Leading Off
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Democrat Chris Mann is getting some high-profile help from an unusual corner in his rematch against Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach: Kansas’ statewide police union.
The Kansas State Lodge Fraternal Order of Police announced Tuesday that it was endorsing Mann, the first time since 2002 it’s supported a Democrat in the race to become the state’s top lawyer.
The FOP, which backed Republican Ty Masterson’s bid for the open governorship that same day, didn’t mention Kobach in a statement praising Mann’s background as a “former police officer turned prosecutor.”
The Democrat, however, soon used the new endorsement to bolster his case that Kobach, an extremist who has spent well over a decade pursuing conservative causes far outside state lines, is the wrong person to serve as attorney general.
“My opponent has never worn a badge,” Mann said at a debate on Tuesday. “He’s never stood toe to toe with violent criminals on the street or in a courtroom. Instead, that man has run for almost every office in the state of Kansas, and he’s done it because he wanted to push his political agenda.”
A survey last month for the Democratic Attorneys General Association found Mann, who lost a tight race to Kobach in 2022, narrowly leading 47-46 this time, while Republicans have not publicly released any recent polling. Mann has also dominated in fundraising this year.
Kobach pushed back at the debate by arguing that crime was “plummeting” under his watch because of “how we’ve removed violent illegal aliens who are allowed to remain in Kansas”—the very issue that first garnered him national attention years ago.
Kobach, who held a high-level position in the U.S. Justice Department during the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency, was the primary author of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, the 2010 anti-immigration bill that authorized the police to demand proof of citizenship during routine traffic stops.
He swiftly parlayed that effort into conservative stardom and began instructing other states and municipalities on implementing similar policies. Kobach’s profile only grew when he was elected Kansas secretary of state later that year.
In office, he convinced the GOP-controlled legislature to allow him to prosecute voter fraud—a power no other attorney general in the nation possessed, according to the Brennan Center.
Armed with that new authority, Kobach spent his eight years in office winning the type of adulation from conservatives—and scorn from critics—that most Republican politicians could only dream of. The liberal publication Mother Jones profiled him in a 2012 piece titled “Kris Kobach, Nativist Son,” while Donald Trump chose him to lead his bogus “Election Integrity Commission” in 2017.
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Kobach often saw his agenda blocked in court, and on one memorable occasion, a federal judge ordered him to take a remedial legal education course after he violated evidence disclosure rules. (He completed a six-hour course called “Civil Trial: Everything You Need to Know”—and charged it to taxpayers.)
But in 2018, he nonetheless appeared to be on the cusp of climbing the next rung of the political ladder when he ran for governor.
Thanks to a Trump endorsement, Kobach secured a 343-vote win in the GOP primary against Jeff Colyer, who had become governor just six months earlier after the extremely unpopular Sam Brownback resigned to take a post in the Trump administration. He thereafter spent most of the general election as the favorite to lead this conservative state.
There was even talk that Kobach could eventually seek the presidency following his anticipated win against Democrat Laura Kelly and Greg Orman, an independent whom Democrats feared would siphon away votes Kelly needed. But Kelly, who relentlessly tied Kobach to Brownback’s disastrous financial stewardship of the state, turned the Republican’s national fame into a liability.
“He goes on television and he talks and he talks and he talks,” Kelly told the Wichita Eagle during the campaign. “He probably watches it over and over again, and he loves every bit of it. And I’m glad somebody does. I don’t think any of us have enjoyed it.”
Kelly went on to upset Kobach 48-43, and for a time that seemed to be the end of his once-promising political career.
The Kansas City Star published a story shortly after the election in which fellow Republicans trashed his effort, with one source saying, “The joke was, you’d say ‘the Kobach campaign’ and [then] you’d say, ‘what campaign?’”
Axios reported the following year that Trump’s transition team had considered Kobach to become his first secretary of Homeland Security, but his reported ties to avowed white supremacists were a “red flag,” and he was never nominated. Still, Kobach stubbornly refused to go away.
In 2020, he campaigned for an open U.S. Senate seat, a prospect that excited Democrats enough to spur them to meddle in the GOP primary on his behalf. But Rep. Roger Marshall, who benefited from a well-funded conservative effort to stop Kobach, decisively beat him and went on to comfortably win the general election.
Kobach, though, got another chance for a comeback in 2022 when Attorney General Derek Schmidt gave up his post to challenge Kelly, and this time, things aligned just right. Kobach beat his nearest primary opponent 42-38, and he edged past Mann 51-49 in the general election even as Kelly was narrowly outpacing Schmidt.
Mann is back for a second round in a year when his fellow Democrats have high hopes in Kansas. Marshall is struggling against Democrat Adam Hamilton even though the state last elected a Democratic senator in 1932. Polls show Masterson better situated against Democrat Cindy Holscher in the race to succeed the termed-out Kelly, but the race remains competitive.
Mann, for his part, is seeking to flip a post that Democrats have won just once during the last five decades. That victory took place during the 2006 Democratic wave, when incumbent Phill Kline, a Republican whose crusade against abortion clinics similarly made him a notorious figure far outside of Kansas, went down in a landslide against Democrat Paul Morrison.
Morrison, however, became embroiled in a sex scandal that resulted in his resignation after just a year in office. Then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, picked Stephen Six to replace him, but the 2010 Republican wave powered Schmidt to an easy win against Six on the same night Kobach won his first election to statewide office.
Senate
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Republican Sen. Roger Marshall has apologized after an attack ad his campaign ran about allegations of sexual abuse at church youth retreats featured images of the wrong campsite.
The alleged incidents took place two decades ago at retreats hosted by the Church of the Resurrection, a Methodist megachurch run by Marshall’s Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton.
However, Marshall’s ad used a photo of a different Kansas camp called Tall Oaks, which is unaffiliated with Hamilton’s church. That prompted a stern response from Tall Oaks, which demanded Marshall stop running the ad unless he removed the photo, which included children.