PARK CITY, Kan. — There is, at last, good news out of the Kansas Senate race: the Cook Political Report has officially declared the contest a toss-up, which is the highest honor a state this loyal can receive.

For nine decades, Kansas has handed both of its Senate seats to Republicans. The last time a Democrat won one, a Democrat had not won one in 94 years — that is a statistic written about a single year, 1932, which Kansans will tell you the state has never fully forgiven. The state has shut out one party in Senate races longer than any other state, a streak NBC notes is now under national spotlight. And this week, with 15 days to go and the race rated a dead heat, the president of the United States came to the building.

He spoke Monday at the Heartland Credit Union Arena in Park City, a suburb of Wichita, where Breitbart reported the crowd “blew the roof off” and every seat filled, with thousands lined outside. The incumbent, Sen. Roger Marshall, told the crowd that his race is simple, a word that has not been heard in a Kansas Senate contest since the telephone. His opponent, Adam Hamilton, has achieved the remarkable political feat of becoming competitive in a state that has not been competitive since the Kansas-Nebraska Act, an 1854 law about which the state remains furious. Mr. Hamilton has said he will serve only two terms, an admission of tourist status that no Kansas Republican has ever had to make.

The loyalists arrived early. Tootie Dorsey of Wichita told Kansas Public Radio she came to the arena at 6 a.m. for her first Trump rally, and when asked about the rest of the Republican ticket she said: “As long as they’re under the Republican tent, I’m all in.” That is the sound of a toss-up. It is the sound of a state being asked, for the first time in a century, to explain itself — and answering the way Kansas always answers, by getting there first.

"A toss-up in Kansas is a compliment from the East Coast. We have been called flyover, flyspeck, the middle of the map. Now we are a toss-up. I am going to get that framed." — Walt Kessler, Wichita precinct chair, who describes the national attention as "what the state deserves and what the state gets on cable"

Kansas should be flattered, and by all accounts it is. A toss-up rating means a race is genuinely competitive: money must be spent, and a president must fly in and talk for 82 minutes. For a century the state’s Senate races were so safe that campaigns ran on the pollen count. Now the state has the attention of every consultant in Washington, and the consultants have brought their money, which in Kansas is received the way a hailstorm is received: as evidence that the sky has finally noticed.

KANSAS SENATE LOYALTY: THE RECORD

  • Last Democratic Senate victory: 1932, a year the state has never fully forgiven
  • Current Cook rating: Toss Up, a term coined, Kansans believe, by people who have never seen a wheat field at harvest
  • Presidential campaign support as of Monday: one sitting president, in the building, on a Monday night
  • Early voting: opened Oct. 19, under a sky that has never once been a toss-up

The rally ran 82 minutes. Early voting opened the next morning at 7 a.m. The Cook Political Report uses a scale of eleven ratings; after 94 years in the safest one, Kansas has been promoted, and is now rated the same way as a coin.