Donald Trump wouldn’t be president today if a gigantic rift hadn’t opened up between the Republican establishment and the Republican base, and we’re going to get another taste of that this November when Kansans go to the polls to elect a new governor:
Kris Kobach may be the chosen standard-bearer for the Kansas Republican Party, but elected GOP officials are less than unified behind him in his run for governor.
Almost 40 percent of Republicans in the Kansas Legislature, when asked whether they will support Kobach in November, either would not say or did not respond to repeated inquiries. Four moderate Republicans, all from Johnson County, have said they will not support Kobach.
“I’m not going to take a position on that race. I just don’t feel like it’s any benefit to me to do that,” said House Majority Whip Kent Thompson, a Republican from Iola, without elaborating.
The numbers show the division within the Kansas Republican Party is real, said Michael Smith, a political scientist at Emporia State University.
Kansas is already well-known for its split of relatively moderate Eisenhowerish Republicans and archconservative Brownbackian fire-breathers, but Kobach has taken an atomic chisel to this fissure. Since Trump became president, Kobach has distinguished himself by serving as chairman of the most farcical government commission (the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity) in the history of the country and by being held in contempt of court for failing to follow a judge’s instructions in his role as Kansas’s Secretary of State in charge of elections. He’s a prominent birther who helped author and promote Arizona SB 1070, the state’s notorious racial profiling law, as well as a similar law in Alabama. None of this prevented him from narrowly beating the interim governor of Kansas in the primary and becoming the standard bearer for the GOP in the Sunflower state. Still, fifty-nine percent of Republican primary-goers voted against him.
Complicating the picture for the Democrats, however, is that the gubernatorial election will be a three-way race. Greg Orman, who ran a credible race against Senator Pat Roberts in 2014 as a Democratic Party-blessed independent, will be on the ballot splitting off anti-Kobach votes from the Democratic nominee Laura Kelly. That will probably (but not necessarily) be sufficient for Kobach to win with a plurality of the vote.
A new poll shows Democrat Laura Kelly and Republican Kris Kobach are virtually tied in the race for Governor, but Independent candidate Greg Orman says those numbers aren’t legitimate.
The poll was done by the Public Policy Polling group. It shows Kobach getting 39% of votes, Kelly getting 38% of votes and Orman with just 9%. It was paid for by the KNEA, a Kansas teachers union that supports Kelly. That connection is why Orman is questioning its legitimacy.
“That was just a highway partisan poll done by the ally of the Democratic party. It’s just another partisan dirty trick. The reality is they want to avoid competition and they want to avoid accountability,” Orman said.
KSNT News political analyst Dr. Bob Beatty said that as long as polling companies are transparent about their methods, there’s no reason to doubt their numbers.
“We’re able to look at these polls and really get a good sense of the race as long as they’re scientific, done in a scientific manner, and this one was,” Beatty said.
After the disastrous governorship of Sam Brownback, I think it would be tragic for Kansans to be saddled with Kris Kobach, and it appears that many Republicans feel the same way. The chances are good, however, that that is exactly what will happen to them.
And that’s a sad statement about the political culture of their state and of our country.
If there were such a thing as “reasonable republicans” anymore, maybe.
There are. We find ourselves voting for Democrats 99% of the time. But we are going the way of the Dodo Bird…
There’s Governor Charlie Baker in Massachusetts, but he’d probably be unelectable outside of New England; the RINO hunters would be gunning for him.
Fuck ’em.
If they vote the SOB in, they deserve him.
I don’t care about the rest of it, … Kobach shouldn’t be able to get elected as DOGCATCHER in Enterprise, KS
Kansas will not change until some future generation of Koch’s looks at all that wealth and decides to abandon politics and just have fun.
Okay, there are no reasonable Republicans, Kansas is full of batshit, insane wingnuts (I have friends and family there, I knoweth of what I speaketh) and they deserve what they get. All valid points.
But the real villain here is Orman. Will no one rid this country of self-rightious, Leftier-Than-Thou members of the Our Progressive Betters Party?
If he was that concerned about the consequences of Kobach winning, he would have tried to get the Democratic Party nomination. But nooooooooooo.
Hear, hear.
. . . the spoiler role, to Kobach’s benefit.
“Kansas is full of batshit, insane wingnuts”
Well, sure, if you go to a tractor pull, or a gun show.
I grew up here, and just moved back after 20 years on the East Coast. I’ve been surprised at the lack of Trump and far-right stuff I’ve seen.
I’m in the KC metro area, which is far more diverse than the rest of the state. But guess what? This is the part of the state that’s growing. Tech jobs, services, positions for well-educated folks. Wingnut Land is dying.
Moreover, there are still lots of moderates here. Most have just migrated to the Blue side. They will vote for Democrats, and many have officially switched parties.
If we could get Orman to stop being a spoiler, I think Ms. Kelly could win. A popular Republican former-governor just endorsed her.
I have a Facebook friend in a semirural part of Kansas. She, her husband and her daughter are all staunch, voting Democrats.
Is there such a thing as a “reasonable republican” anymore? And not just Jeff Flake, Susan Collins reasonable, but one who also lives by and practices reasonable principles.
Those republicans have become extinct.
Nope, not extinct. We just vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and even canvass for Democrats. We do this because it’s the best option, or the only option. But we don’t feel entirely at home in the Democratic Party.
We’re far more realistic than many voters on the Left. We know that the extremist, Trumpist Republican candidate is intolerable, so we throw all of our support to the person most likely to defeat them. We have no time for “voting our principles.” This is about the survival of the Republic, so we hold our noses and vote for Democrats.
Well you certainly took liberties with my point without any basis.
I’m not asking because I think such a character would be an alternative. But to rebut the premise of this post, somewhat, that there are no reasonable republicans left who would stop Kobach. And he needs stopping. Sure, there are the Flake/Collins “moderate” republicans, but since when have they done anything other than strike a faux moderate pose? When it gets down to voting, they ALWAYS vote against their stated conscience. Talk is not only cheap but worthless with these guys.
Even if they did exist, I would STILL not vote republican, nor would I counsel anyone who works for a living to do so, given what their general approach to governing, if you can call it that, is. Far from being conservative in the traditional sense, the GOP ideology is now more accurately fascist/oligarchic and has been on a trajectory towards that since Reagan and coming to its current reality/idiot phase. Even when they “work” its a feature, and not a bug, that their efforts are targeted towards a very small slice of the electorate, the wealthy. Some might say here, well, what about all the attention they pay to their base? And my reply would be, other than hate and fear red meat, what have they actually done for them? Nothing of substance.
All that said, you’re wrong: there are no reasonable republicans left, as defined here, and I challenge you to show me one.
Lastly I get your point about not feeling entirely at home in the democratic party. I feel the same, although probably for reasons different, but just as valid, as yours.
It would seem that two things are operating here in this exchange. As you definitely prove, there are no longer any real “moderate” Repub elected officials, they are not permitted to exist by the party and its base.
But there may still be voters (like AngryTeacher) who describe themselves as “moderate” Repubs who can no longer vote for the candidates the failed Repub party and its braindead base now shit out. Of course there are also many, many Repub voters who claim to disagree with many/most of the positions of the failed Repub party, yet continue to vote for whatever monsters the party puts forth. These are people who refuse to be governed by Dems, just as Southerners simply refused to be governed by Lincoln and the (new) Repub party in 1860.
Just my 2 cents.
I was a “moderate Republican”. I voted pretty solidly R from 1985 (when I turned 18) until Abu Ghraib. From that point on, I’ve ambled left, and the GOP has made/continued a rapidly accelerating dash to the right.
At this point the only thing I can imagine making me choose a GOP candidate over a Dem would be a Hugo Chavez-type person (a real one, not the boogeymen of Fax News) on the Dem ticket. I’ll even put up with some personal enrichment (ye olde “honest graft”) in exchange for a consistent vote for plain old humanity in government policy.
I see a variation of this but you characterize the general scenario perfectly. My variation: yeah, a fair number of my Repub friends now vote Dem. Some started earlier than others. The “first wave” were like jammerjim below during Dubya’s first term and sure as hell didn’t vote for him or most other Repubs in 2004. The next wave hit in 2016.
However, I still have highly literate, educated friends who I don’t consider racist who simply refuse to vote for a Dem. Instead they’re all glibertarians. It’s their way of electorally absolving themselves from the disaster that is the modern GOP. I hold them in more contempt than your typical fire breathing wingnut.
I know one of those “glibertarians” (nice word, BTW). For him its all about the tax cuts and deregulation. Absolutely nothing else matters.
At the risk of posting to an old thread, I wanted to thank you for your comments.
I misread your comment a bit, because I see now that you were specifically referring to Republicans who are holding, or seeking, elected office. You are certainly correct – they have shown little or no backbone in standing up to the extremists. In fact, they’ve used that red meat to motivate the far right wing of the party for years, without realizing that this would eventually bite them in their hindquarters (in the form of evermore extremist primary contenders.)
Moreover, Republicans of a certain generation (I’m thinking Ike Eisenhower and Jerry Ford) were true fiscal conservatives who really thought about their role as stewards of the taxpayers’ money. They would not recognize the spendthrift congressional majority that balloons the deficit in order to deliver more tax cuts.
I can’t disagree with most of what you wrote. I guess I support more of an idealized Republican Party (strong on defense, fiscally prudent, generally supportive of capitalism and the free market (not crony capitalism or petro-capitalism), strongly committed to free trade and our alliances with other market democracies.” Obviously, that Republican Party hasn’t
existed for a long time.
So, I vote for Democrats and drink excessively on election night.
We have no time for “voting our principles.”
I’m curious. What are the principles of a self-identifying reasonable Republican such as yourself?
Hi Wendigo, at the risk of posting on an old thread, I wanted to try to answer your question. I can’t speak to the principles of other self-identifying “resonable Republicans.” But I can try to throw out a little of my views which put me to the right of most Democrats, but way outside of the mainstream of the current Republican Party.
*I trust climate scientists and understand climate change to be caused by human activity. I think solutions to this problem are possible, and should be market based. I think it’s fine for the people who innovate, create new industries, and solve this problem to become fantastically rich.
*I cherish the immigrant tradition of the US. I support much-expanded guest-worker programs, with benefits and a social-safety net for those workers. I support our long-standing tradition of accepting refugees. However, I think all nation-states have a right to humanely police their borders, and a right to say who may enter, and who may stay. I’d like to learn more about merit-based systems of immigration. I think H1 visas are wonderful and wish they were easier to get for professionals.
*Generally pro-Israel, but with reservations due to the changing nature of Israeli nationalism and politics.
*Hawkish on national security policy, but generally suspicious of getting embroiled in land wars on the Eurasian landmass. The US and allied democracies should control the “global commons:” the high seas, space, and we should be capable of vigorously defending our allies in Europe and Asia. I’m OK with covert operations to kill terrorists/subvert tyrranical leaders, and weaken our enemies around the world, but ideally this should be done with extensive consultation and oversight by the legislative branch.
*I appreciate the complementary relationship of business and organized labor. Somewhat suspicious of public employee unions, which I see as different from unions in private enterprises. Quit my teachers union after it became more about political activism and political correctness than about supporting good teachers. I’m not sure what a good, effective union looks like in a 21st Century economy of rapid change and creative destruction. But I’d like to see one!
*Strong defender of free speech. There should be no “safe spaces,” or “trigger warnings.” Life is about confronting difficult information and oppositional views which challenge one’s perception of reality. That’s why I’m on this wonderful site. I’m very disturbed at what I perceive as the expanding definition of “unacceptable speech” or “hate speech.”
*Strong defender of religious freedom. I would have happily baked a wedding cake for a gay couple, but I would defend another baker’s right to say “no.” Free markets, again. I would hang a rainbow flag in my cake shop window and rake in business that my competitor turns away.
*Agnostic on the Second Amendment. Happy to register my guns, have waiting periods, background checks, magazine size limits, caliber restrictions, etc. But oppose total banning of firearms. I worry more about wacko gun nuts and the NRA than I worry about anti-gun activists.
Well, this has been fun. Really nice to think about these issues, trying to figure out where I stand. Beware that my positions on some or all of this may change. I’m willing to be convinced. I like to be challenged. No thinking person of good will is the enemy, in fact I’d love to take each and every person on this forum for a beer. Please folks, one at a time. I’m on a teacher’s salary, remember.
I know you hate California’s top-two “jungle primary” system. But it clearly seems better than the status quo in other states. At the very least, it means we don’t have to worry about the possibility that a candidate will win office with only 39% of the vote in the general election.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2018/3/16/121417/942
Why settle for jungle primaries when you could do ranked choice voting instead?
Let me know when that becomes an option.
I don’t claim that the “jungle primary” is the perfect system. But for all of the contempt for it, it’s better than the system that exists in most states now.
Hard to see any way out for Kansas when the state can watch the catastrophic effects of Sam Brownshirtism, yet the conclusion of enormous portion of the citizenry is that the state needs more of the same. “Conservatism” cannot fail, it can only be failed?
What’s most interesting in a failing culture/society like America is the existence of premier rightwing extremists like Kobach. As I recall, his educational resume is simply unbelievable, he is the product of the finest universities in the world, where he excelled at every turn. His intelligent is apparently of the highest order, yet the toxic poison of nativist American “conservatism” animates his every thought and action. But despite the IQ, there is no wisdom in that deeply poisoned brain whatsoever. How exactly he was able to be a superstar student yet be in thrall to a reality-denying ideology is a puzzling mystery; how could he have excelled in academe saddled with such an extreme mental disability, one that should have made any kind of liberal education simply impossible,let alone one accorded the highest honors?
Nor is he at all alone. Wingnuts Canada Cruz, Crackpot Cabinet member Pomposeo and senator Tom Cotten are more of the same—educational resumes beyond belief for (young) brains already stuffed to the gills with “conservative” claptrap. Presumably we’d find the same phenomenon with illegitimate Trumper “Justices” Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Highly achieving intelligence in the service of moral perversion in every instance, with wisdom nowhere to be found. Something critical has failed here. One is of course reminded of Albert Speer and Reinhard Heydrich.
In any event, the deeply disgusting Kobach seems almost certain to win, given the unfortunate dynamics of the particular race, and the fact that he has trademarked the critical issues for America’s failed white electorate: blind hatred of Latinos and spite as the motivating force behind all public policy. That’s “conservatism”!
What does “stop Kobach” mean? Assuming they could actually win and govern, does it mean that these Republican “Moderates” will not be racists?
Will it mean they won’t spend all their time shouting about immigration and all the “criminals pouring over our borders?”
Or will they disapprove of Trump but love Mike Pence because he SOUNDS saner and less vulgar?
In short are they worthless if they even exist? As long as they self-identify as “Republicans” they are part of the problem, not the solution. If they want to vote for Democrats, fine.
Perhaps in an ideal world, such “sensible Republicans” could form the basis for a “conservative” alternative to liberal policies and we could have a reasonable national debate about policy.
But we don’t live in anything approaching an ideal world. What is going on now is a naked fascist movement trying to take over – permanently, because they know they are losing ground and losing their “white privilege.”
In such a universe the non-Trump conservatives are a useless appendage.