Ty Masterson’s vanity pushed Pyle into governor’s race, sinking Schmidt | Opinion
.JPG "This screen capture is from gubernatorial candidate Dennis Pyle’s ad linking his opposition to abortion rights with his opposition to transgender athletes in girls’ and womens’ sports.")
Kansas Republican leaders will blame Dennis Pyle for four more years of Laura Kelly as governor.
But the real architect behind Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s loss to Kelly is Ty Masterson of Andover, the Republican president of the state Senate.
In a fit of political pique over redistricting last February, Masterson pushed Pyle around. And Pyle, one of the most rigid conservatives ever to walk the corridors of the Capitol, pushed back harder.
The day after Tuesday’s gubernatorial election, Kelly leads Schmidt by a razor-thin 14,110 votes out of almost a million votes cast. Pyle got 19,762 votes in a long-shot, hyper-conservative independent gubernatorial campaign.
If a single Pyle vote would have gone to Kelly, that voter would be my nominee for Kansas’ most confused individual, because Kelly represents just about everything the rock-ribbed right hates.
If Pyle had stayed out of the race, there’s little doubt that Team Schmidt would be popping champagne corks today.
Instead, they watched as NBC, CNN and the Associated Press called the race for Kelly, and Schmidt conceded Wednesday afternoon.
So how’d we get here?
The seed was planted in February, during the Legislature’s consideration of a redistricting map designed to cement Republican power in Kansas for at least the next decade.
Goal No. 1 was to unseat U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, Kansas’ only congressional Democrat.
The House and Senate both passed a map proposed by Masterson called Ad Astra 2. Kelly predictably vetoed it and the initial Senate vote to override her fell slightly short of the two-thirds majority needed.
Pyle, of Hiawatha, and others fretted that the map might dilute the deep-red conservatism of their beloved “Big 1st” District by moving Lawrence, the state’s only liberal stronghold, into it.
A day later, after Masterson applied pressure, a couple of senators flipped and his map became state law.
Masterson could have taken his win and gone home, but he’s too vain for that.
Republican senators had defied him, however briefly, and needed to be punished.
So he stripped three senators, including Pyle, of prime committee assignments, to send a message that he was in charge and others better fall in line.
Four months after Masterson did his end-zone dance on Pyle’s spine, Pyle left the Republican Party, re-registered as unaffiliated and hit the campaign trail for governor.
GOP leaders tried to get him to back out, but they had no leverage because Masterson had already pretty much nuked Pyle’s Senate career.
He got some financial help from Democrats, who recognized that a vote for Pyle was a vote peeled off Schmidt.
Surprisingly, Pyle’s low-budget campaign had the election’s best ad. It followed a young girl from fetus to swimming medalist and vowed “to protect women’s sports, from conception, to the fulfillment of her dreams.”
It highlighted Pyle’s unswerving devotion to banning both abortions and transgender athletes.
Stung by the ignominious defeat of the anti-abortion “Value Them Both Amendment” in the August primary, Schmidt’s campaign comments on abortion — the GOP’s bread-and-butter issue for decades — were muted and vague.
You know the rest. Four more years for Kelly, who political experts had called the Democrats’ most vulnerable sitting governor going into the election.
And Masterson failed to even unseat Davids, who won easily despite his best efforts to gerrymander her into political oblivion.
So it all ultimately turned into a futile effort that backfired on Schmidt.
Maybe Ty Masterson has learned a valuable lesson that if you mistreat other lawmakers, even the annoying ones, they might come back to haunt you and your party.
But I wouldn’t count on it.
This story was originally published November 9, 2022 at 5:26 PM.
