Is Kansas GOP picking a Big Lie conspiracy theorist as its leader the way forward? | Opinion

Kansas Republicans have made Mike Brown the party’s new chairman. The choice is antidemocratic in three different ways:

▪ Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner, is an ardent and enthusiastic promoter of Big Lie election conspiracies that falsely claim Donald Trump really won the 2020 presidential election. He flatly rejects the will of the voters in favor of unproven mumbo jumbo nonsense.

▪ Kansas Republican voters were given the opportunity to endorse Brown’s claims last year when he ran a primary race against incumbent Secretary of State Scott Schwab. They rejected him and his ideas, giving Schwab a 10-point margin of victory. That’s a rather clear statement of what rank-and-file Republicans think of Brown’s conspiracism, but party insiders decided to embrace him anyway.

▪ More broadly, Brown’s elevation is a response to the November election victories of Gov. Laura Kelly and 3rd District Rep. Sharice Davids, both Democrats. Republicans control three of the state’s four congressional seats, both Senate seats, a supermajority in the Kansas Legislature, and all but one elected statewide office. But the fact that Democrats in this state are still able to win an election or two now and again is treated by party elites as a veritable emergency.

“We simply can’t continue to do the same thing over and over and think that the outcome will be different,” Brown told his fellow Republicans on Saturday. “We’re going to get control of this mess, OK?”

Some mess. The Kansas GOP is dominant in this state — but not entirely dominant. The message here seems to be that only 100% electoral success is acceptable to party elites.

You know who thinks that way? Not folks who are enamored of American democracy, that’s for sure.

So now Brown has been hired to fix the “mess.” The question is whether it will produce the complete GOP electoral dominance that Sunflower State Republicans apparently desire. And there are reasons to be skeptical on that front.

State GOP leaders think Laura Kelly’s victory over Derek Schmidt in November was a fluke — an accident of math brought on by Dennis Pyle’s right-wing independent run which deprived Schmidt of the victory he might otherwise have claimed.

Maybe they’re wrong.

Kelly’s margin of victory was greater than Pyle’s vote total. And it came four years after Kelly beat Kris Kobach, the right’s standard bearer, by a much wider margin. Far from being a fluke, that’s a pretty typical result for Kansas gubernatorial elections.

Only one outright conservative — Sam Brownback in 2010 — has been able win a majority of the state’s gubernatorial votes in recent decades. Otherwise Kansas voters keep embracing Democratic women like Kelly, Kathleen Sebelius and Joan Finney, or moderate Republicans like Bill Graves. At the gubernatorial level, anyway, they have largely rejected rightist candidates like Schmidt, Kobach and Tim Shallenburger.

Brownback was the exception, and his brand is toxic with Kansas voters now.

The message seems clear: Kansas voters might generally prefer Republicans, but they don’t want their governor to come from the party’s extreme right edges. They want centrist, steady leadership.

And in response to this pattern, Kansas Republican Party leaders have chosen Mike Brown to lead them.

Perhaps Brown will surprise us and do his utmost to make the GOP more appealing to more voters across the state. Coming up with a strategy that appeals to a coalition of conservatives and moderates to give his party a real and durable majority vote — to win the game democratically — would be quite the political accomplishment.

That doesn’t seem very likely, though.

Brown is the same guy who, during the George Floyd protests in 2020, called on his Facebook followers to buy guns and ammunition and suggested he was preparing for war. His history suggests he’ll lead the party further to the right and its angrier, conspiracy-addled extremes. That might make politics in Kansas more interesting — and much messier — but it can’t possibly be good for democracy.

This story was originally published February 14, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Is Kansas GOP picking a Big Lie conspiracy theorist as its leader the way forward? | Opinion."