Kansas politics bleeds two shades of red

ByABC News
October 20, 2008, 6:29 AM

TOPEKA -- Laura Ostrowski was "not particularly excited" about John McCain.

Rocking her infant son, Matthias, in a sling at the Kansans for Life office here, Ostrowski says she didn't like McCain's support for research on human embryonic stem cells, which she sees as abortion. She saw the Republican as the lesser of two evils.

Then Sarah Palin came along.

"She's somebody a lot of women can identify with. She's a mom. She works. She's conservative," Ostrowski, 23, says of the Alaska governor. "It made me feel I was voting for him rather than against Obama."

Kansas politics may match the color of Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz, but Republicans in her home state come in two shades of red that often clash. At one end of the spectrum are social conservatives who protest at abortion clinics and push to teach creationism in school. At the other are pro-business moderates who have crossed over to vote for centrist Democrats such as Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

"McCain has really bridged that divide," says Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. "The country club set really like McCain, and values voters really like Palin."

Until the Arizona senator chose Palin as his running mate, the Republican rift briefly raised the possibility that Barack Obama could become the first Democrat to carry Kansas since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Enthusiasm ran highest in January, when Obama, whose mother grew up in Kansas, visited his grandfather's hometown of El Dorado.

The connection helped Obama defeat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the caucuses. It also energized Democrats, who have registered twice as many new voters as Republicans have this year. Voter registration ends today. As of Sept. 1, the GOP had 751,125 voters on its rolls, well ahead of the Democrats' 451,577.

"For the general election," Kansas State University political scientist Joseph Aistrup says, "the question is not whether McCain wins, but by how much."