Wednesday brought news of an historic shift in Kansas politics. Kansans’ discontent with the direction conservative politics and government has taken their state transformed dismissible public opinion polling into indisputable vote tabulations as the polls closed Tuesday. The primary provided many surprising results. Here are the main takeaways.
First, the big headline is the defeat of Representative Tim Huelskamp in the Kansas 1st Congressional district. Dr. Roger Marshall is no great departure from core conservative values and ideology, but he apparently has two traits that the soon-to-be former Congressman Huelskamp lacks. One is the apparent willingness to accept that politics requires the recognition and at least non-hostile acceptance of different points of view. The second trait is an awareness that spending all your time rudely yelling, “NO,” doesn’t make enough friends to get your way.
Second, voter turnout proved to be strong. It is an article of faith in the field of political science — primary elections only bring participation from the most active and committed members of the political parties. The unaffiliated and the unmotivated either cannot or do not participate in the primary process. The Secretary of State predicted a 24% turn out for yesterday’s election – a proportion that has not been equaled in over a decade. Considering just the Republican and Democratic registered voters, over one-third of those eligible cast ballots, and it appears that overall Republican turn out approached 37%. A detailed look at Republican turnout isn’t available yet but it appears that Johnson County was above expectations while Sedgwick appears to be lower as it was in 2012 and 2014.
Third, the Kansas Legislature has had a shake-up with potentially more to follow in the November general election. Since the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party as well, seldom make endorsements in a contested primary, it is a generally accepted fact that the endorsement of particular groups is a key guide voters use in the absence of first-hand knowledge about a candidate. The litmus test for conservative Republicans, particularly the small-government, low tax element, is undoubtedly the Kansas Chamber of Commerce.
While some advance ballots and perhaps those 17,000 “suspense” voters’ ballots remain to be tallied, the current results show that of the Kansas Chamber’s twelve endorsed state Senate candidates in contested primaries, eight were defeated and five of those were incumbents. In addition, an Overland Park Republican senator, who was not endorsed by the Chamber, lost his seat. In the Kansas House, of thirty-one contested primary Kansas Chamber endorsements, eighteen lost and eight of those were incumbents.
This primary season saw lots of groups and organizations exercising their voices. The list is too extensive to present here, but for the first time in a long time organized voices challenged the conservative position on taxation, cuts in the quality of public services, especially to those most in need, and the ongoing failure of the economy to generate lots of jobs and a rebound in public revenue.
Dr. Mark Peterson teaches political science at the college level in Topeka.