I am an old gay. This is an important part of the story that I am about to tell.

If you are an old gay like me, you well remember living in a world in which the vast majority of people disapprove of you. This was the United States up to about 20 years ago. It didn’t matter if you were promiscuous or flaming or even out — its simply mattered that you were gay and therefore a deviant who would go to hell.

I didn’t believe this. My friends and family didn’t believe this. Nonetheless, quite a few Americans believed it. An awful lot of Kansans believed it. To live in the world of 20 years ago as a gay man required the willingness to accept that most of the people you lived around and worked with didn’t just dislike you but disputed your basic personhood. Three years after I left the state to work in Florida, Kansans overwhelmingly voted to ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution.

People like to believe that this former world didn’t exist. But it very much did. I have not forgotten it. And I know that others my age have not forgotten it either.

I write this because of the 2024 general election results, which I know for many progressives and moderates and even a handful of conservatives has come as a dispiriting shock. Unfortunately, being right has nothing to do with majority support. Slavery had majority support in the South. Women had no separate legal identity from men for hundreds of years.

None of that was right. The people who supported such vile policies were wrong.

Likewise, the embrace by a majority of Americans of a would-be autocrat in the presidential election is simply wrong. They picked a man who encouraged an insurrection against the United States government. They picked someone who emboldens America’s enemies and alienates our allies. They picked someone who catastrophically mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis. They picked someone whose reelection bid was opposed by his own cabinet members.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be sworn in as our 47th president. He was elected, and that’s that. Perhaps this time things will be different. But our nation will likely suffer because millions of Americans took the path they did.

Kansas will likely suffer because our state’s voters took the path they did. More will die from a lack of health insurance. More will face absurd criminal penalties for possessing and using cannabis.

I don’t believe that voting one way or another or belonging a certain political party makes people good or bad. But those who participate in the civic life of our country should take responsibility for their actions. That goes for politicians and voters alike.

New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie encapsulated my feelings perfectly, while explaining the perils of overanalysis.

“As long as journalists and pundits act as if they are amateur political strategists and not people trying to understand and tell the truth about the world, they are going to take the implicit view that voters can never be wrong, which then demands endless explanation of their morally blameless choice,” Bouie wrote in a thread on Bluesky. “Not me. It is not my job to say what a political party should or should not be doing. It is my job to tell the truth, and the truth is that a lot of people willingly abandoned their faculties to make a bad, destructive choice.

“This is not a popular opinion these days but people have agency. People are in control of the choices they make. No one is forced to do anything.”

Not everyone voted with these majorities. Some chose a different direction. They decided to live with empathy and caring and concern and made political decisions accordingly. They put the welfare of their fellow human beings ahead of the price of eggs or their own resentment of a changing world (spoiler alert: It’s going to change no matter which candidate you select).

As an old gay, though, I understand how this works. We do not come naturally to empathy for others. Humans look out for themselves primarily, and perhaps a handful around them. Prioritizing the nation or the needs of the disadvantaged? It’s a heavy lift. And it’s not just voters. Leaders from parties have seized the opportunity to demonize those who were different when needed.

President Ronald Reagan looked the other way while hundreds of thousands of gay men died of AIDS.

President Bill Clinton signed “don’t ask, don’t tell” into law and “reformed” welfare by ending the benefit as we know it.

President Barack Obama said he opposed sex-same marriage.

Reagan was wrong. Clinton was wrong. Obama was wrong. Kamala Harris was wrong when she rebuffed progressive dissent about widespread death and destruction in Gaza. Unfortunately, I have seen too much to expect genuine caring from politicians. I wish they would do better. I hope they would do better. I support a world in which stout-hearted activists pressure them to do better. But I don’t expect them to suddenly develop a conscience — voters alone hold that power.

So if you’re a straight, white person afraid of what another Trump term portends, welcome to the club. Some of us have been members for an awfully long time.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

Vibes aren’t enough.

From my perspective on election night at 10 here in Kansas, that’s the takeaway from a day of voting that didn’t produce much in the way of thundering progressive results in Kansas — or anywhere else, really. That might be the proverbial bitter pill, but sometimes we all need a dose of strong medicine.

Another term of Donald Trump as president? Likelier than not, from all indications. The Republican supermajority in the Kansas Legislature? Apparently still in place come January.

I wrote about a multitude of encouraging shifts and promising signs in Kansas over recent months. There were the PACs and educational groups boosting moderate Statehouse candidates. There was the 32,000-plus Facebook group supporting Kamala Harris. There was a spate of polling, including numbers showing Trump ahead by only five in Kansas and Harris up by three in Iowa, that suggested a broader realignment thanks to fired-up women.

All of these stories happened, of course. But if you don’t have the votes to support the vibes, those stories remain anecdotal. Regardless of your enthusiasm or that of your friends, the folks with the most votes win elections, and they’re the ones who will make the choices we have to live with over the next two to four years.

This column has come together without knowing the final results of all these races. Final tallies may take days to arrive.

But I think it’s worthwhile for all of those who follow politics or work somewhere in the spectrum of public affairs to recognize that our own personal morality doesn’t matter one iota when it comes to wielding political power.

The vibes the progressives clung to over the past few months — at least since Harris entered the presidential race — appear to be nothing more than vibes. Not just in Kansas, either. When a nation has fractured 50-50, winning takes ambitious strategy, relentless focus and a willingness to rethink your basic approach.

Perhaps one day that will change and a blue wave will sweep across the nation. But no such wave crested Tuesday.

At this point, I’m not drawing wider conclusions about the United States or Kansas. I will leave that to others with more time to process raw information into steaming hot takes.

I have two additional thoughts this evening.

One is that Kansans and voters across the United States have made their decisions. That’s how our representative democracy works. We will now see how those decisions play out. I hope, regardless of my personal beliefs about our leaders’ character or ideology, that they succeed in improving our state and nation.

Second, as I wrote on Monday, everyone’s lives continue. Everyone’s world continues. Those of us interested in making it a better place, in whatever way we can, should keep doing so. If that means speaking truth to those in power and making our voices heard, so be it. If that means taking care of ourselves and our families and our communities, so be it.

I’ll be here, writing these columns and editing this commentary section, because that’s what I know. See you soon.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

You want to talk about that new poll showing Kansas as a potential swing state? OK, let’s talk about that new poll showing Kansas as a potential swing state.

The annual Kansas Speaks survey from the Docking Institute at Fort Hays State University showed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a mere five points behind Republican candidate Donald Trump. Given that the survey covers traditionally conservative Kansas, political pundits pounced.

“BREAKING: Trump only winning by 5 In KANSAS,” wrote legal commentator Tristan Snell.

“If Harris is only down 5 to Trump in Kansas – election night is going to be very good for Democrats,” added Obama campaign and administration alumnus Tim Fullerton.

“…holy s---?” exclaimed journalist and lawyer Seth Abramson.

Let’s step back from excited progressive reactions for a moment and actually talk about the poll, what it means and whether Harris has a shot in Kansas. (Spoiler alert, she almost certainly does not). We found a great person to help us break things down: Brett Zollinger, director of the Docking Institute itself. He sat down with Kansas Reflector staff on Tuesday afternoon to give background on those surprising results.

First off, we should understand that the data presented comes from a survey, not a poll. Kansas Speaks primarily tracks public opinion on issues rather than candidates. It gathers a representative panel of Kansans and collects information from them via a carefully designed survey online.

“The presidential election is a very minor focus for us in Kansas Speaks,” he said. “We are far more focused on policies, issues that are going to be relevant to Kansans, likely to come up in the legislative session, that sort of thing. But every four years, we get this unique opportunity to see what our survey methodology bears out in terms of some actual voter decisions in the state in the presidential election. So in 2020, we were within 0.2% actually, in the spread between Trump and Biden with our survey panel methodology.”

For reference, in 2020 Trump finished at 56.2% in Kansas, while President Joe Biden reached 41.6%, a 14.6 percentage point gap. The 2020 Kansas Speaks survey found 52% support for Trump and 37.6% for Biden, a 14.4 percentage point gap.

That earlier accuracy was much remarked upon by online commentors. But Zollinger wanted Kansas Reflector readers to understand that the modeling and weighting decisions made for the Kansas Speaks survey are not necessarily the same ones made by political polling firms. They’re playing different games.

“If we were actually trying to measure, with a lot of predictive ability, the presidential vote turnout, we would probably engage in a fuller methodology common to the survey industry, especially the presidential polling industry,” Zollinger said. “We don’t. But we do winnow it down to registered voters who say that they plan to vote, which is not a bad methodology necessarily for doing that. And the survey panel is what it is. These are folks who have opted in to be surveyed. It’s not uncommon to use these today. Pew Research has its own big one. Gallup has one.”

Researchers looked at various demographic factors, he said, “and we did pretty much a simple proportionate weighting.” (You can dig into the crosstabs on page 96.) They did the same with their 2020 results.

“We took the proportion in the sample who fit a certain age profile, and we adjusted it to the state’s age profile of adults, same with gender, same with education. … We believe it is the most reasonable approach to trying to make up for some underrepresentation by some age groups in the panel and some underrepresentation by certain education levels,” Zollinger said.

Which brings us all down to the basic question: Do we believe the survey results?

I do, with caveats.

Kansas has changed. In the eight years since I returned to the state, I’ve watched as a motley mix of Republicans, Democrats and independents have rejected Trump and extreme ideologies. I’ve watched a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the Legislature to ban abortion fail by an 18-point margin. I’ve watched voters twice elect Democrat Laura Kelly as governor. I’ve also heard, over and and over, and read, in repeated email messages, that Kansans don’t like the current political atmosphere.

Now, that doesn’t turn us into an immediate swing state. It doesn’t guarantee a Democratic Legislature anytime soon. But it does, at least from my perspective, suggest that Republicans can’t count on a blank check from Kansas voters.

Trump will almost certainly win Kansas. But that margin will matter.

Alex Middlewood, a political scientist at Wichita State, weighed in on the survey results via a Tweet thread. She said the results showed that Trump has been losing ground in Kansas over the past eight years.

“His vote share in 2020 was lower than it was in 2016, and 2024 is very likely going to be even lower. Make no mistake, Trump is going to win Kansas,” she wrote. “However, any shift in the margins, like we’re seeing from these results, will likely have major impact on the state legislature races. Ds are working hard (and spending lots of money) to break the R supermajority. These results should give them hope.”

More Kansans speak

I’ve been keeping track of interesting presidential endorsements in Kansas news outlets over the past couple of weeks. You might not be able to read an endorsement from the Washington Post, but these plucky Kansans have a lot to say.

“Rep. Steven Howe reflects on voting for Trump after earlier criticism,” by Steven Howe, Salina Post, Oct. 26.

“My fellow conservatives, we have to split the ticket to save the US Constitution,” by David Mastio, Kansas City Star, Oct. 29.

“Oops, I voted for Hitler…again,” by Dane Hicks, Kansas Informer, Oct. 30.

“Kamala Harris has what it takes,” by Susan Lynn, The Iola Register, Oct. 25.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

Sometimes you need to step back to see what’s right in front of you.

That alarming fact struck me last week as I watched firsthand how institutional forces conspire to deny Kansans the ability to vote for the candidates of their choice. I don’t believe the parties involved all gathered in some smoke-filled room to make their decisions, but they have nonetheless aligned themselves against pluralistic democracy and encouraged creeping authoritarianism.

On Wednesday, Facebook deleted our post referring to freelancer Grace Hills’ simple story explaining how Kansas can vote in the upcoming election. With Oct. 15 as the deadline for voter registration, the story was a timely reminder of how Kansans could participate in the political life of their state.

But Facebook didn’t want you to see it, claiming that “it looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.” Not only could we not post the article but Kansas Reflector followers couldn’t either. The platform has at various points shut down pages belonging to the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County and Kansas Reflector. Meta, the parent company behind Facebook, apparently has been deploying an artificial intelligence bot that mistakenly targets innocuous political material.

On Thursday, a press briefing from the Alliance for Youth Organizing featured Loud Light president Davis Hammet in a roundtable discussion with youth voting advocates from across the nation. Hammet recounted how the Kansas Legislature passed the bill that essentially shut down voter registration drives formerly carried out by Loud Light, the League of Women Voters and other groups. Those carrying out such drives could theoretically be prosecuted if someone mistook them for government officials, leading to uncertainty and legal exposure. A judge finally blocked the law’s enforcement this summer.

“The reason this really matters is that when you register someone to vote when they’re 18 or 19, they become more likely to vote for the rest of their life,” Hammet said on the call. “And the inverse is true. When they are deprived of that opportunity to get registered, to get engaged, they are less likely to participate. Not just in elections, but in civic life in general for the rest of their life. So voter suppression, but particularly voter registration suppression, causes irreparable harm, not just to young voters but to our entire country and to the idea of democracy.”

I didn’t want to just write about Facebook taking down links to our article. And while youth voting advocacy matters a great deal, Kansas Reflector reporters have covered that story. (Columnists have taken it on, too.)

But then it struck me: This is the same story. This is one and the same story.

This is a story about powerful institutions on the state and national levels who have decided that they want to make it more difficult for people to participate in the political process. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apparently soured on the entire political process and reconciled with former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Kansas legislators have routinely found themselves in thrall to charlatans who claim voter fraud is a pressing threat.

Rather than steel their nerves and push forward with what is obviously the right course of action — engaging people of all ages in the democratic process — the Kansas Legislature and social media oligarchs have decided to shut it all down. Or come as close as they can.

We have no idea how many Kansas youths missed the opportunity to register through a drive conducted by Loud Light or other civic organizations. They may be silenced for decades to come. Likewise, we have no idea how many people browsing Facebook last week might have seen a link to Hills’ story and clicked, learning more about engaging with the political process. Facebook didn’t just suppress the story but actually took it down, leaving them without the opportunity.

In the background, Trump and his poisonous partisans have continued to claim without basis or justification that the 2020 election was stolen and that the 2024 election may be tampered with as well. The first didn’t happen, and the second won’t happen either.

But that’s not the point. These political actors hope to use confusion and anti-democratic messaging to suppress voter turnout and advance their own political project. It’s an absolute scandal. No matter your party, no matter your ideology, no matter your age, or background, please recognize the threat.

Our individual rights do not come from Facebook. They are not granted by shortsighted Kansas legislators. They do not issue forth from one campaign office or another. Our rights belong to us and us alone, as Kansans and Americans. We have the right to guide our government. We have the right to speak against those who would silence us.

We will only be suppressed if we allow ourselves to be.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives are fleeing for the exits.

News broke Thursday that two-term Rep. Jake LaTurner of Kansas, a shiny-cheeked lad of 36, would retire at the end of the year. He joins Reps. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, Ken Buck of Colorado and Patrick McHenry of North Carolina in choosing not to run or resigning right away. Altogether, reports Axios, nearly 20 House GOP members have decided to leave the chamber without firm plans.

Everyone who leaves, of course, wants to explain their reasons for doing so. I’ve taken the liberty of composing a generic explanation for these departing politicians. Anyone else wanting to abandon the “increasingly chaotic” chamber can use it as a template, too!

Dear home state friends and voters, although mostly those donors who wrote gigantic checks to fund my election:

I write with a heavy heart today to announce that I will not run again for my beloved congressional seat. It has been my pleasure to serve the amazing, wonderful, awesome and totally hot people of Wisconsin or Colorado or Kansas. This of course is why I decided to work in Washington, D.C., so I did not have to see many of them.

For these past two years in Washington, D.C., all I could think about was my home state of Wisconsin or Colorado or North Carolina. Mainly about how good it felt not to be there.

Unfortunately, the time has come for me to depart from the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol. Actually scratch that. I’ll probably return to those halls sooner or later, but as a big-time lobbyist making a lot more money and doing far less work.

Sure, some might say this has to do with the gridlock and dysfunction caused by Republicans having a narrow margin and a bunch of legislators who would rather talk about Jewish space lasers than legislation. But this isn’t true at all. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and myself all get along super fine. I would rather encounter their awesomeness at a safe distance. With security guards if necessary.

No, I want to spend more time with my spouse. Or I want to spend more time with my spouse and young children or my spouse and teenage children or my spouse and grandchildren. Perhaps I just want to spend more time with my mistress and possessions.

What accomplishments am I most proud of? Well, I did listen to Rep. Greene talking about those lasers for 45 minutes and didn’t throw my drink in her face. That counts, right? Also, I voted for whatever bills the speaker of the House told me to, whoever the speaker of the House happened to be that day. Whether he was Mike Johnson or Kevin McCarthy or anyone else who might have slipped in there for a minute or two, I respected and supported him.

Please know that we always wanted to do the best for Kansans or Coloradans or Wisconsinites. Like when we didn’t pass Ukraine aid for months and months and let Russian President Vladimir Putin come close to winning! That was great and something I’m totally proud of. So was the way that our Senate colleagues killed an immigration compromise with the Democrats for purely political reasons. Yay for us.

Don’t worry, though, we might suffocate even more important bills before my time is up.

I can’t close without paying tribute to the Big G, our lord and savior, the one who makes all this possible: Donald Trump. Ha ha, I kid (although not if you’re paying attention, Mr. President, sir). I of course mean Yahweh, the creator of all that surrounds us. He’s never led me wrong, except perhaps when he suggested that I should run for office during a time of corrosive partisanship and existential threats to the republic.

Naturally, attention now turns to my potential successor. Whoever follows me in representing North Carolina or Kansas or Colorado, I look forward to helping them in whatever way possible. As long as they’re a Republican and don’t talk about space lasers.

Also, whoever follows me in this job will have an incredibly awful time and find their soul being crushed every single day because of the horror that infests this place.

USA! USA! USA!

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

It shouldn’t take courage to do what Rep. Steven Howe, R-Salina, did earlier this month.

But it did.

Howe wrote a column about former President Donald Trump, the Jan. 6 insurrection and election denialism. He asked his fellow Republicans, in plain language, to take a different path while they still have time. With a full primary schedule ahead of us — and the Kansas presidential primary set for March 19 — the party could choose to look forward rather than backward, focus on attracting new voters rather than exacting revenge, and work together with Democrats for the good of our country.

Sure, I can hear you all out there saying, fat chance of that ever happening.

Yet Howe speaks with remarkable sincerity. As long as the GOP includes folks like him, we can’t abandon hope.

“For our republic to survive, it needs the peaceful transfer of power,” Howe told me during this week’s Kansas Reflector podcast. “And that is a bedrock foundational issue that has allowed us to survive as a democratic republic. And I feel like that is not something you toy with.”

Opinion writers and political pundits have spilled a lot of ink in recent years about party asymmetry. In other words, Democrats and Republicans don’t always behave in the same way. Democrats encompass a wide variety of warring factions, while Republicans look for order imposed from above. This can be overstated, but you certainly don’t have to look far before finding Democrats bad-mouthing President Joe Biden or his reelection campaign.

Finding Republicans willing to speak out against Trump — a twice-impeached former president who lost reelection and was subsequently indicted on 91 felony counts — takes more effort.

Yes, Howe is conservative. Yes, his political beliefs and ideology likely differ from mine. He also respects reality.

Thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters storm the U.S. Capitol building following a “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. The protesters stormed the historic building, breaking windows and clashing with police. Trump supporters had gathered in the nation’s capital to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over Trump in the 2020 election. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

“After I wrote this, I received a message from a neighbor, or someone in the neighborhood, and someone that I’ve known for a while,” Howe said. “And they said they still believe the election was stolen, three years since Jan. 6 has happened. And I don’t know if I can change the minds of fellow Republicans that still believe that, because people will believe what they want to believe. And I’m only one person, and that I’m trying to shine the light on some things here for our fellow Republicans to consider.”

He added: “I think Republicans need to know that there is a Republican at the state level that isn’t going to support the former president.”

The most recent polling data aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.com suggests that even in Iowa, only a smidge more than 50% of Republicans would support the former president in the caucus. But as happened in 2016, an array of other candidates split the opposition vote.

As we’ve seen repeatedly in Kansas, reliable Republican voters seldom feel comfortable straying from their party when the general election comes around. That means that the choice of voters in primaries and caucuses — even if they represent a fraction of a fraction — carry outsized weight. Kansas political operatives have used this fact over the years to purge the Kansas Legislature of moderate voices.

All this empowers an ideologue like Trump.

And it leaves normal people out in the cold, unrepresented by their party.

“I’ve received quite a few encouraging notes from constituents, people that I’ve never heard from before, or maybe I’ve never met in person, but have sent me notes by email, some phone calls,” Howe said. “And people were encouraged by me coming forward and in writing the piece. And I think there’s more Republicans still out there that perhaps don’t want to speak publicly. They don’t want to get the backlash or the retribution that the former president has talked about if he’s reelected.”

The representative craves, as do I, a return to a different kind of political discourse. As Kansas Reflector’s opinion editor, I would love to write more often about truly progressive topics. Throughout the past three years I have instead written repeatedly about basic facts. Science is real. Vaccines work. Widespread election fraud doesn’t happen.

Both Republicans and Democrats used to agree, if nothing else, on a shared basis of real-world experience.

Not so much today.

“To continue as a civil society, we need to allow each other space to be heard, and to listen,” Howe said. “And just because someone disagrees with your opinion, on a policy matter, or something like that, doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. And so I think a lot of times these days, people take things so personally, or they make it personal, when it doesn’t have to be. And I think that’s the way we move forward is being civil, allowing for discourse, especially discourse from the other side. And we can find common ground.”

I sure hope so. But we all have to make it through the next act of the Donald Trump show first.

Read Rep. Steven Howe’s full column in the Salina Post.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

Everyday folks don’t want to think about it because it makes them uncomfortable and sad.

National news media types don’t want to think about it because they have stories to write throughout the next year.

The truth is, however, barring a bolt from the blue, next year’s U.S. presidential election will feature Democratic incumbent Joe Biden running against Republican Donald Trump. All of the drama and dread we came to expect in 2016 and 2020 will return, only tireder. The sooner we focus on the specifics of the likely race, Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson told me in this week’s Kansas Reflector podcast, the better off we’ll be.

“There’s a natural desire to want to have a political horse race, there’s a natural desire to want to have a contest, even where one doesn’t really exist,” said Wilson, a longtime GOP strategist and ad maker who spurned Trump all the way back in 2015. Founded by former Republican stalwarts, the Lincoln Project has devoted itself to opposing Trump and supporting democracy.

“We all know how this is going to turn out,” he continued. “We knew from the beginning there wasn’t gonna be a big Democratic primary. We knew from the beginning that Donald Trump had a dominant position inside the Republican Party at every single level that mattered. … It’s one thing to want something politically, but it’s another thing to acknowledge the realities of where we stand in the country. And the reality is, it’s going to be a Trump and Biden shootout.”

Since Wilson and I spoke last month, Trump has continued to trample on norms. He called for the execution of outgoing U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. He may have purchased a handgun illegally. He pushed for a government shutdown to “defund” the myriad criminal prosecutions against him.

Most Americans, most Kansans for that matter, likely don’t want to pay attention.

They want to move on and think about something else.

But that’s not going to happen. Trump has a pathological need for attention, and as long as he breathes and has a receptive audience, he will do anything to get it. Forget running for president in 2024. If he loses and stays healthy, he will run again in 2028. If he wins, he will push for a repeal of the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution so he can run for a third term. If the man could push through the horror of Jan. 6, 2021, when he instigated an armed insurrection against the government he led, he will push through any barriers in pursuit of power.

Meanwhile, Biden seems like a nice fellow who has done a credible job as president. The United States boasts low unemployment, workers have seen higher wages (although inflation has taken a toll) and NATO has been united in fending off an authoritarian aggressor. Those accomplishments haven’t translated into widespread support, though.

Wilson sees that as more or less baked into the current partisan environment.

“We live in a country now where where no president is likely to get above 50% ever again. That’s how divided we are as a nation,” he told me. “And I get it, I do I get it. The difficulty (Biden) faces is that there’s a massive media machine on the other side that every day declares that the world is burning. The economy is terrible. And has this sort of fantasy vision that doesn’t match up to the realities or the numbers.”

I’m flummoxed looking ahead to next year.

On one hand, Trump seems like more cartoon character than candidate at this point. His rallies have devolved into bizarre soliloquies of rage and vengeance. What kind of second term would he have, and who on earth would volunteer to work for him?

On the other, Biden seems to fade into view like a faint TV transmission from an earlier era, the kind of spotty broadcast where you miss every third word. He hails from a more genteel era of politics that has been almost entirely obliterated by angry ideologues. Even a lengthy list of accomplishments, it seems, can’t match the allure of angry talking heads.

Are we really going to do this?

If so, a wider perspective might help. Kansas proved last year how voters would turn out to support abortion rights. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs. Wade has transformed politics around the issue. Wilson told me engagement with the subject has scarcely waned.

“If you ask a random Democratic consultant, ‘Hey, what are the big issues?’ they would tell you, the economy, climate, guns, cat and dog other things, right?” he said. “None of those things break out of the lowest possible tier compared to Dobbs. Dobbs is the killer app. Dobbs is the thing that has that has a wildly disproportionate impact on voter behavior.

“As of right now, the other thing that has been underscored is that Americans now understand that our democracy is under threat. And between jobs and democracy … there’s a much different political climate in the country than anybody anticipated two years ago.”

Wilson and I talked about so much more during the podcast, including the current political environment and next year’s elections. He also gave his opinion on the “No Labels” group, which has been attempting to put a third-party presidential candidate on the ballot. Please listen.

For the next 13 months, you might want to buckle up.

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