This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on April 10, 2017
Wichita is 1,250 miles from Washington, D.C., but you can bet quite a few people inside the Beltway will be checking election returns from there Tuesday night. Normally, few outside of Kansas would care much about the results of a special election to fill a staunchly Republican House seat like Kansas’s 4th District, a vacancy caused by Mike Pompeo’s departure to become CIA director. After all, how competitive could a district be that voted for Donald Trump by a 27-point margin (60 to 33 percent for Hillary Clinton) and four years earlier for Mitt Romney by 26 points (62 to 36 percent for President Obama)? Old-timers will remember this district as the one once held by Democrat Dan Glickman, who won in 1976 as Jimmy Carter defeated President Ford and lost in the Republican tidal-wave election of 1994 to Todd Tiahrt. Tiahrt then served eight terms before giving the seat up to run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate—losing to fellow GOP Rep. Jerry Moran in the Republican primary—and
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