PRAIRIE VILLAGE, KANSAS — One of the treasured vanities of my home state of Kansas is the idea that, although we are the nation’s laggards and late-comers in so many ways, there are other departments in which we are way ahead of everyone else, savoring the fast-food treats you will one day savor and debating the issues that you, too, will agonize over before too long. It’s an understandable fantasy for a people who are constantly reminded by the culture at large how lame and uncool they are, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t coming true, for once, in 2014. This week, Kansas may well be the one state that bucks all the national political trends.

Here you have several prominent conservatives, Republicans in one of the most Republican states in the country, running in a year that looks to be a Republican sweep nationwide, and these Kansas Republicans are either behind in the polls or barely keeping pace with their Democratic opponents.

The men in question are:

* Governor Sam Brownback, once a national leader of the GOP’s culture-war wing who came to Topeka in 2010 and immediately used deep tax cuts to blast an enormous hole in the state budget. The consequences, which I have described in this space before, are almost impossible to calculate—essentially, it’s austerity for the common folk so that the state’s ruling class can take home even more. In the face of the inevitable surge of public outrage, Brownback and his Super PAC friends are currently running TV commercials around the clock. The strategy seems to be to rescue the party’s most sanctimonious moral crusader by drowning his opponent in a triple wave of slime, trashing the Democrat for (a) wanting to raise taxes, (b) going to a strip club in the 1990s (and, the commercials imply, voting perversely to allow strip clubs to sprout next door to churches), and (c) fraternizing with a judge who changed the sentences of some notorious local murderers from death to life without parole.

* Senator Pat Roberts, a dutiful Republican soldier who got promoted when it was his turn to get promoted and who has spent decades in Congress but accomplished surprisingly little. (His one legislative achievement, the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996, was a disaster for family farmers.) It has been a comfortable arrangement, no doubt, but Roberts settled in just a little too cozily. Like many other Midwestern politicians before him, he seems to have decided he liked life in Washington better than in his home town, and by 2014 he was seen only rarely within the boring, rectilinear confines of the state he represents. His official residence, if you want to call it that, is a campaign donor’s house in Dodge City. Making jokes about this, as Roberts used to do, drew down on him the ire of the local tea party, and a right-wing challenger nearly beat him in the Republican primary in August. Now an independent candidate, Greg Orman, has assumed the anti-Washington mantle, and Pat Roberts’ carefree days in the U.S. Senate may at last be nearing their end.

While these fixtures of the Kansas political scene prepare to make their last stand, there has been, hovering like a comet or some other astronomical wonder, the spectacle of the Kansas City Royals, an ordinarily undistinguished baseball team that nevertheless beat all comers this year right up to Game Seven of the World Series—which they lost to the San Francisco Giants by one run. Every politician in the region has naturally sought to cloak themselves in the Royals’ glory, but what the team’s epic run actually portends for our political future remains obscure. Maybe it signifies that, with pluck and determination, the local Democrats can pull off a historic upset. Maybe it is the ninth inning of Game Seven for the Kansas GOP.

*

Of the various Kansas races, it is the Pat Roberts–Greg Orman Senate matchup that has captured the attention of poll-parsers and odds-makers from coast to coast, because it presents them with an alluring double uncertainty: Not only is the race itself too close to call, but if the independent Greg Orman wins, we don’t know which party he will line up with. In fact, we know remarkably little about Orman’s politics generally, because he didn’t come up by conventional partisan means; he moved sideways into public life after a successful career running a private equity firm. Over the years he has had dalliances with both R’s and D’s, and today he presents himself as an anti-politician, assailing (as he put it in a TV debate a few weeks ago) “partisans of both parties” who refuse to “roll up your sleeves [and] start solving problems.”

As races come down to the wire all over the country, it seems ever more possible that the fate of the Senate lies in the hands of this one unknown figure, who could conceivably deliver control of that august body to either side. The possibilities have beguiled the science-minded men of the consensus, who for weeks have speculated back and forth on this or that possible scenario, with the enigmatic Orman always hovering over the outcome.

Which makes what I saw last Wednesday particularly strange. Determined to find Greg Orman, this mystery man of American politics and learn what I could about him, I drove to his campaign office, in a strip mall on the outermost fringes of the Kansas City metro area. There was a single person present amid the signs and buttons and campaign detritus when I walked in, and she kindly informed me that the candidate was appearing that day at a farm near Lawrence, Kansas, where he would be announcing his agriculture policy.

That sounded good to me; I was on my way.

I eventually found the place: a picturesque homestead with a 19th-century house, a few gnarly cottonwoods, a perfect red barn, and a sweeping view across the Kaw River valley to the buildings of the University of Kansas in the distance. Two photographers and 20 or so ordinary citizens were milling about; then the candidate himself arrived. To my astonishment, every other person besides me and the photographers proceeded to arrange themselves in formation behind Orman, many of them holding Orman for Senate signs. Standing before this human backdrop, the candidate spoke about the problems facing rural Kansas to an audience consisting of, well, me.

Yes, reader, aside from the camera guys I was the only member of the news media who had bothered to come and hear the candidate’s plans for wind energy and broadband on the prairie. I am sorry to say that I found this situation so completely disconcerting that when Orman called for questions from the media, meaning, uh, me, I was positively tongue-tied. I thought of all those guys back in D.C. figuring the odds and parsing the polls and . . . I’m the only one here to listen to what he actually has to say? This didn’t make any sense.

Eventually, I am happy to report, my brain rebooted and Orman and I had a good conversation.

I asked him about the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute elite bankers. “Obviously, for there to be justice in this world, it has to be applied even-handedly,” he said. “So I think those sorts of things obviously can’t go on.”

I told him I admired his stance on the abortion issue, the way he was so forthrightly pro-choice in his debate with Pat Roberts. Not many politicians in Kansas, I said, are willing to take a stand like that anymore. “We’ve tried from the beginning to be authentic,” he replied. “We’ve tried to answer any question that a Kansas voter has of us.”

I asked him about what I believe is Farm Issue No. 1: monopoly—the domination of farming by a handful of agribusiness middlemen. “Farmers are obviously in the middle of a cost-price squeeze right now,” Orman replied. “Part of it’s because, on the other side of it, they have very few choices,” referring, presumably, to the extremely small number of buyers a farmer can sell to. I remarked on how easy it would be for the government to do something about this situation. His response: “It’s amazing what we would be able to do [in Washington] if we had people there representing Americans instead of representing special interests.”