Kansas
has unexpectedly become the center of American politics in 2014.
Most
of this election is focusing on the Senate battlegrounds of Colorado, North
Carolina, and New Hampshire because two years ago those states were
presidential battleground. Kansas was not one of those states.
Kansas
is without a doubt a very red state. Five times did Kansas' electoral votes not
go a Republican. In 1892, they supported
Populist candidate James B. Weaver. Four years
later William Jennings
Bryan
won the state, but lost the election to William
McKinley. Woodrow Wilson won Kansas in 1912 & 1916 as did Franklin
Delano Roosevelt in 1932 & 1936 in their
respective presidential victories. The most recent Democrat to win Kansas in a
presidential election was in President Lyndon Johnson's 1964
landslide victory over Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
Even
though President Obama has familiar connections to Kansas and named Kansas
Governor Kathleen Sebelius to head Health and Human Services, he lost the state
twice. In 2008, Kansas's 6
electoral votes went for Senator McCain 56-42. Four years later Romney won the
state 60-38. I do not expect the state to go for a Democratic presidential
candidate anytime soon unless there is a huge monumental national political
shift.
Though
in state level politics there appears to be a very dramatic political shift.
Four
years ago, in the Kansas Gubernatorial Election Sam Brownback won in an
election that was very
good if you had the letter R next to your name on the ballot or a very bad year
if you had the letter D next to your name depending on your political
perspective. Anyways, 2010 was a good year for Republicans and that was shown
in Kansas where Brownback won the governor's election 63-32.
Brownback
has been involved in Kansas politics for a long time. He won a seat in congress
in 1994. In 1996, then-Senator Bob Dole resigned his senate seat so that he
could run for president. The Kansas governor appointed Lt. Governor Sheila
Frahm to fill that seat, but it also triggered a special election. In the
Republican Primary for the 1996 special election, Brownback won the election
and went on to win the special election that November to serve out the
remainder of the term. Brownback was elected to his own term in the US Senate
in 1998 and re-elected in 2004.
As
payback for not appointing him to that senate seat in 1996, Brownback purged
and punished the moderate Republicans.
The
one thing that has triggered Kansas' political shift was this.
Brownback
signed into law in 2012 tax cuts. Governor Brownback and those that supported
this bill claimed that these tax
cuts will create economic prosperity for the state. In the real world where
everyone else lives in, tax cuts specifically those on the top wage earners do
not create economic prosperity and contributes to the widening income
inequality gap.
This
is not from Occupy Wall Street or some lefty think tank. This is according to the Congressional Budget Office which said in 2012, "there is not conclusive evidence,
however, to substantiate a clear relationship between the 65-year steady
reduction in the top tax rates and economic growth. Analysis of such data
suggests the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with
saving, investment, or productivity growth. However, the top tax rate
reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income
at the top of the income distribution."
As
we have seen many times over, cutting taxes on the wealthy shifts the burden on
those in middle and lower classes and results in funding for necessary public
services to be cut and in some cases eliminated. One those services that faced
the chopping block was public schools in Kansas. Along with this tax cut in
2012, Brownback signed
into law a school funding bill in April 2014. Critics of the law say that it
cuts critical at-risk funding, creates more equity between rich and poor
districts, and (surprise) creates a tax break for corporations that donate to
private school scholarship funds for low-income and special-needs students
which could cost the $10 million a year in lost revenue.
Two
of the groups calling for Brownback to sign this bill were the Kansas Chamber
of Commerce and the Koch Brothers led Americans For Prosperity. Representatives
from those organizations were present at the bill signing.
In
June 2014, Chris Hayes author of the book Twilight Of The Elites and host of the
MSNBC program All In With Chris Hayes
traveled to Kansas to document that the budget cuts are leading to schools in
some Kansas rural communities being shutdown.
Messing
with the schools is meaning you have gone too far for
some Kansas voters and even for some Republicans. The Democratic
nominee Paul Davis has secured the
endorsement of more than 100 former and current Republican officials.
Davis
will need their support and enough crossover votes to win this election. The
latest Real Clear
Politics polling average show Davis leading by an average of 2.8 points over
Brownback. Talking Points
Memo's Poll Tracker
shows that Davis has been consistently leading since June.
Meanwhile
another Kansas statewide race will have national implications into who will
control the Senate this coming January when the 114th Congress convenes.
In
that election Democrats gained
52 seats in the House,
two seats short of a majority. During the long period between Election Day 1930
and the convening of congress in 1931, 19 representatives and
representatives-elect DIED thus triggering special elections and leading to
Democrats ending up in the majority
In
the Senate, Democrats
gained 8 seats and along with the Farmer-Labor Party caucusing one seat with
them forced a tie in that chamber, but with President Hoover's Vice President Charles Curtis being a
Republican that party still maintained the Senate.
And
Curtis was a Senator from… KANSAS. When Hoover was elected president in 1928
and inaugurated in March 1929, Curtis' senate seat was filled and it triggered
a special election in 1930 thus paving the way for a Democrat to win that seat
in that election cycle.
See
folks, it's all connected.
George
McGill was elected to that Senate seat via a special election in 1930 and won
his own seat outright in 1932 before being defeated in 1938. Since then Kansas
has had two Republican Senators.
That
trend might be broken this coming November.
Senator
Pat Roberts was a shoe-in for re-election this November. Sure there was that minor
detail of him not having a home address in Kansas. And he did
defeat Milton Wolf, President Obama's
cousin
and a doctor who
posted x-ray pictures of patients on Facebook, in the Republican primary 48-41.
In
the typical two-person Republican vs. Democrat, Roberts wins by at least
8 points
according to the Real Clear Politics average. There is a well funded
Independent candidate who was polling well. In a three-way race, Roberts still
wins in some polling, but only with a plurality of votes somewhere in the low
40s and in some cases the mid 30s.
The
Independent, Greg Orman, wins.
According to a PPP poll conducted in August it is by as much as 10.
On
3 September Taylor dropped out the race. This did not sit well with Kansas
Secretary of State Kris Kobach. I bet he reads the same polls as I do and knows
that if Taylor drops out Roberts will likely lose this coming November and also
increase the likely hood of Democrats keeping their majority in the US Senate.
Kobach
sued to keep Taylor on the ballot. It failed. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled
that Taylor can't be forced to run for an office that he has expressed no
desire to run in and ordered the Secretary
of State to take Taylor's name off the ballot.
Kobach
is claiming that he doesn't have to print out ballots until this coming Friday.
One
problem…
Doing
so would violate the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act which is a
federal law that requires ballots be sent to military voters no later than 45
days prior to an election.
Speaking
of that, Kobach is sending out
notices with ballots to overseas voters. This is a part of long list of
voter suppression schemes to combat the non-existent
problem of voter fraud that the Kansas Secretary of State is participating
in.
And
Kris Kobach might lose his re-election too.
Orman
ran in the Democratic Primary for Senate in 2008 but dropped out. Orman has the
funding to compete in an election like this. Orman has been registered as both
a Democrat and a Republican at various times in his life but has been
unaffiliated since 2010. According to his political contributions he donated
money to Harry Reid's senate campaign, and Obama and Hillary Clinton's 2008
presidential campaign, but donated to Republicans Scott
Brown and Todd Akin in 2010.
Orman
has not stated which party he will caucus with based on his past affiliations,
but according
to Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight Orman has a 75% chance of caucusing with
the Democrats should he win.
The
Orman candidacy has raised a lot of red flags for the Roberts' camp that the
campaign has brought in experienced campaigners from Washington along with Senator
McCain, former
Kansas Senator Bob Dole, and other big
Republican names to campaign for Roberts.
I
wonder with all this attention on their senate and gubernatorial races that
voters have said this phrase:
"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in
Kansas anymore."
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