PC/AHC: a liberal Kansas

And we still have widespread local prohibition laws in across the rural counties of Kansas.
400px-Alcohol_control_in_the_United_States.svg.png

The map is about 7 years old, but the point stands.

I saw that map. I can’t see how Cook County (Chicago) warrants a yellow block, but I guess it has a few dry suburbs. But old opinions do die hard, and change often has to wait until the older generation dies out. I live in Quincy, Illinois, a community with a population that has hovered at 40,000 for the past century. In the 1930’s the population was concentrated in a densely packed part of town that has gradually de-populated as growth takes on a more suburban character. But around 1990, the state tried to authorize more off-track betting parlors to help the horse racing industry. As the proposal was put forward, retired church ladies voiced their objections that gambling would bring back lawlessness, racketeering, the red light district and other elements of the more raucous environment of the thirties. The parlor opened, but closed for lack of business about three years later. And there was no racketeering. A similar objection was raised when Iowa legalized riverboat casinos in 1989. The crime waves never came. Soon Illinois and Missouri followed suit; imagine, Missouri legalized casino gambling in 1993, a mere 16 years after it became the last state to legalize the sale of light bulbs on Sunday, long prohibited on “moral” grounds. Yes, prior to 1977, Missourians in Kansas City would flock into Kansas to do shopping on Sunday, as Kansans came into Missouri for night clubs and liquor the rest of the week.
 
Well Kansas did used to be more receptive to economically left candidates in the past, particularly when there was an economic crisis in the region.

If you want to have that kind of agrarian radicalism remain a stronger force in Kansas, the key thing you probably are going to need to do is avoid the decline of the old small family farm and it’s replacment with the larger more ‘corporate’ farms. While there are low income workers on those farms, they tend to be disproportionally forgein born and very rarely turn in elections (if they even eligible to vote in the first place).

Much has been made of Kansas' Populist heritage, but that was already a thing of the distant past in the 1940's. Not only did the state easily go for Willkie in 1940 and Dewey in 1944, but even in 1948, when farmers' anger over the 80th Congress caused Truman to win a number of midwestern and western farm states that had gone for Dewey in 1944 (IA, WY, CO, WI), Kansas again went for Dewey and indeed gave him his third biggest winning margin in terms of percent of the vote (+ 9.02, behind only ME and VT). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_presidential_election
 
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