Despite 2018 loss, Kris Kobach bets Kansans will still buy his model of politics

Growing up the son of a Buick dealer, Kris Kobach spent high school preparing new cars for delivery. He cleaned every inch, even the engine itself. He removed price stickers with soap, Windex and razor blades.

Today, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate sees similarities between selling cars and politicians.

“Let’s take the example of Jeep,” Kobach said.

“Jeep has a very high reliability rating right now. They hold their value,” said the former Kansas Secretary of State, who has paraded in a very real Jeep mounted with a replica machine gun. He likened his main primary rival, Rep. Roger Marshall, to a Ford Taurus, which he described as “just sort of a vanilla car.”

Kobach might have done a bit more research. “Jeeps have a long history of customer loyalty despite lagging in reliability” and other characteristics, according to Consumer Reports.

As it turns out, the Jeep comparison is on target. The Harvard-trained lawyer, 54, is a well-known brand among Kansas Republicans who commands an intensely loyal base. He has established a national reputation fighting illegal immigration and the perceived threat of widespread voter fraud.

But for other voters, reliability is a question.

He supported President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election and backed the idea that the United States could make Mexico pay for an expansive border wall. He personally defended in court a Kansas law that requires residents to prove their citizenship to register to vote — and was found in contempt for his conduct during the civil trial.

In the last year, Kobach has accused Democrats of using the coronavirus pandemic to push socialism, called for military action against Mexican drug cartels and labeled a U.S. Supreme Court decision that keeps the Trump administration from deporting undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children “one of its worst decisions of the year.”

His campaign has been greeted with existential panic in some quarters of the Republican Party, which fear he could lose the November election to Democrat Barbara Bollier, a state senator who until recently was a moderate Republican. His GOP critics also worry he will force national Republicans to spend valuable resources fighting for a Senate seat the party has held since the 1930s.

Kobach’s 2018 loss in the governor’s race — while he was still Kansas secretary of state — remains fresh for many. Democrat Laura Kelly soundly defeated him, 48% to 43%. It was the GOP’s worst showing in the gubernatorial election since 2006.

“Kris Kobach is a political tragedy. He was the rising star in Republican Kansas politics. The road ahead for him looked bright,” state Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat, said. “But today you have to say that his star is rapidly falling and it’s through his own missteps and misjudgments.”

The Established Brand

After years of headlines, most Kansans have long since made up their minds about Kobach, for better or worse.

In 2018, as he battled Kelly, one poll found 47 percent of voters had an unfavorable view.

Despite the sting of that loss, Kobach hasn’t revamped his message or put a new spin on his views for the 2020 model. Instead, he is leaning into his status as a known quantity.

“The consistent conservative,” his billboards say. His Senate campaign logo even resembles the one from his gubernatorial run.

“Kris from year to year to year does not change his views. He does not change his speech. He does not capitulate or gloss over issues to meet the crowd or the situation he finds himself,” said Wink Hartman, Kobach’s 2018 running mate. “People, either they like his stances or understand it, or they don’t. But I will give him great marks for he does not change.”

Kobach, who has been in the public eye in Kansas for more than a decade, has said he doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t a conservative. He earned degrees from both Harvard and Oxford, and studied under Samuel Huntington, director of the Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.

Huntington argued South Africa, then under apartheid, should follow a “policy of simultaneous reform and repression,” according to a 1987 review of his work in The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. He went on to write a 1996 book that said battles between cultures, not countries, would define future conflicts.

While he has since distanced himself from some of Huntington’s more radical ideas, he also once acknowledged to The New York Times that Huntington “touched on a lot of themes I’ve worked on with immigration law.”

Kobach bristles at any suggestion he is racist.

“Take the caricature of racist: ‘So he has been fighting against illegal immigration for 20 years, therefore he hates people who aren’t white,’” Kobach said. “One little kernel of truth and then you have this big false thing that some people propagate.”

In Kobach’s words, his caricature is of a “really mean guy” and so extreme he can’t see other sides of an argument.

“I think that’s false,” Kobach said. “I certainly strive as a Christian to be respectful of everyone and see us all as equal in the eyes of God and to be kind and loving to other people.”

Kobach worked at the Department of Justice in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, an experience he has highlighted in past campaigns. While at the agency, he helped develop the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, to register non-citizens from select countries coming into the United States.

Critics said the countries chosen for the program were disproportionately Muslim-majority nations and it was suspended under President Barack Obama.

More recently, Kobach was a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a member of the Overland Park city council.

He rose to national prominence over the past decade as Kansas secretary of state, an office he held from 2011 until 2019. He turned what had previously been a mostly clerical position into a platform for his fights against voter fraud and illegal immigration.

As Kobach contemplates the possibility of becoming the next U.S. senator from Kansas, he views Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley as a role model.

“Because he’s been a staunch conservative,” Kobach said. “He’s also been unafraid to take on established interests like Google, like the social media giants.”

He has also considered what being a Republican senator will be like if Democrat Joe Biden defeats Trump.

Kobach said a Biden presidency would cause him to take a dramatically different approach to serving in the Senate. He promised he would be “leading the defense” and grill Biden’s judicial nominees.

2018 Sequel?

Kobach’s 2018 loss continues to hang over both Republican insiders and grassroots voters.

To his critics, Kobach’s continuing weakness is readily apparent. No sophisticated opposition research is needed to dig up problematic comments and past controversies. And he has been unable or unwilling to change course following his 2018 loss, they contend.

“I think a lot of these voters are a little leery to do that again,” Kelly Arnold, former Kansas GOP chairman, said of the 2018 race. “I think a lot of people see what’s at stake.”

A new PAC is spending millions on anti-Kobach TV ads in the final stretch of the primary including one about a paid volunteer who posted on a white nationalist website (the volunteer was fired). He’s using the assault to try to rally the most conservative voters to his side.

In the immediate aftermath of 2018, Kobach said his campaign made no critical errors. This despite more than a dozen GOP strategists and officials describing a candidate who refused to listen to advice and didn’t spend enough energy on fundraising. He maintains he was swept away by a national Democratic wave, and points to the fact that while Kansas is generally conservative, the governor’s office regularly switches parties.

“We got 21,000 more votes than Brownback did in 2014 and that still wasn’t enough to overcome that blue wave,” Kobach said. He actually received 19,834 more votes than Brownback.

At a meet-and-greet Friday in Junction City, Kobach also acknowledged his campaign for governor had made tactical missteps.

“Sedgwick County is one example. We found that in Sedgwick County we could have done a much better -- done much better generally on the ground game because the ground game is our strong suit,” Kobach said. “And so we have a totally different team in Sedgwick County this year.”

Kobach and Trump

Trump hasn’t endorsed in the race. Kobach said that while things could change, he doesn’t anticipate the president weighing in.

“I think there’s a sense of personal loyalty to me and then he’s also got some people in the Washington establishment leaning on him to pick a less conservative candidate like Roger Marshall,” he said.

Kobach, who frequently touts that he endorsed Trump before the Kansas Republican presidential primary in 2016, lost the 2018 race despite vocal support from the president, who held a Topeka rally to support him and other Republicans weeks before the general election. Trump went as far as joking that he hoped Kobach lost “because I want him so badly” for the administration.

Kobach later flirted with becoming an “immigration czar” but a list of demands attributed to him later leaked. They included 24-hour access to a jet, guaranteed weekends off and assurances he would ultimately lead the Department of Homeland Security.

As a job failed to materialize, Kobach dove into working as general counsel for We Build The Wall, a group that raises funds to build strips of private wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Founded by veteran Brian Kolfage, its advisory board has attracted a who’s who of the Trumpian right: former White House strategist Steve Bannon, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, among others.

“We’ve had so many eyes just watching every move that we make and (Kobach’s) been able to help me make sure that everything we do is by the book and legally above board,” Kolfage said.

Kobach said his work has involved negotiating with land owners, but also discussions with the Department of Homeland Security “making sure that our specifications are consistent with theirs.”

The group has experienced stumbles, however. A ProPublica investigation published July 2 found that one segment of wall aided by We Build The Wall is showing signs of runoff erosion that could place it at risk of falling into the Rio Grande River if it isn’t fixed.

Trump then tweeted that he disagreed with building the wall. “It was only done to make me look bad, and perhaps it now doesn’t even work. Should have been built like rest of Wall, 500 plus miles,” the president wrote.

Trump hasn’t publicly waded into the Senate primary, but The New York Times reported he had asked the Club for Growth to stop airing anti-Marshall ads. Kobach, an early supporter of Trump who has informally advised him for several years, rejects any suggestion there’s been a cooling of their relationship.

“We have a very good relationship and it hasn’t really changed,” Kobach said.

Kobach said he spoke to Trump on the phone right after his June 20 Tulsa rally, which drew far fewer participants than the Trump campaign had expected.

“We still talk the same way to each other, still talk on the phone very frequently,” Kobach said.

This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.