Tag Archives: Kris Kobach

Bleeding Kansas

By tmess2 | Published July 21, 2020

In two weeks, Kansas and Missouri will have their state and federal primaries.  (There are also primaries in Arizona, Michigan, and Washington.)  While on the Missouri side of the state line, the biggest race is actually a ballot issue (Medicare expansion which is expected to pass), Kansas has some major races on the Republican primary ballot.

The big one is the U.S. Senate race.  The incumbent Senator — Pat Roberts — is a conservative Republican.  However, that is not enough to guarantee a win in the Republican primary, and Senator Roberts had a tough race in 2014 (only getting 48% of the primary vote for an 8% margin).   Senator Roberts has  decided that forty years in Congress (sixteen in the House and twenty-four in the Senate) is enough and it’s time to enjoy retirement.  And eleven Republicans decided that their names would sound so much better with Senator in front of it.

At this point in the race, it appears that there are three major contenders.  The establishment choice is very conservative Representative Roger Marshall.  Marshall represents the first district of Kansas which covers western and north central Kansas.  Meanwhile, the Tea Party candidate is Spawn of Satan Kris Kobach.  Folks may remember former Secretary of State Kobach as the Republican who lost the governor’s seat in 2018 or as the author of much of the anti-immigrant legislation passed over the past decade.  Finally, there is Bob (Hamilton) the plumber.  Hamilton runs a highly successful plumbing company in the Kansas City area and is trying to paint himself as a Trump clone. Continue Reading...

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What Will Mike Pompeo Do?

By tmess2 | Published September 1, 2019

Prior to Mr.  Narcissist becoming President, Mike Pompeo was an up and coming Congressman from Kansas about to start his fourth term in what (up to that point) had been the very conservative but not completely bonkers wing of the Republican Party.  Since 2017, Mike Pompeo has been one of the handful; of “responsible adults” in the Trump Administration’s foreign policy establishment.  (Responsible in the sense that these individuals are not willing to dump our allies and cozy up to authoritarian regimes.)

Mike Pompeo is now facing a choice about what next that may have a key impact on who controls the U.S. Senate in 2021.  Back in 2014, Senator Pat Roberts had a tough race for his fourth Senate term — only getting 48% of the vote in the primary and 53% in the general election.  While Senator Roberts is a traditional conservative, that’s not conservative enough for many Kansas Republicans.  (For almost three decades, there has been a civil war in the Kansas Republican Party between very conservative Republicans and traditional conservatives.  The main success of the Kansas Democratic Party has come when the Kansas Republicans have picked candidates who are too conservative thereby driving moderates to vote for the Democratic candidate.)  For 2020, Senator Roberts has seen the writing on the wall and had opted to retire rather than face another nasty primary that he probably would have lost.

At this point, multiple candidates have expressed interest in running in the Republican primary for this seat including Spawn of Satan Kris Kobach.  As you may recall, the last time we saw Spawn of Satan, he was losing the governor’s race to Democrat Laura Kelly.  Many in the Senate Republican leadership and in the Kansas Republican Party fear that, if Kobach wins the Republican nomination (highly likely in a split field), a Democrat could actually win the Kansas Senate race.  Looking for a white knight savior, they think that Mike Pompeo would fit the bill, either driving most of the other candidates from the race or at least having enough name recognition and support to get most of the non-Kobach votes. Continue Reading...

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Thinking 2021

By tmess2 | Published September 15, 2018

One weakness that the Democratic Party has had over the years is getting loosely attached Democratic voters to think beyond the current election.  But many components of the political system elect members in staggered elections (e,g,, the U.S. Senate); so gaining the ability to pass your legislation requires a multi-year plan.

While in the weeks ahead, posts on this site will undoubtedly focus on the race for power in D.C., this post is about the other offices that will be on the ballot in November — state positions.  In less than nineteen months, residents of the U.S. will receive and then return their census forms for the 2020 census.  In slightly over two years, the Census Bureau will release the numbers from that census to the states which will then begin anew the process of drawing the political maps that will control U.S. House (and state legislative elections) between 2022 and 2031.  And some of the people elected at the state level this November will still be around in 2021 to vote on these new maps.

The big office in most of the states is governor.  There are 36 governor’s offices up for election this cycle with Republicans currently holding 26 of them.  In 34 states, the term of office is four years; so the winner this year will be around in 2021.  (In two states — New Hampshire and Vermont, both held by Republicans — the term of office is two years; so we will get another shot at removing the Republican in 2020 and only New Hampshire is likely to have multiple congressional seats after the 2020 census.)   In some of these states — Arizona, California, and Iowa — the redistricting process minimizes the influence of the governor or legislature; so, while — for other reasons — holding California and picking up Arizona and Iowa would be useful, they will not have a big impact on redistricting in 2021.  There are also some states that currently only have one representative in Congress eliminating the need for Congressional Districts — Alaska (Independent); South Dakota (Republican), and Wyoming (Republican).  Even after eliminating these states, you have twenty states held by Republicans and eight states held by Democrats in which the winner of the 2018 election for governor will be around in 2021 and have the power to veto or sign any proposed congressional map. Continue Reading...

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Every Vote Counts — Spawn of Satan Edition

By tmess2 | Published August 12, 2018

Tuesday night saw two very, very close elections.  In a special election in a deep red U.S. House district in Ohio, the Democrat is currently trailing by about 1,500 votes before provisional and the remaining absentee ballots are counted.  In the Republican primary for Governor, Secretary of State (Spawn of Satan) Kris Kobach is leading current Governor Jeff Colyer (who only recently replaced Sam Brownback as governor) by approximately 110 votes as mistakes in the numbers on the Secretary of State’s website are being corrected.

What comes next in both states is slightly different as the process of counting the votes is governed by state law.  In both states, the current count does not include provisional votes — those cast by voters whose names were not on the precinct roll or who lacked proper ID — and late arriving absentee votes (as long as postmarked before the election).  Kansas has a shorter time-frame for these issues.  In Kansas, all absentee votes must arrive by the Friday after the primary and the counties will begin their official canvass — which includes counting all valid provisional and absentee votes this upcoming week (August 13-16).  In Ohio, those who cast provisional ballots have until seven days after the primary (August 14) to submit supporting documentation (e.g., show up with valid ID) to their local election authority and any absentee ballot received by ten days after the primary (August 17) counts with the canvass beginning on the 18th.

Because Ohio has such a long time for absentee ballots to arrive, we still don’t know how many ballots we are dealing with in Ohio.  We know that there are around 3,000 provisional ballots.  We also know that there are over 5,000 people who applied for absentee ballots who did not return them by election day.  How many of those 5,000 absentee ballots are in the mail is the unanswered question.  Generally speaking, provisional ballots tend to lean Democratic but absentee ballots are more of a mixed bag.  In Kansas, there were approximately 9,000 provisional ballots and current estimates are that around 6,000 of those provisional ballots are for the Republican primary.  (As should not be surprising, about 3,500 of the 9,000 are in Sedgewick County — Wichita — and Johnson County — affluent suburban Kansas City with another 1,400 in Douglas — Lawrence/University of Kansas — and Shawnee — the state capitol of Topeka and Wyandotte — less affluent Kansas City suburbs.  The next largest county has about 200 provisional ballots).  I have not seen any count of absentee ballots. Continue Reading...

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