Three days after Donald Trump was sworn into the Presidency, Representative Mike Pompeo resigned from his Congressional seat after he had been selected and confirmed as the Director of the CIA. Within a few days, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback called for a special election to select a representative for the now vacant seat. This election was set for Tuesday, April 11th.
The Fourth District of Kansas comprises the counties of Barber, Butler, Chautauqua, Comanche, Cowley, Edwards, Elk, Greenwood, Harper, Harvey, Kingman, Kiowa, Pratt, Sedgwick, Stafford, Sumner, and part of Pawnee County. Most of the people in this district live in or around Wichita, the most populous city in Kansas.
There were not any primaries for this election. The three major parties in Kansas (Republican, Democrat, Libertarian) each had a convention to select a candidate to participate in the general election. These conventions were held in February, with the Republicans having theirs on February 9th and the Democrats and Libertarians both had theirs on the 11th.
For the Republicans, the primary candidates were State Treasurer Ron Estes, former Congressman Todd Tiahrt, attorney George Bruce, talk show host Joseph Ashby, and Trump campaign staffer Alan Cobb. Ashby and Bruce were eliminated on the first ballot and Estes won the second ballot with 52% of the vote.
For the Democrats, the primary candidates were attorney James Thompson, businesswoman Laura Lombard, former Kansas House Minority Leader Dennis McKinney, police officer Charlie Walker, and former House candidate Robert Tillman. Lombard, Walker, and Tillman were eliminated on the first ballot and Thompson won the second ballot with 54% of the vote.
For the Libertarians, the primary candidates were educator Chris Rockhold, former House candidate Gordon Bakken, and farmer John Kostner. Rockhold won the nomination on the first ballot with 85% of the vote.
There are no independent candidates for this seat. If there was to be any independent candidates in the race, they would have needed to obtain 3,000 signatures from registered voters by February 18th to successfully petition to be on the ballot. No candidate obtained enough signatures by the deadline.
It would be easy just to say that this is a safe Republican seat and call it a day. In the last four elections, when Pompeo was first elected in 2010, the Republican candidate has won by an average of 29 points. I want to dig around a little bit and see if there is any under current that may be missed.
Kansas will have elections for all of its executive offices next year, with some candidates having already declared that they are running for governor. I've been looking at this race as a preview of sorts for the elections that will be occurring next year. For my purposes, we will look at the Republican vs Democratic dichotomy as the Libertarian party is not yet big enough to have a serious effect on the two party system.
Ron Estes is the State Treasurer and has been since the Brownback administration started in 2011. While Sam Brownback is currently one of the most unpopular governors in the nation, Estes seems to have kept out of the unpopularity plaguing the government in Topeka. To be fair to him, he is the treasurer, a relatively innocuous position. In 2014, while Brownback won a close election to keep the governor's seat by 3.5%, Estes routed his opponent by 35%.
Given that it was 2014 when that happened and the Brownback administration has since seen its popularity collapse, it would be interesting to see how far being part of the administration could hurt Estes. It is feasible this trend could show up in the votes next week; after all voters starting punishing Brownback last year by electing a more moderate legislature. In addition, tying Estes to the Brownback administration has been something that Democrat James Thompson has been trying to do as well as a means to undercut his chances as well.
How far that effort would go remains to be seen. Any effort by Thompson to drag down Estes with Brownback may be limited by Thompson himself. In the current "establishment vs. progressive" fight within the Democratic party nationally, Thompson falls in the progressive category to the point that Bernie Sanders came to Kansas to stump for him. That may work well for the Democratic party in Kansas; after all Bernie Sanders did win the Kansas caucus over Hillary Clinton last year. However, in a congressional district where Republican voters outnumber Democratic voters nearly two to one, that might not get Thompson far.
In the 2016 state legislature elections (and one United States House district), Kansans sent a more politically diverse group of politicians to Topeka for the next two years. What they did not do, however, was send a great number of Democrats to the legislature. In the State House, the Democrats gained 12 seats, but still only have 40 of 125 seats. In the Senate, they only gained one seat to hold 9 out of 40 seats. Kansans do want change from Brownback's policies based off of this, but are not willing to go all the way over to the other side of the aisle to do that, instead preferring a more moderate tone.
If Thompson had fallen into the more moderate, establishment wing of the Democratic party, he would have had at least a sporting chance to flip the seat. As it is, there is not much to suggest there will be an upset next Tuesday. There's only been one poll conducted and it corroborates this by show ing Estes with a solid 24 point lead over Thompson. It's hard to imagine that this house seat would flip parties, but depending on how close the results end up could be a very telling sign in elections to come.
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