Russell Arben Fox is a professor of political science at Friends University in Wichita, Kan.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach leads Governor Jeff Colyer by fewer than 200 votes in my state's Republican primary. Neither has conceded, and even the least contentious possible outcome will inevitably involve further delays, possible recounts, and bad feelings. A divisive Republican primary is hardly bad news for local Democrats, of which I’m one. But I'm confident that a clean win by Colyer, rather than Kobach, would have been the best news of all.

This may strike you as as surprising. Wouldn't the Democratic candidate (longtime state Senator Laura Kelly, a close friend of former Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius and a politician well-connected to the state’s Democratic power base in the northeast corner of the state) prefer to run against a polarizing and unpopular figure like Kobach?


After all, this is a man who has barnstormed across the country, selling barely hidden nativism and immigrant-bashing, involving himself in failed lawsuits and political crusades that have left cities with legal bills in the millions and personal contempt charges that he's been able to foist upon Kansas taxpayers to pay in his behalf. He embraced President Donald Trump's groundless claims about “millions” of undocumented residents voting in American elections, and was appointed by Trump himself to lead a panel determined to expose this scandal, which ignominiously disbanded when no evidence could be found. Accusations about the false information Kobach peddled through that panel are plentiful. (Kobach's personal crusade to find illegal voting has resulted, after nearly eight years in office, in all of nine convictions.) On top of all this, Kobach simply hasn't done a terribly good job as secretary of state. Technological election glitches and confused voter instructions—at least some of them arguably related to Kobach’s legally blocked campaign to change citizenship requirements for voting and to create new rules for purging the voter rolls in Kansas—continue to be endemic.

So why wouldn't Democrats want to run against a target like that, especially in a conservative state like Kansas, where Democrats need to divide the opposition and recruit moderate Republicans to their cause? In brief, because a Colyer candidacy would more likely make the Kansas gubernatorial race a referendum on something unpopular: former Governor Sam Brownback’s ruinous tax cuts. Whereas a Kobach campaign is likely to make the election a referendum on something far more popular among Kansas voters: President Donald Trump.

Coyler, the current governor, has barely had six months to build any kind of momentum, and as Brownback's lieutenant governor, he has a tightrope that's nearly impossible to walk. He has been obliged, by fiscal reality, legislative action, and state Supreme Court decisions, to acquiesce to dialing back Brownback's irresponsible tax-cut vision and moving toward more sustainable approaches to taxation and school funding. As a result, Colyer, otherwise quite conservative, found himself occupying a “moderate” position in the state's Republican constellation.

Yet he couldn't easily embrace that position, rejecting Brownback's legacy and casting himself on the side of those who always fought against Brownback, because, of course, he was central to the Brownback wing of the party. Which means that the script that a Democratic opponent to Coyler would follow writes itself: emphasize his position in what is widely regarded throughout Kansas—even by many members of his own party—as a failed Republican administration, watch him contort in his efforts to distinguish himself from his disliked predecessor while not alienating the true-believing base which forms the conservative faction in the party, and reap the benefits.

Hanging Kobach with Brownback’s failures wouldn't be impossible, but it would be harder. Sebelius is often credited with an adage in Kansas politics: “Democrats don't win in Kansas; Republicans lose.” That is, when the Republican Party can't unify its conservative and moderate factions, or when they are burdened with a candidate that various intraparty factions dislike, Democrats have a window of opportunity.

This is what Democrats—and really, everyone on the left in Kansas—have been anticipating since the 2016 election. While nationwide, the election of Trump left millions of liberals, progressives, socialists and just plain ordinary Democrats feeling shellacked, here in Kansas those of us on the left could console ourselves with local results that showed the “Brownback Revolution” finally coming apart. As is well known to anyone who ever Googled “Kansas” or “Brownback” or "tax experiment" in the past six years, Brownback, elected governor in 2010, brought with him into the legislature a core of passionate, deluded believers in the old supply-side economic gospel. In 2012, he orchestrated successful primary challenges against multiple moderate Republicans, which when all was said and done effectively put one conservative faction entirely in charge of the state Republican party.

The result was an essentially uncontested “march to zero” plan to turn Kansas into a no-income-tax state, a plan that flew in the face of fiscal reality and had devastating consequences for Kansas’s education funding, roads and social services, to say nothing of the state’s credit rating and socioeconomic health. The dispiriting nadir for Kansas Democrats was Brownback's reelection in 2014. Since then, through the 2016 primaries and general elections when Republican moderates and Democrats finally started to push back, and through Brownback's departure for a diplomatic post in January with a miserable approval rating, we have been watching the window for Democrats to make a showing in the state capital of Topeka. It seems to have only widened.

Even so, I think it would be widest with Colyer at the top of the Republican ballot, rather than Kobach. One thing to remember is that it's not enough to say that Kansas is a conservative state. It is, of course, for a host of demographic and cultural reasons. But it is even more so a profoundly Republican state, with a close association between that political party and the attitudes and perspectives of the majority of the state's (white) citizens that extend back practically to the moment of state's entrance to the union on the brink of the Civil War. The Republican Party’s lock on Kansas politics isn’t absolute, but it’s pretty close. Kansas hasn't elected a non-Republican to the U.S. Senate since 1939, and the last time Republicans lost control of the state Senate was 1917. Thomas Frank was right to observe that Kansas was more riled by the Populist insurgency of the 1890s and early 1900s than any other state. But unlike elsewhere in America, the Democrats were not able to build on that insurgency, and Republican dominance returned in force.

The result of this longtime party rule has meant, naturally, that factions within the dominant party became more entrenched and, sometimes, combative. Since the 1950s and 1960s, it has been an accepted fact in Kansas politics that policy would always be determined by the relative, shifting, factional strength of three groups: conservative Republicans, moderate Republicans, and—always in third place—the Democrats. Over the past four decades of the 20th century though, that triangulation enabled Kansas's political class to maintain fairly stable, and relatively sustainable, fiscal policies, not to mention generally only moderately conservative cultural policies, with Democrats occupying the governor's mansion for 28 of the past 60 years.

Whether she runs against Kobach or Colyer, Laura Kelly has a shot at being the latest Democratic governor in Republican Kansas. I've no doubt that she will follow essentially the same anti-Brownback playbook no matter whom her opponent ends up being. But I wonder if it would work as well against Kobach, simply because he will carry so much national baggage into the campaign. I expect Kelly to struggle to keep a monotonous focus, campaigning against the Brownback legacy, in such a target-rich environment.

This is not to deny that she couldn't find good, salient arguments against Kobach and all that baggage. But will those arguments be politically effective, in a state where being Republican is such a deeply engrained default? I doubt it. I simply suspect they wouldn't be as effective as pointing to an unpopular Republican governor, tying his former lieutenant governor to him, and saying, “Republicans need to get their house to order; time to send a Democrat in to fix things.” After all, this is a message that has actually worked in Kansas' recent past. To do the same in the midst of Fox News-amplified noise about citizenship, immigration, race relations and Trump’s tweets will be difficult, to say the least. (If Kobach is the nominee, I suspect the question won't be whether Trump will come to Kansas to campaign for his protégé, but whether he will come twice.)

To complicate the race further, we also have Greg Orman—a wealthy, smart, relatively young and attractive, socially liberal, business-friendly independent from the Kansas City area—running for governor. With a socially conservative state politician as his running mate, Orman seems to have designed his campaign in anticipation of Kobach winning the nomination. He has checked all the boxes that would be necessary for him to be appealing to moderate Republicans who can’t stand Kobach.

With a less-polarizing figure leading the Republican race, the appeal of Orman’s proclaimed independence would be lessened somewhat. Part of his argument is that he is outside the familiar battles between conservatives, moderates and Democrats from Kansas history. A race that was a referendum on Brownback, a referendum that could borrow from patterns familiar with Kansas voters—an unbalanced Republican Party in need of correction!—might arguably have given his pox-on-both-houses rhetoric less purchase. But with Kobach as the nominee, Orman would definitely be in the hunt—and the effects a serious independent candidacy would have on Democrats in this Republican state are easy to guess.

The key for Kelly will be to keep the race as Kansas-specific as possible. Unlike Colyer, Kobach aggressively embraces the Brownback tax legacy, promising to restore the cuts that the state House partially repealed last year. But with the national attention and money that follows Kobach everywhere he goes, preventing him from transforming the race into a referendum on Trump and the future of American civilization, as opposed to on a Kansas Republican governor’s legacy, would be difficult.

Every one of us on the left in Kansas should be hoping, I think, for absentee ballots or some other unanticipated event to swing the Republican nomination back in Colyer's direction. Either way, though, our work is cut out for us. But of course, that's nothing new.