In two weeks, Kansas and Missouri will have their state and federal primaries. (There are also primaries in Arizona, Michigan, and Washington.) While on the Missouri side of the state line, the biggest race is actually a ballot issue (Medicare expansion which is expected to pass), Kansas has some major races on the Republican primary ballot.
The big one is the U.S. Senate race. The incumbent Senator — Pat Roberts — is a conservative Republican. However, that is not enough to guarantee a win in the Republican primary, and Senator Roberts had a tough race in 2014 (only getting 48% of the primary vote for an 8% margin). Senator Roberts has decided that forty years in Congress (sixteen in the House and twenty-four in the Senate) is enough and it’s time to enjoy retirement. And eleven Republicans decided that their names would sound so much better with Senator in front of it.
At this point in the race, it appears that there are three major contenders. The establishment choice is very conservative Representative Roger Marshall. Marshall represents the first district of Kansas which covers western and north central Kansas. Meanwhile, the Tea Party candidate is Spawn of Satan Kris Kobach. Folks may remember former Secretary of State Kobach as the Republican who lost the governor’s seat in 2018 or as the author of much of the anti-immigrant legislation passed over the past decade. Finally, there is Bob (Hamilton) the plumber. Hamilton runs a highly successful plumbing company in the Kansas City area and is trying to paint himself as a Trump clone.
All three of these candidates have opted to run as Trump loyalists. And with no political difference to speak of in their pledges, the race has gotten rather ugly. Representative Marshall has a back story that was a big deal when he first ran for Congress in 2016, but is not necessarily well-known in the other three-quarters of the state. He was involved in a traffic accident. A partner in one of his businesses had a son in the local district attorney’s office who managed to fix the traffic ticket and get the case sealed. Also, having been in D.C. for the past four years, he has had to try to balance the reality of governing against Trump’s hollow pledges. Needless to say, as with most other Republicans, he has some statements that can be twisted into waffling on the Trump agenda (only because the Orange Menace has both a short-term memory problem where today’s pledge is forgotten tomorrow and a detail problem where no pledge actually contains the nasty details of how to get it done).
SOS Kobach has a racism problem. Not shockingly, given that his agenda was always racist, some of his big supporters have ties to white nationalist groups. And some of those ties are now being raised as a major issue in the campaign.
Bob the plumber’s problem (and strength) is that he has no history in politics. Like many business people (including Trump himself), he has given to likely winners on both sides of the aisle. And he has no history of actually working on any major issue. Of course, that allows him to parrot the most nonsensical things that Trump says on tweets, but — if you want a person who can be a leader in the Senate on day one — Bob Hamilton would not be your choice.
Besides the candidates themselves running these ads, you have outside PACs interfering. One PAC which appears to be tied to the Republican establishment is running attack ads against Kobach, alleging that it was secrets that came out during the general election campaign that cost him the election. (The truth is that Kobach is so far to the right that he almost falls off the edge of the political math. While Kansas may be conservative, there are just enough moderately conservative Republicans left that you can’t run that far to the right and win.) One PAC (apparently supporting Hamilton) is running adds attacking Marshall as not being a true conservative and just another Washington politician. And you have an apparently Democratic PAC touting Kobach as the true conservative and alleging that you can’t trust Marshall to support Trump.
The likely Democratic candidate is (former Republican) State Senator Barbara Bollier. In another state, she would probably not be the Democratic candidate, But in Kansas, a moderate candidate who can claim that the Republican Party left her is the type of Democrat who has a chance at winning the general election.
You also have two interesting congressional primaries on the Republican side. The primaries involve the second and third districts which comprise the northeast corner (and the population center) of the state. In Kansas, Republicans have a tough decision in drawing lines. You can either guarantee one Republican district and leave the other a toss-up or you can try to slant both districts in favor of the Republicans, but weak Republican candidates and strong Democratic candidates can result in you losing both. In 2018, the Republicans barely held the second district and lost the third district.
The Democrat in the third district (Sharice Davids) is probably just a little bit too liberal for the district, but the Republican contenders for the district are trying to out-conservative and out-Trump each other and have run ads questioning the Trump bona fides of the other candidates.
Even with the swing to the Democrats, a decent Republican candidate would have won the second district by a comfortable margin. Instead, the questionable honesty of Representative Steve Watkins led to a very close race (margin less than one percent). Since then voter fraud charges (putting false information on his registration) have been filed against Watkins, and a former and current state official have filed to run against him in the primary (in a district that includes the state capitol). The existence of a three-way race may allow Watkins to eke out a win (like the multi-candidate race might allow Kobach to win the Senate race). If Watkins does survive, he will likely face the mayor of Topeka (the state capitol) who could very will be the next representative from this district (and the first Democrat to carry this district since 2006).
In short, in what is a very red state, we are seeing Republicans forming a circular firing squad. And depending upon what happens on August 4, national Republicans may be spending money defending Republican seats in Kansas that they had hoped to have available for races in more traditional swing states.
