With all the attention being understandably focused on Michigan’s August 4 primaries, many may have missed what happened in Kansas the same day, which represented some potential good news for Democrats, as I explained at New York:
A “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” raged on in Michigan during yesterday’s primaries. But the vibe was very different among Democrats in Kansas, which also held primaries on August 4.
Kansas is a resolutely red state where Republican extremism periodically gives Democrats an opening. The Democratic Party has won four gubernatorial elections dating back to 2002, when Kathleen Sebelius exploited GOP divisions to win; now two-term incumbent Democrat Laura Kelly, a tough-minded moderate in the Sebelius mode, is leaving office amid high Republican expectations that they will reimpose a one-party rule on the state.
But that plan might not work out. A robust Democratic primary to choose a Kelly successor, along with an equally robust Democratic primary to choose a challenger to Republican U.S. senator Roger Marshall, shows that the Sunflower State’s minority party is by no means throwing in the towel. And while the candidates in both primaries exhibited some distinctive appeals, there’s no evident intraparty ideological warfare, likely because Democrats know they must appeal to moderate Republican voters to win.
Kelly endorsed Johnson County (a wealthy Kansas City suburb, and the largest county in Kansas) state senator Ethan Corson as her successor. But he lost to his Johnson County colleague Cindy Holscher, who offset Corson’s financial and advertising advantage with an issue-oriented campaign focused on two people-pleasing themes. She favored a moratorium on data-center development generally and also opposed and a specific (and controversial) subsidy-laden deal to build a new stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs. She will now face Republican state legislative leader Ty Masterson, who rode a Donald Trump endorsement to the GOP nomination over a large field. She is sure to hit Masterson on his Trump-like benevolence toward data centers but will also deploy the not-so-secret weapon of all Kansas Democrats: resistance to GOP efforts to ban abortion.
Kansas was the very first state to hold a ballot initiative on abortion rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, when anti-abortion activists proposed a constitutional amendment to override state judicial decisions protecting the right to choose. It lost by nearly 20 points. This year some of the same people went after pro-choice judges from a different angle, as The 19th reported:
“Kansas voters rejected a ballot measure that would have made members of the state’s Supreme Court electable by popular vote — a seemingly technical issue that had become a proxy battle for the future of abortion rights in the state. …
“Conservatives in the state’s Republican-led legislature put forth the proposal in an effort to remake Kansas’ high court, which in 2019 issued a pivotal decision holding that the state constitution guaranteed the right to an abortion. Three years later, in 2022, Kansas voters rejected a measure that would have undone the court’s decision — securing the Sunflower State’s status as a destination for people seeking abortion from neighboring states such as Texas and Oklahoma, which have both banned the procedure.”
The initiative lost by 22 points (61 percent to 39 percent). It was backed by Masterson, unsurprisingly, and also by Marshall, a hammer-headed conservative known for his loyalty to Trump’s agenda.
Marshall’s general-election opponent is right out of Kansas moderate central casting. Kansas City megachurch founder Adam Hamilton is running a centrist-outsider campaign appealing to people across party lines. He is senior pastor at the largest United Methodist church in the country and has a national as well as a local following that fed his modest but still decisive victory over a huge primary field. His financial and political viability led the authoritative Cook Political Report to move the Kansas Senate race from the Safe Republican to the Likely Republican rating, which places the contest on upset watch. Republicans will now have to deal with the temptation to energize conservative evangelicals by attacking a religiously observant Democrat on theological as well as ideological grounds, much as they’ve done (with limited success so far) against the Reverend Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.
Holscher and Hamilton offer Kansas Democrats about the strongest statewide ticket they could hope for in a year when a national anti-Trump wave could affect even deep-red states. And they won’t have to worry too much about intraparty conflict on the road to November.
