Of Kansas’ four congressional districts, the First has long been the largest – now with 69 counties covering roughly the western two-thirds of the state. Given a new census, this vast rural district may get bigger. The state legislature will soon begin thinking about new maps.
The census happens every ten years. The population count for 2020 will, among other things, change the boundaries of districts represented in state legislatures and in the U.S. House of Representatives. As the numbers are dissected, shifting populations will excite visions of new boundaries. Next year, legislators will decide those boundaries, revising the allotment of legislative seats – and power – in Topeka and Washington.
The U.S. population divided by the number of U.S. House districts (435), comes to about 700,000 constituents for each, give or take a few thousand. In Kansas, a state representative should serve about 23,000 constituents, and a senator, 72,000.
As the American population increased over the last half century, more and more and rural residents moved to the cities. In Kansas, most rural counties lost more than a third of their population. Even with metropolitan growth, Kansas could not match the pace of other states. Kansas congressional districts went from six to four. The number of constituents represented by members of the U.S. House has doubled in less than 50 years.
Bob Dole, of Russell, was the last congressman to represent the 6th district which, in 1960, was north central and northwest Kansas – Hays to Goodland, with Salina and Concordia at the eastern edge.
Dick Nichols, of McPherson, elected in 1990, was the last congressman to represent the 5th district. After the 1990 census, the size of the Kansas delegation was cut to four, and the First district absorbed the Fifth.
The First district now runs east past Junction City, Manhattan and Emporia to the Shawnee County line, 350 miles from Colorado and 11 miles shy of Topeka.
With reapportionment looming, the Big First is likely to get bigger. Should it get less rural? That question ten years ago provoked a radical plan, a map that pictured the Big First with its usual western and central block, but with a northern tier that included all counties bordering Nebraska, then looping down through the state’s northeast corner to include Wyandotte County and Kansas City.
That map was ultimately junked. Its origin was unclear, and from the outset it drew harsh critics from both rural and urban interests. The rural (Republican) crowd wanted no link with the urban northeast. The urban sector (heavily Democratic, and moderate) did not want its power in the Third district diluted, consigned to an afterthought in farm country. The social critics snickered that urban Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., would blanch at mixing with a rural, predominantly white constituency that had few cultural or political ties with the Kansas City area.
The First District, however, is home to a mobile crowd. Many have been to the Wyandotte metro area, a destination featuring a NASCAR speedway, a monstrous sports store, furniture mart, restaurants, hotels, casino, athletic stadium, and entertainment venues. The metropolitans are aware that rural Kansas produces food and fiber and mines the oil and gas so important to its residents. Their interests are more mutual than not. To merge them politically may make sense this time, enhancing the combined interests of consumers and producers, a kind of cousinly co-mingling. We each have strengths of value to the other.
Such a merger would free Wyandotte from its forced Third district marriage to Johnson County, chief tapeworm of the central plains. Most Wyandotte-Johnson cultural ties are myth. Western Kansas, with its pockets of ethnic diversity and immigrant tradition, has much in common with the heritage of those who built Kansas City’s train yards, stock yards, packing houses, industrial parks and, of course, that magnificent medical center at 39th and Rainbow.
Johnson County, with its auto malls and office parks, its soccer fields and row crops of tract homes, is a swim pool ghetto leveraged to the hilt. It freely taps the sports, arts and entertainment centers of Missouri and Wyandotte neighbors while touting them as their own, giving little in return. The cultural and ethnic heritage of Wyandotte and Kansas City has far more in common with the immigrant history of the west than with the WASP nests of Overland Park, Leawood, Mission Hills.
A decade ago, reapportionment instead put Manhattan, Junction City and other parts of the old Second district into the First. Reapportionment has always involved trades among districts gaining and losing populations.
The Wyandotte question will rise again. A reapportionment trade-off may bring Shawnee County and Topeka into play. Given the ever shifting populations, a rural-urban marriage is inevitable.
