But just like America, and just like Kansas, the roomful of Sykes’ constituents were divided.
“You flipped — I’m disenfranchised,” said Kent Crippin, 82. “And I’ve been a Republican all my life.”
Sykes is one of four state lawmakers in Kansas who switched allegiances last month, walking away from the Republican Party that has controlled this state’s politics for years. The defections will not affect control of the Legislature — Republicans have plenty of votes to spare in Topeka — but they reveal a larger problem for the party as 2020 approaches, and one that reaches well beyond Kansas.
Across the country, Democrats made inroads in 2018 in suburban areas where they had long struggled.
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All the while, a long-standing split between conservative and moderate Republicans in Kansas has grown increasingly contentious.
“Conservatives, or the further-right faction of the Republican Party, have continued and continued and continued to try to force those of us of the moderate mind out of the party,” said state Sen. Barbara Bollier, a retired anesthesiologist from Mission Hills who was the first of the four Johnson County legislators to announce she was becoming a Democrat.
Some conservatives sounded untroubled by the exodus of moderate lawmakers, who had frequently voted with Democrats in the Legislature even before changing parties. Some conservatives even saw the switches as an opportunity, freeing the Republican Party to run more conservative candidates.
“I don’t think that the entire suburbs are all of a sudden blue,” said Liz Benditt, a leader of Education First Shawnee Mission, a group of mothers formed that endorsed a mixed list of Democrats and moderate Republicans in legislative races last year. “I just think there’s more openness to talking about things we disagree about and finding common ground.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.