So Why Exactly Did Johnson County Turn Blue?

In the fall of 2020, a Montreal TV crew came to Kansas to assess the “blue wave” that was reportedly about to submerge the state. Although I live and work in Missouri—and have since I moved here late in the late 19th century (or so it seems)—I was among the people they chose to interview.

I suspect the Canadians got my name out of Thomas Frank’s unlikely 2005 bestseller, What’s the Matter with Kansas. Much to my surprise, given where I live and work, Frank devoted five pages to me and the harm I had reportedly wrought on Kansas. In Canada, apparently, my reputation lingered. 

As I explained to the mystified Canadians, they were no more likely to find a blue wave in Kansas than Mr. Rick was to find water in Casablanca. Trump, I told them, would win Kansas by 15 points, which he did, and Roger Marshall would win the open Senate seat by a comparable margin, which he very nearly did. Like Rick, the Canadians were “misinformed.”

If there was no wave washing over Kansas, there was, however, a ripple trickling through Johnson County. As the results of the 2024 election confirm, staid old Republican Johnson County has turned blue. I don’t mean “blue” as in mildly depressed, although there is a bit of that going around. Indeed, one Johnson County friend began her holiday letter thusly, “Well, damn. I really thought the Holiday Letter in 2016 would be the darkest we would ever have to send, but….” 

No, I mean “blue” as in Democrat.

Of the 3,000-plus counties in the United States, only 11 shifted more dramatically leftward from 2012 to 2024 than Johnson County, and only one of those was in the Midwest. The 26-point shift during that period moved the county from reliably red to certifiably blue.

In 2024, a year that saw 89 percent of America’s counties shift to the right, Johnson County bucked the trend. Kamala Harris outperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers, winning the county by 8.5 percent, an anomalous performance in a state that gave Trump a 16-point margin of victory, a slightly higher percentage than he secured in 2020.

At the local level, Democrat Congresswoman Sharice Davids carried Johnson County easily. The county elected a Democrat sheriff for the first time in nearly a century. And Democrats solidified their hold on the County Commission.

As to why the county has shifted to the blue, almost no two political activists give the same answer. For a while, the conventional wisdom pointed to a growth in the county’s Hispanic population, but nationally, Hispanics have been moving to the right. Locally, the results out of heavily Hispanic Wyandotte County—where the Trump vote increased by 7.5 points from 2020 to 2024—suggest the same.

On a closer look, although no one factor can explain the shift, the movement seems less shocking than inevitable. In the post-war years, Johnson County owed its rapid growth to the in-migration of two-parent families, the GOP’s most natural constituency. 

As late as 2004, the GOP presidential candidate, George W. Bush, was winning the county by 23-plus points. The party grew fat but not happy. A new generation of conservatives bucked up against the county GOP’s old guard. 

According to Dwight Sutherland, one-time committeeman for the Kansas Republican Party, “the party establishment was more concerned with patronage than ideology and did not react well to a challenge to their gravy train. Their response was to throw their support to the Democrats whenever they lost a primary.”

As long as the county remained a bedroom community, the GOP could afford a little intramural sparring. The influx of younger, single adults, however, has eroded the Republicans’ demographic hegemony. Sensing opportunity, the Democrats widened the GOP wedge with what deposed Johnson County Commissioner Charlotte O’Hara describes as “an avalanche of money.” 

In 2024, Commission Chairman Mike Kelly shoveled some moolah onto that avalanche by forming a well-funded political action committee. Called “Amberwave,” Kelly’s PAC courted those citizens more concerned with “expanding sustainability” and “combating extremism” than, say, with fighting high taxes and checking corrosive inflation.

Just as the nation has been evolving into “two Americas,” this dynamic slice of Kansas has been evolving into “two Johnson Counties.” Michael Ignatieff, writing in Prospect, Britain’s leading current affairs publication, describes the citizens of the one America as “younger, city-dwelling, higher income, college-educated men and women, living either on the West or East Coasts.”

Johnson County has its own East Coast. The county’s 12 blue seats in the Kansas House form a contiguous mass that hugs the county’s eastern border, the State Line. Herein live the people that, according to Ignatieff, “have feasted on the tech and AI boom, profited from the stock market rise and leveraged the credentials they earned in American universities to gain power.”

The larger, amorphous red mass to the west is—again, according to the liberal Ignatieff—“the America that worries that its great days are past, that distrusts the elites on both coasts and fears that America’s institutions are irrevocably corrupted.”

In the political petri dish of Johnson County, the historic stereotypes have fully flipped. The Democrats have emerged as the party of the educated and affluent and the Republicans as the party, says Ignatieff, of “older, non-college-educated white men living in small towns and rural areas in the south and the Midwest.”

This flip comes at a cost to the county GOP. According to Sutherland, many wealthier conservatives prefer not to associate with what they see as “working-class rubes and rednecks.” Forget “fashionable.” In the tonier parts of the county, being a Republican is no longer even respectable.

The west is a different story. In 2024, the rubes sharpened their pitchforks and drove two Democrats out of House seats. 

Truth be told, this modern-day Johnson County War is just heating up.