It’s been 17 years since Thomas Frank’s book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” proved a political sensation. Frank, a Kansan by birth, argued that Kansans harbored a puzzling propensity for voting against their own economic interests. His jeremiad was penned before a grassroots Republican revolt against Gov. Sam Brownback’s embrace of draconian tax cuts which he claimed would jump-start the Kansas economy. Brownback’s so-called “Kansas experiment” ended in fiscal disaster. By 2016 Republican voters replaced its Tea Party zealots in the legislature with pragmatists who promptly rolled back all the 2012 tax cuts. Two-third majorities in both chambers overrode the governor’s veto.

Then Democrat Laura Kelly was elected governor defeating Kris Kobach, an anti-immigrant nutcase, who promised to restore the Brownback tax cuts. Kansans had had enough of closed schools, deteriorating roads and reduced public services. Consequently, I wasn’t all that shocked when they signaled their Republican legislators that they shared no interest in repealing their constitutionally guaranteed access to abortions. Perhaps there hasn’t been that much the matter with Kansas after all. Arizona, on the other hand, is competing for the nation’s political-dysfunction championship. Republicans there just nominated a candidate for Secretary of State who claims it is impossible for any Democrat to be fairly elected. He is promising to tamper with Arizona’s election procedures to assure none will ever win another election.

Politicians usually succeed by monitoring the pulse of public opinion. So, how could legislators in Topeka get abortion so wrong? Did they simply believe they could stack the political deck during a low-turnout election — relying on mid-term primaries as the vehicle for minority rule? Or was there another dynamic at work? A fifty-year Republican friend, who lives in Washington, provided me with an insight on what is happening to incumbent Republicans:

“A critical mass,” he observes, “is so frozen in fear of being primaried or attacked from the Trump/MAGA wing of the party, they’ve lost all sight of holding or securing enough swing voters to win in November.”

MAGA fictions are generating a centripetal force sucking in Republicans, much like a black hole, from which there is apparently no escape.

Even in Colorado, Republican candidates seem to have been transported into an alternate universe or some weird, parallel reality. Tina Peters was able to raise a quarter-million dollars in less than two weeks for a recount in the primary election where she placed third. Her donors must know there is little to no chance of reversing the results. Presumably, they see value in simply undermining public confidence in elections. Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl has embraced this “rigged election” construct without offering a scintilla of evidence to support it. All this lunacy presumes that rank-and-file Republican voters will remain in line for whatever fantasies are being served up. Kansan voters have punched a hole in that theory.

It’s been barely a hundred years since women’s suffrage was approved as an amendment to the federal Constitution, delivering electoral standing to American women. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade sends the very clear message that their equality remains conditional. There is considerable truth in the quip that, “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament rather than a crime.” As medicine and the science supporting it have progressed, public attitudes have changed. Abortion is a moral issue for little more than a quarter of American voters. It’s a civil rights and health-care issue for the remainder. Parents of girls are unwilling to deny this option to their daughters — even, it is evident, for a significant portion of Republican parents. The demand that government interpose itself in the exercise of this choice may prove sufficient reason for jerking proponents from their seats.

It will require a bloodbath at the polls this November to shatter the MAGA trance paralyzing so many Republican candidates. Ironically, it is the carefully executed rigging of the Supreme Court with conservative justices that has become a self-set trap for Republicans. The Court’s decision to consider the “Independent State Legislature” doctrine proposed by North Carolina next year, in Moore v. Harper, could generate an even more virulent voter backlash than the reversal of Roe v. Wade. If the Court majority declares state legislatures free to overturn ballot-box choices and transfer certification of Presidential electors to gerrymandered partisan majorities, violence will be nearly certain. Citizen-led redistricting commissions for congressional seats are also at risk of repeal.

I recently heard of “accelerationism,” which has been embraced on the right. The term insinuates that forcing ever more extreme political proposals and policy interventions should hasten the advent of an authoritarian utopia. Fortunately, it is unlikely that accelerationists will prevail in either Colorado or Kansas. Nonetheless, Thomas Frank will find ample material for a sequel wherever they do.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.