Kansas is a divid­ed state, at war between red and blue and pur­ple. Even set­ting aside the bat­tle between K‑State and KU, there’s a war between con­ser­v­a­tives, Democ­rats, and mod­er­ate vot­ers who used to think of them­selves as moderates.

While the New York Times can only find time to men­tion that 6 year-old Nebraskans love Dick Cheney, and could­n’t find time to men­tion that he was in Kansas not to “feel the love,” but to shore up a fal­ter­ing Con­gress­man in Red Amer­i­ca, oth­ers are see­ing a shift in pur­ple Kansas.

The Cook Polit­i­cal Report just moved the Kansas 2nd from “Sol­id Repub­li­can” to “Like­ly Repub­li­can,” expand­ing the field of com­pet­i­tive races, and rais­ing the odds of a split con­gres­sion­al del­e­ga­tion. And Peter Slevin writes a pro­file of Kansas Democ­rats that actu­al­ly dis­cuss­es the state of the races here. Kansas GOP lead­ers come off look­ing fair­ly buffoonish:

Ron Free­man, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Kansas GOP, called the migrat­ing can­di­dates — Parkin­son, Mor­ri­son and sev­en state House can­di­dates, includ­ing one par­ty-switch­ing incum­bent — “a sim­ple case of polit­i­cal opportunism.”

Catch that? Incum­bent office-hold­ers are switch­ing to the minor­i­ty par­ty because of oppor­tunism. Sure.

Fur­ther­more, Sur­veyUSA’s lat­est track­ing poll on pres­i­den­tial approval sug­gests that 6 year-olds may be just about the only peo­ple who still care for the VP. Only four states give the Pres­i­dent pos­i­tive approval, and even North Dako­ta tends not to like him.

Kansas has slipped down to the 19th most approv­ing state, with only 41% approval, 57% dis­ap­prov­ing. We’ve seen this num­ber bounc­ing around a lot since the sum­mer, with 15 point swings in net approval com­ing every month or so. 

Approval among Repub­li­cans has been vary­ing less and less, though it shift­ed 18 points this time (it jumped 24% last month). Demo­c­ra­t­ic dis­ap­proval has been steadi­ly enor­mous, and actu­al­ly eased off this month, with net approval tick­ing up 7%. Inde­pen­dent dis­ap­proval was steady around 34% net dis­ap­proval. It seems to be set­tling down to a lev­el sub­stan­tial­ly less sup­port­ive than it was when the fluc­tu­a­tions start­ed in the summer.

Con­ser­v­a­tive net approval dropped 24%. Mod­er­ate approval has been fair­ly steady, so the 9% drop in net approval is sig­nif­i­cant, and shifts in opin­ion among mod­er­ates is impor­tant for elec­tion outcomes. 

Approval in west­ern Kansas is lev­el­ing out at around 50–50, as is approval in Wichi­ta. East­ern Kansas returned to net 27% dis­ap­proval after a sin­gle month at 8%.

Over all, Kansas is get­ting pret­ty purple.