Election polling has the challengers close enough to make unseating Governor Sam Brownback and U.S. Senator Pat Roberts more than just a toss-up possibility, however, this column is not about “the horseraces.” There’s plenty of that available elsewhere.

We at Insight Kansas have posted the results of the numerous quality polls that have been done during the campaign for the general election Nov. 4 on our blog — insightkansas.wordpress.com).  Our rolling average meta-analysis is there as well.

Is Kansas ready to have a decisive referendum on the conservative agenda versus an agenda of moderate, pragmatic policies?  Will voters for state offices embrace candidates who want to adequately fund K-12 education; provide “austere but adequate” assistance to the poor, elderly, and disabled; keep higher education high quality; and maintain roads without abusing the wallets of working Kansans and their employers? For the U.S. Senate and House will voters reject “fighters” and back “doers” instead?

At the end of the 2014 campaign, the state has economically rebounded from what it was during the recession when Kansas’s economy slowed dramatically and the housing market declined but did not collapse and create a banking mess; unemployment pushed up to unacceptably high levels; public revenues declined as a result; and the aviation flu Wichita had been suffering turned into full-blown pneumonia.

The election of America’s first African-American president and the subsequent drafting of Governor Sebelius to his cabinet provoked a snarling nativist reaction among a broad swath of Kansans that subsequently rang in Tea Party politics and the deeply conservative Republican partisanship that elected Brownback/Colyer, Kobach, Yoder, Pompeo, Jenkins, and the inimitable Huelskamp to our highest offices.  Moderate Republicans and about 17 Democrats were driven from the legislature.

The 2014 election is a sort of an accounting, offering the people of the state the opportunity to validate or reject the tumultuous changes of the past four years.  All but one of the incumbents, to their credit, has completely owned their participation in the political changes that have occurred.  Even Senator Roberts, who doesn’t make this list of forthright incumbents, has campaigned fully embracing this aggressively conservative path.  The opponents have drawn clear positions rebutting the incumbents.  The campaigns’ “optics” may be ugly, but the issues and positions are clear.

Soon after the polls close, we’ll know about turnout.  The pre-election evidence suggests a pretty modest level of likely voter participation.  October, 2014 statewide voter registration totaled 1,743,790 voters, 13,500 more than in October, 2010, but almost 30,000 less than in 2012, and 6,000 less than in 2008!  Not exactly a tidal wave of new voters seeking their chance to express an opinion on the “experiment” of the last 4 years.

There have been organized, bi-partisan mobilization efforts by the Reroute the Roadmap organization, the KNEA, and Women for Kansas on the anti-incumbent side.  Notable moderate Republicans have organized and endorsed the challengers. Editorialists and pundits have critiqued the data associated with slashed tax revenues, slow growth, reduced spending on classroom education, the regressivity of current tax policy, and in surprising numbers in surprising places endorsed the challengers over the incumbents.  Yet at the close of the campaign, voter excitement and motivation seems to mirror past “off-year” elections – not intense.

H.L. Mencken, the American curmudgeon wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”  Let us all hope that, whether it turns out to be “good and hard” or just good, a substantial majority of registered voters show up and make their choices rather than letting the choices of the few make the decision for the many.

Dr. Mark Peterson teaches political science at the college level in Topeka.