> Bartels points out that Kansas has been among the most reliably
> Republican of states for 100 years. FDR barely carried it in '36, as
> I recall. So isn't what's the matter with Kansas an old story?
I think you have to take into account Kansas' precarious geographic position atop Oklahoma and the South. When one asks what is the matter with Kansas, I think one is asking how a state that was once firmly aligned ideologically with the liberal Northeast, including on matters such as abolition of slavery, is now firmly aligned ideologically with the reactionary Deep South. It is kind of an old story. But, basically, it's just a result of the rise to power of the reactionary South, whose politics and (covertly) racist ideology (and theology?) has spread throughout the entire midwest (and now finds itself in DC).
The South won, largely thanks to Nixon, but most of the rest of the county that has embraced its thinking (i.e., the midwest) doesn't yet realize from where there currently championed ideology is derived: Dixiecrats.
(Also, in 1936, the Republican candidate for president, Alfred Landon, was from Kansas.)