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Why Republicans Fear Kobach Will Lose Kansas

Why Republicans Fear Kobach Will Lose Kansas

Former Kansas Secretary of State officially announced on Monday that he will be seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat presently held by Republican Pat Roberts, who is retiring. If Kobach receives the nomination and defeats a Democratic nominee in 2020, he would hardly be the first Republican to win that seat — Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1930. In other words, Kansas is a very red state. And yet, some GOP strategists are imploring Kobach not to run and fear that if he does receive his party’s nomination, he could become the first Republican to lose a U.S. Senate race in Kansas in 90 years.

Kobach isn’t just any Republican: he is extreme even by modern-day GOP standards. And he comes with a lot of baggage. Here are some of the reasons why various Republican strategists would love to see Kobach drop out of the race.

1. Kobach lost Kansas’ gubernatorial race to a Democrat in 2018

Texas is often described as a red state, but compared to Kansas, Texas is light red rather than deep red. In 2018, according to U.S. News and World Report, voter registration in Kansas was a paltry 24 percent Democratic — whereas Pew Research found that among Texans, the political makeup was 39 percent “Republican/lean Republican,” 40 percent “Democrat/lean Democrat” and 21 percent “no lean.” Democrats have more reason to feel depressed in Kansas than they do in Texas. And yet, in 2018, the unthinkable happened in Kansas: a centrist Democrat, Laura Kelly, won the gubernatorial race, defeating Kobach by 5 percent.

Granted, 5 percent isn’t a landslide, but this is Kansas we’re talking about — not California, Massachusetts or even a swing state like Florida or Pennsylvania. In 2016, President Donald Trump won Kansas by 21 percent. And GOP strategists fear that if Kobach could lose one statewide race in Kansas, he could lose another.

Joanna Rodriquez, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, complained to The Hill, “Just last year, Kris Kobach ran and lost to a Democrat. Now, he wants to do the same and simultaneously put President Trump’s presidency and Senate Majority at risk.”

2. Kobach lost a House race to a Democrat in 2004

The 2018 election wasn’t the only time Kobach lost to a Democrat. In 2004, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District and was defeated by former Rep. Dennis Moore by 11 percent in a district that is 82 percent white. Kobach has held some major positions (chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, Kansas secretary of state), but GOP strategists believe that he has suffered too many losses to Democrats in a state where Republicans have a huge advantage.

A GOP strategist who spoke to The Hill on condition of anonymity fears that if Kobach stays in the Senate race and Democrats win enough Senate races in red states, they might regain control of the Senate in 2020. “You can see a real scenario where President Trump is reelected and the U.S. Senate falls to the Democrats if Kobach puts Kansas in play,” that strategist warned.

3. Kobach is an unapologetic birther

When Barack Obama was president, Kobach enthusiastically promoted the racist and idiotic birther conspiracy theory — which claimed that Obama wasn’t really a U.S. citizen and was born in Kenya. Obama’s birth certificate proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Yet even when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was holding Obama’s birth certificate right up to the camera in order to show how ridiculous birthers were, Kobach persisted in his birtherism.

4. Kobach falsely accused the Human Rights Campaign of promoting ‘pedophilia’

Kobach, a far-right Christian fundamentalist, is notoriously anti-gay. When he ran against Moore in 2004, he accused his Democratic opponent of associating with a group that promoted “homosexual pedophilia.” That group was the Human Rights Campaign, a mainstream gay rights organization that has never condoned or promoted pedophilia in any way. But in his effort to smear Moore, Kobach reflexively associated a gay rights group with pedophilia.

5. Kobach has worked for the racist Federation for American Immigration Reform

Kobach has not only been an avid proponent of voter suppression; he has also been deeply anti-immigrant and worked for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal division of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group. The Federation, founded by eugenics proponent John Tanton in 1979, has a long history of calling for a moratorium on immigration and claiming that Latinos don’t fully assimilate into U.S. culture.

Endorse This: Senator’s Musical Phone Call

Endorse This: Senator’s Musical Phone Call

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Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) inadvertently showed off his lighter side Thursday — courtesy of his cellphone ringing out in the middle of a committee hearing.

Click above to watch this usually stone-faced lawmaker really let it go — if only for a moment. Then share this video!

Video viaThe Hill.

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Kansas Republican Voices An Incumbent’s Lament

Kansas Republican Voices An Incumbent’s Lament

By Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington Bureau

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — On the eve of an election that could end his 33-year career in Congress, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts stood Monday in a tight Republican Party office, the head shots of GOP heroes staring at him, and offered up what could only be called an incumbent’s lament.

On the campaign trail, senators are punching bags. Voters have lost faith in their government. His opponent doesn’t even understand the institution he wants to join. In short: It’s rough out here.

“It’s been a tough year for any incumbent,” Roberts said, looking up at walls filled with portraits of George H.W. Bush, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bob Dole.

That the Kansas conservative was the one delivering the monologue was a bit of a twist. This year, it’s largely Democratic incumbents bracing for a bruising election day on Tuesday — thanks to a tough lineup of red state races, President Barack Obama’s deflated approval rating and months of unsettling news from home and abroad.

But perhaps because of his anomaly status Roberts feels the pressure all the more. Deep in a ruby red state, with conservative credentials and decades of service, even Roberts is on the ropes. Even he was having to explain his role in a divided government. Even he has had to distance himself from Obama’s agenda, he said.

“I think the president, quite frankly, has moved so far left and has made people so frustrated and upset that if you’ve even been within the city limits of Washington — the federal limits of Washington — you’ve got a real challenge on your hands to explain to people that you’ve been opposed to the Obama agenda all along,” Roberts said. “People are so frustrated and angry that they’ve lost faith in their government.”

Roberts’ trouble comes from more than just proximity to the city limits of Washington. It has also been a result of how infrequently he’s been in the city limits of his hometown of Dodge City. The senator has taken heat for allegedly taking up residence in northern Virginia and spending too little time in his home state. He didn’t help his cause when, to defend himself, he explained: “Every time I get an opponent — I mean, a chance — I come home to Kansas.”

Roberts has had other trouble — including a tea party-aligned primary challenge and a Democrat who withdrew at last minute, leaving him in a one-on-one faceoff with wealthy businessman and independent Greg Orman.

Orman has played coy about his partisan sympathies and has not said whom he would support for Senate majority leader. He suggested his allegiances may change from issue to issue, a notion that really riled Roberts, a dedicated party loyalist, on Monday.

It’s “Jim Jeffords on steroids,” he said, referencing the Vermont Republican-turned-independent whose party switching gave Democrats control of the Senate.

“This whole thing that he would be an independent and he would just go look for good ideas, or people who had good ideas. And maybe he’d get with them and they could fix things,” Roberts said. “That just is not how the Senate works. It may well be how a lot of people think it should work but that’s not the case.”

Roberts took umbrage at other notions coming from his opponent’s campaign. Orman had dismissed a group of touring Republicans stumping for Roberts this weekend as “a Washington establishment clown car.” Former Sen. Bob Dole was among them. “You don’t call Bob Dole a clown,” Roberts declared. The Orman campaign says the candidate wrote an email to Dole explaining he did not intend to call Dole a clown.

Orman once invested in a shrimp farm in the Nevada desert, Orman noted, adding that such an enterprise was not a “mainstream” Kansas business.

In the end, the senator says he believes Kansas voters were coming around to his view of the race. They were becoming more skeptical of Orman, he suggested, and coming home to the familiar.

As he looked out at volunteers crowded into the small office, he whittled his pitch down to just a few words.

“You know me,” he said. “You know Pat Roberts.”

Photo via Wikimedia

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Moderate Thunder Out Of Kansas

Moderate Thunder Out Of Kansas

IOLA, KS. — The several dozen citizens gathered at a street corner just off the main square of this southeastern Kansas town of 5,600 were polite and friendly in the Midwestern way. They did not look in the least like a band of counterrevolutionaries intent on reversing the direction of the government in Topeka.

Yet the results of the Tea Party rebellion four years ago have led these civic-minded, middle-of-the-road Kansans to a quiet but fierce determination to take their state back from those who once talked incessantly about taking their country back.

What brought them together earlier this week was a visit from Paul Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor. Davis has generally been running ahead of Republican incumbent Sam Brownback in what is one of the country’s most consequential showdowns on next Tuesday’s ballot.

Brownback set things up this way by launching what he called, proudly and unapologetically, a “real, live experiment” that he hoped would provide a model of red-state governance. He pushed steep income and business tax cuts through the Legislature, insisting that his program would spur unprecedented economic growth. The results so far have been less than inspiring: large budget deficits, credit downgrades, and substantial cuts in education spending, some of which were reversed only because of a court order. Only rarely does an election pose such a clear philosophical and policy choice.

Brownback often cited low-tax Texas as his model, prompting a ready reply from Davis. “They don’t want to be like Texas,” he said in an interview at his storefront headquarters here. “They just want to be Kansas.”

What it means to be Kansas is precisely what’s at stake, and it’s why Davis’ campaign uses #RestoreKansas — a traditionalist’s slogan when you think about it — as its Twitter battle cry. The choice Davis is offering is not between liberalism and conservatism but between two kinds of conservatism — the deeply anti-government Tea Party kind, and an older variety that values prudence and fiscal restraint but also expects government to provide, as Davis put it, “the basic services that are essential to the state’s vitality.”

In his stump speech, Davis emphasizes public education, transportation, Brownback’s rejection of the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, and a widely unpopular privatization of Kansas’ Medicaid program.

What’s striking is how many Republicans have joined Davis’ effort, including a large group of Republican politicians, some of whom Brownback purged in bitter primaries. Achieving ideological purity in the GOP turns out to have high costs, and Davis spoke of “the many functions we’ve had where we had more Republicans than Democrats.”

“I like those,” he adds.

Indeed he does. In a state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost two-to-one, moderately conservative Republicans are the swing voters.

Some are shocked that Kansas is one of this year’s battlegrounds, not only in the governor’s race but also in the pivotal U.S. Senate contest between independent Greg Orman and incumbent Republican Pat Roberts. But one person who is not surprised is James Roberts (no relation to the senator), Davis’ 29-year-old campaign manager.

In January 2013, the young organizer paid me a visit in Washington to explain why Kansas could swing Democratic this year. Over lunch at a Mexican restaurant this week in Lawrence, I asked him how he knew this back then. “We’re a Kassebaum-Dole-Eisenhower state,” Roberts said, referring to two legendary Republican senators and the president from Abilene by way of stressing that Kansas is “a pragmatic, moderate state.”

“We’re not a state of radical experiments,” he said. “Anytime conservatism takes a back seat to raw ideology, Kansans rebuke that idea.”

If Republicans do as well nationwide next Tuesday as many expect, they should pay attention to the reaction unleashed here by Brownback, a former U.S. senator whom Davis regularly accuses of bringing “Washington, D.C.-style politics to Kansas,” which he equates with “hyperpartisan politics.”

Among those who came out to greet Davis here was David Toland, executive director of Thrive Allen County, a social service and economic development organization. He summarized why the decision here matters so much.

“If moderates are starting to push back against the extremism of the Republican Party in Kansas, I cannot believe they won’t be pushing back in other states,” Toland said. “This is a state with a strong conservative tradition that’s in open rebellion against the policies of its own party.”

Conservatism at its finest has been defined by a devotion to moderation. Next week, conservative Kansas may remind the nation that this is still true.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

U.S. Senate Independent candidate Greg Orman, left, shakes hands with Sen. Pat Roberts following their debate at the KSN television studio Oct. 15, 2014 in Wichita, KS. (Fernando Salazar/Wichita Eagle/MCT)

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