kansas became known as the place where abolitionist John Brown and his sons wielded their axes against slavers, where the temperance movement leader Carrie A. Nation also wielded an ax to break up saloons and make Kansas the first state to prohibit alcohol sales. It's where the Topeka school board was taken to court by another man named Brown, leading to the 1954 landmark decision against segregated schools.
Politically, Kansas is known for electing Republicans, lots of them, though they have come in different shapes and sizes. There have been plenty of moderates among them, men such as Dwight Eisenhower, the allied commander in chief in the Second World War who served as president from 1953 to 1960.
He was from Abilene, the booming cow town of the 19th century that now boasts a population of about 6,000.
One of those people is Galen Kubin, a semi-retired 83-year-old farmer who lives with his ailing wife in a nursing home in the centre of town.
On a Sunday, I found him having lunch at the Hitching Post Restaurant adjacent to the old Abilene train station and the verdant grounds around the Eisenhower library and memorial.
"We come here every Sunday," he said, inviting me to join him. "It's the best deal in town." His wife wasn't feeling well enough to come with him.
Clad in the jacket and tie of his Sunday church-going best, he looked like the proprietor must have looked 75 years ago.
And it was a good deal: fried chicken with mashed potatoes, green beans, with soup and chocolate cake for dessert, all for $9:95.
Service was so fast, the meal was over before we knew it, and Galen asked for another pot of coffee.
He told me how he still drives out to the farm every day to see how his sons are doing on the property he acquired in the 1950s.
His daughter, Galen said, is a physician currently working as a volunteer in Haiti where she's building a clinic in a mountain-side community that has never known running water. "She's helping get that too," he said, with the tone of a man who knew the lay of the land he was describing.
He does. Turns out Galen spent seven years as head of his church's outreach programs, most of which were aimed at the Caribbean island that has taken such a terrible beating the past few decades.
He's spent plenty of time there, and said he'll be going down again next spring, God willing.
Galen is among the very religious majority of Kansans.
He's a Creationist, – even took his grandchildren on an archaeological dig in the Grand Canyon a few years ago, where they unearthed dinosaur fossils; "all part of God's plan," he says.
And he's staunchly opposed to abortion.
But Galen doesn't like politicians who wrap themselves in cassocks.
"I'm a Republican," he says, "but i'm the first to admit my party has done a lot of things i'm not proud of."
One of them is the show the current Governor, Sam Brownback, puts on.
Mr. Brownback, a former U.S. Senator and Congressman, has often paraded his religiosity. A devout evangelical Christian, he once washed in public the feet of one of aides when he was leaving Mr. Brownback's Senate office, just as Jesus might have washed the feet of one of his apostles, or the pope one of his subjects.
He later converted to Roman Catholicism, but Gov. Brownback is famous for showing up in many religious circles. Jews in Topeka say he makes an appearance in the largest synagogue at several of the faith's holidays each year and swears allegiance to Israel. Which is a little awkward, since most of the Reform congregation are Democrats and are more critical of Israeli government policies.
Gov. Brownback will have a rough time getting re-elected this year despite his unabashed appeal to Kansas's religious majority.
Four years ago, he introduced a supply-side approach to the state's fiscal policies – one advocated by the controversial economist Arthur Laffer – and slashed Kansas's income tax, eliminating it completely for all small business owners, including professionals such as doctors and lawyers. He promised that such an approach would stimulate business and result in much more income for everyone and much more revenue for the government.
It hasn't quite worked out that way, and Kansas has run up an enormous debt. It's been forced to cut spending on schools – once considered untouchable – and eliminated many arts programs and other funding.
But the right-to-life movement still backs the Governor, and it represents a large block of votes.
On the way out of Abilene, I drove past 18 of them – nine on each side of the road – waving placards to all who drove by. "Abortion is murder!" read one; "Protect the lives of the defenceless," another said.
It's a reminder of how divided this state really is: devout religious conservatives, libertarian economic advocates, moderate Republicans who just want to solve problems, and a handful of liberal Democrats who keep their heads down.
If the alliance between the Republican mods and Democrats succeeds in winning the Governor's mansion and a seat in the Senate (courtesy of an independent, Greg Orman, both groups have gotten behind) it will be the first big setback for the state's right wingers, who, until now, have largely gotten their way.
In this event, despite a number of defeats for Democrats elsewhere, Middle America (aka Kansas) will have spoken.