Kansas has voted Republican for president in every election since 1968, and 2024 held form — Donald Trump carried it by 16.1 points, a touch wider than his 14.7 in 2020. The number at the top hides a state pulling two ways. Of 105 counties, five went Democratic, and one casts better than a quarter of all Kansas ballots: Johnson County, the Kansas City suburbs. It backed the Republican for president by 17.4 points in 2012, then crossed to the Democrat by 8.3 in 2020 and 8.5 in 2024 — a flip held across two cycles in the place that sets the state’s ceiling.
The cities tell the rest. Douglas County, around Lawrence and the University of Kansas, gave the Democrat 38.0 points, the widest margin of any Kansas county; Wyandotte County, which holds Kansas City, Kansas, ran 23.9; Riley, around Kansas State, and Shawnee, around Topeka, each finished a point or so Democratic. Sedgwick County, which holds Wichita and casts about one in six Kansas votes, stayed Republican by 13.8 — the swing point of the state’s urban map. Everything outside the cities held Republican, and the further west, the wider: Wallace County, on the Colorado line, voted Republican by 84.8 points, the widest margin in the state.
Underneath the politics, Kansas runs near the national middle. Median household income was $74,275 in the 2024 ACS, 34th of the fifty states and below the U.S. $80,734; 35.6 percent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree, 21st. Hispanic or Latino residents make up 13.6 percent of the population, most of Mexican origin, concentrated in the meatpacking towns of the southwest. The state is religiously mixed — 17 percent Evangelical Protestant, 14 percent Catholic — with 54 percent claiming no denomination. In 2026 Kansas chooses a new governor, with Laura Kelly term-limited: a crowded Republican field meets an August 4 primary, and Senator Roger Marshall seeks a second term the same cycle.