Almost every town in the deep red southwest Kansas voted for Trump in 2016, according to an analysis from The Upshot Wednesday, except for one: the oddball Liberal, Kansas, population 25,000. In 2016, Liberal voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 52-40.
The town, whose biggest employer is the National Beef Packing Company, is — along with the nearby Dodge City and Garden City — part of the “beef triangle” in southwest Kansas. It is also a rare beacon of diversity in a state that is nearly 87 percent white. Since the 1980s, an influx of Latinx immigrants has brought the Latinx community up from 20 percent to nearly 60 percent of the town’s total population.
Because of its racial and linguistic diversity, it has even developed its own accent. This June, Kansas State University researcher Mary Kohn found that young Liberal residents, even if they didn’t speak a word of Spanish, have integrated Spanish phonetics into how they speak: Liberal residents tend to use staccato syllables and less nasal-y vowel pronunciations, much more like Spanish than English. That’s not unlike how European immigration in the Midwest helped to create the beloved Minnesota accent a century ago.
According to The Atlantic, many immigrants have come in hopes of securing those meatpacking jobs, which, though difficult, tend to pay above minimum wage. (Apparently, the evidence of meatpacking is everywhere in the region. As soon as writer Deborah Fallows landed her plane on the nearby meatpacking town of Dodge City, “the breeze blew in the pungent and unmistakable odor of cattle from the feedlots.”)
Liberal’s name derives not from its voting habits but from its enigmatic founder: a homesteader named S.S. Rogers who arrived in the then-uninhabited region in 1872. The water in the area was scarce at the time, and many people sold water for high prices. But Rogers decided to offer his free. Travelers who were handed free water told him, “That’s mighty liberal of you.” So in 1885, when the U.S. established a post office in the region, the name Liberal stuck.
Voting is not the only way Liberal, Kansas stands out. Because no one can refute it, the town has claimed itself as the official home of Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz" (the film never specified a location besides Kansas), and it operates a museum, Dorothy’s House — complete with a backyard Yellow Brick Road — that Atlas Obscura described as “a trip over the rainbow into a land populated with dusty mannequins dressed in ill-fitting costumes.”
