KANSAS?
The first sign that Donald Trump was on a downward arc came only eighty-one days into his term. All it took was two numbers. They arrived a few minutes before midnight on April 11, 2017, on the website of the Wichita Eagle. They were:
64,004 56,435
For those who knew and cared, they signaled that something exceedingly unexpected had happened during that day.
Here’s the backstory. These were the totals cast for the Republican and the Democrat vying in a special election for a Kansas congressional seat. The incumbent, Mike Pompeo, had resigned to be Donald Trump’s head of the CIA, and later secretary of state. It had long been a solid Republican seat, where Wichita merges into wheat fields. Five months earlier in that district, Trump had ridden roughshod over Hillary Clinton by twenty-seven points. As anticipated, the new Republican replaced Pompeo.
But in politics as in sports, the scores are less important than the spread. What struck informed observers was that the Republican finished only 7,569 votes ahead. Democrats aren’t supposed to come that close in Kansas. After all, this was a state which since 1939 has sent only Republicans to the US Senate. But the April 11 spread was a spindly seven points.
There were omens on both sides. The 56,435 votes for the Democrat meant that among those who had supported Clinton in 2016, an impressive 69 percent made time for the April election. Apparently, just eighty-one days of Donald Trump sufficed to propel them to the polls.
The 64,004 for the Republican was a more ominous portent. Those five digits attested that if they weren’t ready to repudiate their president, enthusiasm for him was waning. Of those in the district who backed Trump in 2016, only 39 percent were moved to make the April vote. Put another way, fully 101,178 of them chose to do other things that day. That’s not the way Republicans are supposed to behave, especially in Kansas. No less than voting, staying home sends a message. (A similar nonchalance would recur a year and a half later, in November 2018.)