The return of the moderates
The political pendulum at last swung toward the center Tuesday in Kansas, taking out a congressman, perhaps a dozen state legislators and a Sedgwick County commissioner.
Kansas can hope the stunning GOP primary results lead to the restoration of order to the state’s finances. That’s a must after all the missed revenue projections, credit rating downgrades, budget cuts, highway fund raids and other fiscal mismanagement.
Tuesday’s moderate uprising was concentrated in Johnson County, where five conservative House members were swept away in an apparent wave of support for K-12 public schools.
But even Republican voters as far away as Hutchinson and Garden City were drawn to the candidates running as pragmatic consensus builders. The makeup of the Kansas Senate especially changed, even losing Majority Leader Terry Bruce of Hutchinson.
An architect of the state’s poor finances, Sen. Ty Masterson, R-Andover, survived a strong moderate challenge, and other conservative incumbents did well in the Wichita area. But it was good to see that, at least according to preliminary results, Republicans endorsed another term for Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick.
It was just the accountability election that the Statehouse needed. It will require Gov. Sam Brownback to be more willing to work with others and face his own responsibility for his signature tax cuts, which have proved unfair and insufficient as fiscal policy and ineffective as economic stimulus.
The national news was made by the 1st Congressional District, where Republicans gave Great Bend physician Roger Marshall the nod and three-term Tim Huelskamp his comeuppance. Marshall is a likable conservative with good prospects to reclaim Kansas’ historical seat on the House Agriculture Committee.
Sedgwick County won’t know until November whether the County Commission will continue its hard-right stance; which faction has the three-vote majority will depend on the District 2 contest between Democratic incumbent Tim Norton and Republican Michael O’Donnell.
But District 3 Republicans spoke clearly Tuesday in choosing David Dennis over incumbent Karl Peterjohn, who’d misused the commission bench as a political soapbox and enabled the current majority’s bad decision making.
That primary was not only about supporting the Sedgwick County Zoo, public health, and regional and economic partnerships but, like much of what happened Tuesday around Kansas, about pulling government away from the far-right fringe.
No matter the Nov. 8 election results, 2016 will stand out for how GOP primary voters in Kansas ousted ultraconservative incumbents who’d overreached and underperformed.
This story was originally published August 3, 2016 at 12:08 PM with the headline "The return of the moderates."