Well, after 15 proud years of voting as a non-affiliated Independent, I have now become a Republican. Sort of.

To be honest, I didn’t wake up yesterday expecting to become a Republican. In fact, due to years of overseas living, I hadn’t even cast a non-absentee ballot in my home precinct (Kansas) since Clinton and Dole were squaring off for president in 1996. This all changed when I found myself in Wichita this week and my mother, Alice, informed me that she was running for Republican precinct committee-woman and would appreciate my vote. So, in the name of family pride, I signed off as a Republican and gave her my vote.

My decision goes further than nepotism, though. In Kansas the Republican party is so dominant that most elections are functionally decided in the Republican primary — and it’s usually a square-off between moderates and radical religious-right types. After a dismal turnout in 1998 local elections resulted in an embarrassingly ultra-conservative state school board (recall their pinheaded 1999 ruling on teaching evolution), life-long Republicans like my mom decided to take a more active role in promoting a sane, moderate party platform. And, while Kansas has gotten a bum rap for its Republican proclivities (note Thomas Frank’s recent What’s the Matter with Kansas? — an interesting book in its own right), the state has a fine tradition of turning out progressive Republicans from William Allen White to former senator Nancy Kassebaum (who endorsed my mom) to former governor Bill Graves.

This said, however, I doubt I’ll remain a Republican long. And, despite the fact that my dad’s side of the family have all been Kansas Democrats (my great-grandfather, D.O. Potts, unsuccessfully ran for governor in the ’20’s), I’ll probably just go back to being an Independent.