- Coming up on IGI, we review the 2022 Kansas election results.

Who won, who lost, and what were the surprises?

Our all-star panel of experts will analyze the results of an election that, once again, had Kansas in the national spotlight, stay with us.

(chimes ring) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you with support from the Lewis H. Humphreys Charitable Trust, and from the Friends of KTWU.

(calm music) - Hello and welcome to IGI, I'm your host, Washburn University professor of Political Science, Bob Beatty.

All eyes were on Kansas again on November 8th with a number of hotly-contested election races.

Would incumbent Democratic Governor Laura Kelly make history and win a second term?

Would Congresswoman Sharice Davids survive in the third district after redistricting, and would the never-say-die politician of Kansas politics, Kris Kobach, be the comeback kid?

Joining me is truly an all-star panel of experts from 27 News, Capitol Bureau Reporter Rebekah Chung, from the Washburn Political Science Department, Dr. Amber Dickinson, and from the Kansas Reflector, senior reporter Tim Carpenter.

Thank you all for being part of this panel, and I mean it is an all-star panel because all of you have been following this election pretty closely.

What I wanted to start with, of course, was the governor's race and, you know, whether people thought it was a shoe-in for Laura Kelly or she had no chance, I do remember about a year ago getting a call from a reporter or somebody saying, "Does she have any chance at all?"

I said, "Well, let's wait a year," but it is a Republican state, there is a Democrat in the White House, it's been since 1978 that a democratic governor has won with a Democrat in the White House, so it was an interesting election for governor, let's go right at it.

Let's start with with Dr. Dickinson.

- So, I think a really smart thing that this campaign did was not do what some other more purple states were doing, which was talk about abortion over and over again.

I think Kelly's focus on the economy was really, really smart, and we saw just a couple of weeks before the election, Fort Hays put out a poll saying that people felt pretty good about the Kansas economy and I think there's a really strong connection between people's pocketbooks and being pleased with their executive branch, and I think that was a big contributing factor to the victory.

- That's interesting you mentioned that 'cause that goes against the entire, basically, Republican campaign, which we know was pounded, pounded, which is inflation, gas prices, and oh my gosh, this is like the worst thing in the history of the world to hit economically, and yet you cite some data that said Kansans were saying, "Well, it's not that bad."

Tim Carpenter, what your take on the governor's race?

- So I might have been that political reporter who called you and wondered what was gonna happen to Laura Kelly.

This is the second election for which, that I have underestimated Laura Kelly.

I told her after she won the first time that, I admitted to her that I suspected she would lose because Kansas voters wouldn't reward a hard-working state senator from Topeka, particularly a woman, with the governor's office, and once again, I thought she was gonna lose and I was wrong again.

But I really do think that she kinda turned, the tide kinda turned maybe in August with the rejection of that abortion amendment and it kinda gave them some insight as to what was happening with the electorate, I think, and she stuck with her game plan to talk about her track record, what she had done for the state of Kansas, she brought an adult to the room in that work, and her strategy was to win, we'll say the top 10 most populous counties in the state and she won eight of them.

- Rebekah Chung, your take on the governor's race?

- Well, I think to piggyback off of what Tim was saying, I do think there's a dynamic that's changing with Kansas counties.

So looking at Johnson County, it used to be maybe a bit more red, right now it's looking a bit more purple.

So I think you see that shift happening and it's shifting in the governor's favor.

She's, you know, piggybacking off of that and kind of, you know, presenting herself well enough to voters for them to think she's middle of the road, she's moderate, and she's stayed with that track, I think, and that really helped her in the end.

- By winning, just one another quick thing.

- Yeah.

- By winning those eight counties, she won the five most populous counties, and so by winning those counties that gave her about 100,000-vote advantage, Derek Schmidt won 30-something counties by more than 1,000 votes, that gave him a 50,000-vote advantage, so could really blow Laura Kelly away in these rural, small population counties, and still not come close.

- It was a really interesting race for me because the strategies were so clear.

So if a reporter, or Tim, you called or something and say, "Well, what's the strategy of each side is like?"

Well, this is easy.

You know, we saw it in their TV ads and we've mentioned 'em before, Laura Kelly, you know, was incredibly consistent with her message.

She, you know, 5 out of her 13 TV ads, she was literally shown in the middle of a road or between people saying she was in the middle and she stuck to it.

She went off once when she mentioned the transgender issue, but other than that, I mean, she was incredibly disciplined.

And you look at the Derek Schmidt campaign and they pounded national issues, and I mean, pound, pound, pound, and so Rebekah, in the end, we know who won, but we talked about this a lot throughout these months and the possibility that, you know, the Kansas-based campaign could impact people more than a national one.

- I would say so.

Definitely focusing more so on statewide issues, Kelly was able to kind of pivot the vote in her favor when they took that stance, I think one mistake maybe Republicans may have made is taking, one, looking at national issues, but also kind of driving home that more conservative message as opposed to maybe sticking middle of the road or being a bit more moderate themselves to win over those larger counties, I think they were really banking on the Western Kansas vote.

- I think so, and I think that's a theme that we saw in a lot of races, this idea that, "If we just run really hard to the right, we'll secure these victories," and I think that they are underestimating the ability of Kansas voters to vote in a nonpartisan fashion to a certain degree.

I also think another smart thing that the Kelly campaign did was attach, continually attach Schmidt to Brownback, right?

And then Schmidt's attempts to connect Kelly to Biden just weren't as successful.

- That's what made it so clear, right?

We're seeing this, you know, obviously guilt by association, but as you mentioned with Laura Kelly, they were saying Schmidt was Brownback, but he's a state figure, whatever you think of him, he's Kansas, and Schmidt consciously went and was trying to associate Laura Kelly with Joe Biden, I think psychologically it's a little easier for a voter to say, "Yeah, I don't know if she's Joe Biden, I don't like Joe," you know, "I don't like Joe Biden," but you know, she's from Topeka, she's from Kansas, what do you think?

- I don't wanna get too far ahead of us, but we cannot talk about this governor's race without talking about, there are a couple other candidates on the ballot and you, you know, Derek Schmidt, sometimes you in the primary, you go conservative, win your primary, and then drift back to the middle in the general election, and Derek Schmidt didn't have that opportunity because there was an independent candidate, Dennis Pyle, state senator, a longtime Republican who walked away from the GOP just to run his independent candidacy, and he insisted that Kansas needed a more conservative governor, more conservative than Derek Schmidt, and certainly more conservative than Laura Kelly, and, you know, just his influence on the race, it's hard to really discern, but the Schmidt people would say the 20,000 votes that Dennis Pyle got were the 20,000 votes that Derek Schmidt needed to win.

- Well, of course that's not the case because a third party gets about 3% on average anyway, but Pyle was a bit of a ghost, wasn't he?

He didn't run a campaign, yes, 100 grand went in from some group at the very end, but still, I would argue most voters across the state would looked at that and what they saw was an, it was the I for independent, not the Dennis Pyle for who, you know, who the heck this is.

So that's my contrary to that.

I, you know, if it was Dennis Pyle that pushed him to the right, you know, probably too far, I mean, did Dennis pyle force Derek Schmidt to go to a press conference talking about drag shows?

- Well, so you were talking about how Schmidt at the beginning went for these national issues: inflation, fentanyl is bad, you know, crime is bad, but he closed out his campaign in the most bizarre fashion I've ever seen, by basically attacking LGBTQ people, it was just very, very strange, and I don't know whether it was just a last ditch effort to ignite the social war, but I don't think that worked, I think people thought it was like- - Too much.

- "Okay, I was trying to get on board, but this is beyond any reasonable thing that I'm gonna accept."

- But this is another example of these politicians assuming that they can just say these really, really conservative things and then that will get the vote for them.

I think this is a really clear example of, you know, we made the abortion amendment vote and Kansans were clear about that, and when you go and attack people, especially when you're trying to attach this issue of transgender children, I mean, this is too far.

- Mm-hmm.

- And it also raises the question, is this a bit of a wake-up call, do you think, for the Republican party, right?

What sort of strategy would they use in the future?

Would they lean a bit more conservative, double down, or would they kind of become more moderate in that sense, especially with Kansas Republican party?

- But if they blamed Dennis Pyle, then they're not gonna do much soul searching 'cause they say, "Oh, we would've won if Dennis Pyle hadn't have been there, so what we did was fine."

- Well, the executive, the chairman of the Kansas Republican party directly blames Dennis Pyle.

- Right.

- And right now he's on a jihad to excommunicate Republicans who signed Dennis Pyle's petition, Republican, who are part of the Republican party apparatus, city, county, whatever, and he's going to kick them out of their positions simply because they signed this petition that allowed Dennis Pyle to be on the ballot.

- But to Rebekah's point, when I look back at, which I did, going back to 1978, almost every four years there's some interesting third party candidate, and for reason sometimes we don't know, when Mike Hayden ran in one election, the independent candidate got almost 70,000 votes, and I asked people, "What happened there?"

I don't know.

We had Greg Orman, so I, to your point, I'm not so sure it's a good idea to just, you know, "Oh, this election will, it's because of a third party candidate so we don't need to do anything different," at least they should look at a lot of different things.

- But it's a great scapegoat.

- Yes, absolutely, yes.

- It's a great way to say, "It's not that our campaign made mistakes, it's that this person was a spoiler," right?

- Right.

Especially when they have these other races like the Kobach race to say, "Well, look, this person is very conservative and won their race."

You know, they're not gonna talk about the margin, of course, they're just gonna talk about the victory.

- Well, that was nice of you to offer a segway.

Yeah, so we're moving on to the attorney general race and it featured Kris Kobach where, if most of you watching this program are familiar with that name, certainly this panel is, Kris Kobach ran for his eighth different race for his seventh different office, and he did win by a couple points, there was no third party on there.

So let's get right into, you know, somebody who is actually not that popular, even according to the exit polls of people who voted, Rebekah, the AG race, we want your thoughts.

- Well, with the AG race, I think what really kind of did not work in Mann's favor was probably the fact that he didn't get out right off the bat with advertising, I really think he should have jumped on that sooner just because he's not a familiar face.

You know, Kobach already has that edge and that advantage, but Mann waited until maybe the general, and I think it was a bit too late for him, you know, I don't think many people knew who he was, but I think some were kind of, he was more banking on the fact that maybe people did not like Kobach as opposed to, you know, them knowing who he really was.

- Which is a perfectly reasonable campaign strategy.

You know, getting people motivated to vote against someone is just as meaningful as getting someone excited to vote for a candidate, but I think you're right, I'd like to echo your thoughts about this issue of name recognition.

So many people, if they're not gonna vote straight party, they're gonna go in and they're gonna vote for names they recognize, and so, you know, Mann, who had financial resources to get name recognition out there, it was just a mistake, and I think that it's just due to political inexperience.

I think there was a real missed opportunity there.

- Yeah.

- He was a first-time candidate, former Lawrence police officer, never run for public office before, and Kris Kobach, as you said, Bob was very, very experienced, and had, perhaps, the best name recognition of any politician in Kansas.

He has high negatives, but, and I think this heavy Republican state of Kansas came very, very close to saying, "No, Kris Kobach, don't think so, the AG's job is too important, we're gonna give it to this rookie," you know?"

And it was just mm, by a very slim margin that Kris Kobach was saved.

- Yeah, and Rebekah's point is interesting because Kris Kobach on election night, he was on TV, and when he is interviewed, he often gets, gives actually very interesting political analysis, he doesn't say, "Yeah," he doesn't give you cliches, he's like, "Well, the Western Kansas vote hasn't come in," and you're like, "Whoa, that's pretty good analysis."

He said something when he was talking about this race, and Chris Mann, he said, well, early on Kobach said Mann was running sort of a basement campaign, that's what Kobach said, and he was kinda right, to Rebekah's point, in that he didn't start sort of getting out there in March and April, which is exactly what Laura Kelly did, she started advertising in early April, that was her first "I'm middle of the road" and she never quit, but I think I agree with Rebekah, I think it would've probably behooved him even if he just spent 30, 40% of your money, because what you can do is spend your money up early and instead of saying, "Oh my gosh, we're outta money" you use that early spending, show a poll to donors and say, "Look, we need more," we all get those emails, right?

- But again, this is political experience and as we know, Kobach has lots and lots of experience running for office.

- Has the most of any, yeah, candidate.

And yeah, so imagine, you know, Chris Mann, you know, deciding to run for office for the first time, and it's the AG race in Kansas against Kris Kobach, and which is essentially a national race, to your point, right, Tim?

- Yeah, but Kris Kobach had to win a three-way primary to get there, there was no guarantee that Chris Mann was gonna run against Kobach, I think that was what he wanted to do, he wanted to run against somebody with high negatives.

The alternatives were a career federal prosecutor and a state senator who didn't have a lot of criminal law experience.

- Yeah.

- And so, once again, in the primary, I think Kris Kobach won that because of people who knew who he was, nobody knew who Kelly Warren was, and so I think Kris Kobach running all of those times finally got him elected attorney general, the losses in the US Senate race, the loss in the governor's race, helped him.

- And in some ways maybe it's his dream job.

- Who knows?

I mean, there's a lot of office shopping that's gone on with this particular individual and it looks like they finally got one.

- And you know, people keep asking me, "Will he conflict with Laura Kelly?"

and I'm not seeing- - Daily.

I think daily.

- Will the conflict be more with the federal government and Joe Biden, or do you actually see him looking at the state- - No, he's promised to find new and fantastic ways to sue Joe Biden and spend Kansas resources filing these lawsuits against the President of the United States, I'm sure he'll find time to irritate Laura Kelly as well.

- Is that something like with medical marijuana, like even if the legislature was to pass it, it is illegal at the federal level, so could we have this odd situation of the state attorney general taking the federal side on that?

Just throwing that out there, 'cause that's what somebody asked me.

- Well, that's as plausible as having the new attorney general elect stand on the Oklahoma-Kansas border on the highway and wave cars off that he thinks are full of illegal immigrants and he would flash his AG's badge, and have the car searched.

I mean, that's as plausible, that could happen, who knows?

Which is the wild card of Kris Kobach.

- Well, we're gonna move on to the third district, which is, features the incumbent Sharice Davids, a democrat, Davids, and there's again, a lot of national attention on this one, which makes the results even more surprising.

At one point, maybe a month or so ago, it was labeled the most competitive race in the nation, maybe more than a month because then a poll came out showing that it wasn't so competitive, but millions and millions of dollars.

And let's take a look at that race, Rebekah, your thoughts on the third district?

- Well, on the third district, I think it goes back to Johnson County being a bit more purple than red.

Now, I don't think Amanda Adkins may fit that county like they suspected in the beginning, and I think the GOP really thought Amanda Adkins was gonna make this a competitive race, Sharice Davids doesn't really stand a chance, and I think she kind of proved now that perhaps things are shifting in her favor.

- And I think they overestimated the redistricting, I think that they thought that because this is now a more Republican district after the redrawing in the district lines that Atkins had a shot, but you know, I think Davids just proved that she's a pretty unshakeable in this district, that a pretty tremendous win that she got, percentage-wise.

- It was an interesting race because you had an incumbent who was running against a Republican challenger and they had run two years before against each other, this was a total rematch.

Amanda Atkins had two years to prep it, she made sure she cleared the deck of any primary challengers so she wouldn't have that problem, she got the legislature to add these three rural counties down here and cut Wyandotte County in half and send that off to another congressional district.

All this whole US House map in Kansas was designed by Republicans to beat Sharice Davids, and the poll you're talking about suggested that she was up 12 percentage points, shocking, both Amanda Atkins and Sharice Davids said the poll, "No, no, no, no, no, don't pay attention to that poll."

- Atkins called it garbage.

- "Don't look at that over here," but the final result was almost spot on.

- Yeah.

- Spot on.

And so the super competitive race was not, and there was another congressional race in which the Republican incumbent, Jake LaTurner, won by 15 percentage points against a candidate who nobody really understood who that person was, but they were both in double-digit losses, so you had this one that was set up as highly competitive, this other one that nobody paid any attention to, and they were actually fairly close.

- Yeah, the interesting thing about the third district and Sharice Davids, is that she very seriously tried to tell her new district that she's working for Kansas, that she's, you know, she's not a national figure, and I think she was successful.

They sort of said, "Oh, we like her, she's one of us," and yet the national Democrats have to be looking and saying, "My goodness, wouldn't we love to have her to be a national Democrat?"

but she has to keep resisting that.

I have to move on because I've asked our guests to look, pick some TV ads, many of you have seen these throughout the campaign, and the fun ones or the interesting ones, and then we'll say a few comments on them.

Dr. Dickinson wanted everybody to see an ad for the state treasurer's race, Steven Johnson.

So let's take a look at that ad and then let's see why she picked it.

- [Narrator] Steven Johnson, always relentless.

Tax-cutter, saved us billions, was a real stickler on the lunch budget too.

- Less baloney here, more savings for the school.

- Steven knew that regulations drive up energy costs when he was eight.

He'll protect our tax dollars with no liberal baloney.

- [Narrator] Lynn Rogers?

trouble.

- When I grow up, I wanna overtax people.

- [Teacher] The largest tax hike in Kansas history and property owners pay the price again and again.

- All right, Amber, why'd you pick this ad?

- Number one, I appreciate this strategy.

So it's an attack ad, but the attempt to soften the blow of the attack through the use of humor, but why I picked it is because there's actually several different versions of this ad.

So there was an original version where the ad cited a 2015 sales tax vote that Rogers was not even in the legislature at the time, but Johnson was, and he voted for that.

Then there was a 2017 vote in which Johnson again supported the tax increase, but stated that only Rogers supported the tax increase in the ads.

So it's just a really fascinating case of, I don't know who was checking these ads before they released them, but they weren't doing a very good job.

- Yeah, I'm not so sure I've ever seen that in my many years of watching someone attacking somebody on a vote, that the person who also made the vote made, but maybe it's just a down-ballot race and Rogers didn't have a chance to respond, so it just sort of goes out that.

- Maybe it came across to voters as just standard lying in ads.

- Sure.

- All right, well, moving on to Rebekah.

Rebekah picked a PAC ad from the Kansas Values Institute in the governor's race, let's take a look at that.

(bell rings) - What can I get you?

- I'll have a Schmidt sandwich.

(bright music) - Ma'am, watch your language.

- I said a Schmidt sandwich.

- That's not what I heard!

- Me neither.

- She means a Derek Schmidt sandwich, same thing as a Brownback burger.

Got a bunch of underfunded schools and a lot of budget deficit.

- A Schmidt sandwich, just like a Brownback burger.

Neither sound any good to me.

- [Cook] Order up!

- [Cashier] You are not gonna like it.

- All right, Rebekah, why'd you pick that one?

- I just think it's funny.

I mean, they're saying Schmidt sandwich, you know, it's a great play on words.

(laughs) I think it's a really creative ad like we saw from a lot of the PACs, coming down with just very, I don't know, explicit and just also great play on words when they talk about Schmidt Sandwich, Brownback Burger.

For me, it's something that sticks, I don't know if that makes sense, but I think for other voters it does too, so the messaging that they use.

- And it would've been, it came out the last week of the campaign and one of the actors is reading the Kansas City Star, so my guess, and I haven't checked, is it ran in Johnson County quite a bit.

So I think many voters like you thought, "Ah, this is an interesting one," and actually paid attention to it, right?

- Probably, I think that's the thing, when you have things like this that are a bit more forceful with the language and also funny, right?

I think it just makes the ad so much more memorable and maybe when you're going to the polls, people are thinking about this in the back of their head, so.

- Especially when it's actually funny.

- Yes.

- When they try to be funny and they're not, it's not great, but when they're actually funny, I think they're very successful.

- So on the funny theme is an ad that I asked Tim to comment on coming from the Sharice Davids race, so we'll take a look at that ad now.

- Amanda Atkins, what's her story?

- Brownback.

- Atkins?

She was a top advisor to governor, what's his name?

- Brownback!

- You know, the governor that passed that tax scheme that devastated schools?

- Oh yeah, Sam so-and-so.

- Brownback.

- She helped him pass it, they're as thick as thieves.

- Who?

- Atkins, and- - Oh yeah, running for Congress, and that Sam guy.

- Brownback!

- After what they did to Kansas schools?

No thanks.

- I'm Sharice Davids, I approve this message.

- So Tim, this was Sharice David's final ad out of 13, and it also ran in the last few days, and her only humorous ad, so why do you think that might, well, do you think it might have helped her at the end?

- I think your point about last, end-of-campaign ads, people are totally sick of the race and humor is gonna sell, and I think that's what this was about, I think humor's a great idea in campaigns.

Steve Johnson early in his campaign had an exploding car.

The Brownback, the anti-Brownback people had an ad in which a car flew off a cliff.

You know, we had a lot of car destruction here, but it was kinda funny, funny stuff, and I just think, I think that's great, too many ads are super serious.

We need the serious ads, but we also need the funny ads too.

- All right, you each get 10 seconds.

So just the, we literally have less than a minute.

About this election?

What surprised you the most?

Amber.

- I was surprised at the Constitutional Amendment 1 vote.

I think that it was so tight because people didn't understand the language because you've intentionally created an overly complicated ballot.

- All right, Tim Carpenter.

- I think Derek Schmidt lost his race because he was not genuine with who he is.

I sense that he's a more moderate Republican and he was afraid that if he showed that to anybody, he would lose.

- Interesting.

Rebekah.

- I think just the closeness of some of these races, including the governor's race and then also the attorney general race, very, very small margins, but the people that, one, came out in the end.

I think that it was interesting to see, like, how the tide kind of shifted for Republicans this year.

- Sure.

Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of IGI.

If you have any comments or suggestions for future topics, send us an email at issues@ktwu.org.

If you would like to view this program again or any previous episodes of IGI, visit us online at watch.ktwu.org for IGI.

I'm Bob Beatty, thanks for watching.

(calm music) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you with support from the Lewis H. Humphreys Charitable Trust and from the friends of KTWU.