TOPEKA, KANSAS — The clouds are dark and muscular over the sweep of pastureland and over the state capitol here, and you realize that it’s really the only place to be as we finally stagger toward whatever’s going to happen on Tuesday. Certainly, there are shiny stories elsewhere but, if Tuesday really is going to be a verdict, one way or the other, not only on Trumpism, but also on all the conservative policy poison that made Trumpism possible—voter suppression, supply-side economics, deregulation, abandonment of the idea of political commonwealth, weaponized splinter Christianity—then Kansas got there on all of those things ahead of the rest of the country, and long before the current president* decided he wasn’t a Democrat any more.

Kansas was the lab rat, even more than Wisconsin was. Its departed governor, Sam Brownback, a religious and economic fanatic, got elected and then re-elected despite the fact that his policies pretty much had murdered the state’s economy, decimated the state’s institutions of higher learning, and generally transformed the state into a political wasteland. From Forbes:

Since Kansas enacted tax and spending cuts in 2012 and 2013, Brownback and his allies have argued that this […]