After an upset by the Democratic candidate in a special House election in Pennsylvania last month and an unexpected rout by the Democratic candidate for Wisconsins Supreme Court last week, political forecasters are now turning their attention to Kansas 2nd Congressional District, where energy seems to be coalescing around former state lawmaker Paul Davis.
RealClearPolitics, a site that aggregates polls, has removed the 2nd District race from the leans Republican category and is now calling it a tossup. And the group Public Policy Polling shows the centrist-Democrat Davis with a slim lead over a generic Republican candidate.
And generic may actually be a loving description of the field, confess even some Republicans. The Kansas City Star cited an anonymous GOP consultant, who called the candidates running in the eastern Kansas district who include state Sen. Steve Fitzgerald of Leavenworth and state Sen. Caryn Tyson of Parker maybe the weakest field in a Republican seat that you will ever find.
The race has many Republicans biting their nails and warning of an incoming blue wave in the 2018 election.
WHATEVER WAVE Davis is riding, it set him down in Iola late Thursday morning.
Pulled together by Thrive Allen County CEO David Toland, the occasion of Daviss visit was a roundtable discussion consisting of a dozen community leaders drawn from all parts of Allen County civic life business, health care, agriculture, education, non-profit.
Daviss mission, he said, was to listen, and what he heard from this tiny vanguard of citizens were the braided accounts of how one rural Kansas community is plotting its survival in the face of harsh odds.
The endurance of any rural area, the group told Davis, depends on the strength of its personal, economic and institutional collaborations. It is one small town working with another small town, one business working with another business. It is the mental health center working with the school district. The grocery store working with local growers. In-town merchants working with far-flung farmers. The hospital working with law enforcement.
Nathan Fawson, the executive director of the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center, offered the closest thing to a thesis statement on the morning: One of the great blessings of rural life here in southeast Kansas is that, by nature of who we are and how we intermingle, we collaborate with one another. We recognize and experience the strain that is placed upon us in meeting the needs of our community and the limited resources that any one organization may have.
Yet, collectively, we pull our efforts together and we share and we support.
Still, it remains a challenge, Fawson said.
Allen County is currently in a fight against the sort of population bleed that is affecting rural communities nationwide. Toland drew the picture in stark relief by casting the groups attention back to the 1930 census.
In 1932, my grandmother graduated from Iola Junior College and left for KU, said Toland. The population of Iola at that time was 7,160. She moved to Lawrence…where the population at the time was 13,726.
The two Kansas towns were of comparable size and marked by a comparable economic vitality. But you look at whats happened in the last 80 years: Lawrence just crossed 100,000 people. In Iola, were down to 6,000.
IN ADDITION to the massive loss in population, the class complexion of Allen County has shifted radically in those intervening eight decades. USD 257 Superintendent of Schools Stacey Fager pointed to the hollowing out of the middle class that is ensuing nationwide, the effects of which he is seeing firsthand in the Iola school district. You see fewer and fewer of that middle section of students. You see some that are high-achieving and then you see a lot that have very targeted, specific needs. Very few in the middle.
And yet its a mistake to assume that the woes of todays students are exclusively academic, capable of being remedied by a simple scholastic fix; instead, theyre increasingly psychosocial and require the attention of a mental health expert.
To this end, school districts in Iola and Humboldt have been working in tandem with the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center. USD 257 is in talks to locate a full-time mental health expert in the schools by next year. USD 258-Humboldt is there already.
Two years ago, Humboldt Superintendent Kay Lewis worked with Fawson and his staff at SKMHC to secure a full-time, onsite therapist and case manager to assist the portion of the student population whose personal, psycho-emotional concerns were overwhelming their ability to learn.
I think theres a sense out there that mental health needs just dont exist among children, said Davis, whose wife is a psychologist. They just have no idea.
