As just about everybody paying attention expected, Kris Kobach steam-rolled his way into Kansas Secretary of State's office last night. He kind of humiliated his Democratic rival, Chris Biggs, 59 percent to 37.
Kobach certainly deserves credit for knocking off Biggs, the lucid incumbent who flatly refused to engage in fear mongering or interesting campaigning. Kobach, like any crafty politician, traded on his name recognition, scary threats of illegals and dead people (and illegal dead people!) voting and, as KCUR reported just last week, voters' apathy about the post. Kobach's march to office was inevitable.
But Kobach ran a far from perfect campaign. At times during the last five months, he was running against himself more than he was running against Biggs.
Way back in June, it looked like Kobach's political future might
have been dead just as he began running for SOS, when it was discovered
that the Kansas GOP's cash was mishandled
during his time as the party chairman. A Federal Elections Commission
report found that the state party violated the law by taking cash from
corporations, and the coffers all but dried up. Kobach wasn't accused of
doing anything malicious or criminal, and he successfully blamed an
underling he hired. But a Kansas State political scientist told The Kansas
City Star: "Anytime a public figure appears to be incompetent in terms
of the handling of finances ... it doesn't help in terms of his
impending candidacy. The timing could not be worse for any candidate."
But Kobach showed him.
Kobach also survived a brief flirtation
with birthers. Remember them? The Piper conservative made comments in
July that could be, at least, seen as sympathetic to those that craved
President Obama's birth certificate (but not the one he released, a different
birth certificate). He masterfully walked the line by hedging himself
and insinuating the president could be a foreigner at the same time. He told
followers in an Overland Park retirement home, "Look, until a court
says otherwise, I'm willing to accept that he's a natural U.S. citizen.
But I think it is a fair question: Why not just produce the long-form
birth certificate?" That might seem like an extreme stance to some, but
it wasn't enough to turn Kansans off.
And last week, Kobach
survived what surely was his biggest blunder of the election. In what
was either slacking off on due diligence or political hubris (Did he
actually think nobody would check into his claims?), he announced
that he found dead
guy who voted in the primary this year. Unfortunately for Kobach, the
voter was actually alive and raking
leaves in his front yard. People should care about this! Kobach was
running on fear of voter fraud, and he negated his own strategy by lying
about it. If anything would turn voters off a candidate, getting caught
fabricating dead voter stories would do the trick, right? No. Voters
still picked him over Biggs.
Yes, Kobach was untouchable during the campaign, and it should be fun to watch him try to gobble up new authority for his office, like teaching kids civics and repealing birthright citizenship. As for Biggs, he'll always have the banjo.
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Kobach is an interesting candidate to follow. He may have won the SOS election, but if you look at the numbers, Republican turnout was 36,822 less than 2006 and 38,986 less than 2002. Those numbers represent huge losses for an office which hardly recieves any noteworthy attention from the media. Given Kobach's notoriety, one would expect to see an increase in Republican turnout.
On the other hand, Democratic turnout was up 43,834 from 2006 and up 50,943 from 2002. This is interesting in terms of Humphreys' and Kropf's (2004) discussion of the burgeoning rift within Kansas' Republican Party.
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