Kansas 2024 presidential primary may not be what you’ve been led to believe | Opinion
Kansas hasn’t had a presidential primary in the past 31 years, so like many of you, I was heartened when the Legislature and Gov. Laura Kelly — in one of the rare moments they weren’t at each others’ throats this past session — agreed to bring primaries back in the Sunflower State.
My enthusiasm has dimmed considerably after last week’s two-day hearing of the Legislature’s 2023 Special Committee on Elections.
Despite all the flowery rhetoric last session about giving the people a voice in the nominating process, the primary, it was revealed, won’t actually be binding on the Republican and Democratic parties.
“This is a presidential preference primary, so all the state is required to do is to give the results to the parties,” explained Bryan Caskey, director of elections in the secretary of state’s office. “The parties then use their own rules to determine delegate selection to their national conventions. Those rules have to be provided to us by the middle of January, we will make them public, but as a reminder, we have no say in that. We just hand over the results and the parties get to do (vocalized pause) according to their rules.”
Call me a skeptic, but a beauty contest primary that the parties may or may not abide by may not be the best expenditure of the $4 million to $5 million it’s expected to cost the taxpayers.
Also, 548,000 voters who are unaffiliated — 28% of the Kansas electorate — won’t get to vote at all. That’s actually more voters than there are Democrats in this state, 507,000 as of last month.
On the upside, disabled and working voters who can’t go to a central site and spend a day caucusing will get to vote by mail, so that’s an improvement. But even that’s a mixed mailbag, because unlike in a normal election, mail ballots in the primary will only be counted if the Post Office gets them to the election office on or before election day.
The last time Kansas had a presidential primary, I was a (relatively) young reporter in California, never imagining that one day I might be a senior-discount-eligible columnist in Wichita. And frankly, I don’t recall that whatever happened in Kansas was even a blip on the national political radar in 1992.
So I had to go back and look it up, and it actually turned out to be pretty interesting.
In 1992, President George Bush (the first) handily won among Republicans over a raft of challengers including all-purpose grouch Patrick Buchanan, comedian Pat Paulson and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who got his name at the top of the ballot by winning a fishbowl drawing for ballot order (you can’t make this stuff up).
On the Democratic side, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton easily dispatched then-California Gov. Jerry Brown, who was still on his first gubernatorial go-round and hadn’t yet shaken off the moniker “Governor Moonbeam.”
That same ballot included a vote in eight tiny counties that sought to secede from Kansas and form their own state, in protest over school taxes (the more things change, the more they stay the same).
That passed overwhelmingly and was promptly ignored by, well, everyone. Sorry, Hugoton (hotbed of secessionism) you’re stuck with us “city” folk, like it or not.
It’s actually kind of misleading to say we’ve gone 31 years without a primary, because the 1992 exercise was just a one-off. The last one before that was in 1980, which takes us back to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. It had been so long that The Wichita Eagle ran a story reminding people how to vote in one.
In my quarter-century here, I watched as the Legislature diligently canceled primary after primary because it cost too much or was too late to impact the parties’ national nominations — usually both.
And I covered our caucuses — when the parties didn’t cancel those.
It was always entertaining to see the contrast between Democrats’ earnest ineptitude — Let’s make everybody stand outside in a blizzard while we figure out what’s wrong with our paper voter list — and Republicans’ determined command-and-control — You have now been processed through our computer. Wait here to be escorted to your seat. No empty seats between voters are allowed.
Both parties said they carefully tallied the votes. But who knows?
So all things considered, it probably is better to have professional vote-counters count our votes. And it’s too late to change things now for 2024 anyway.
Maybe in the next four years, the Legislature can figure out a way to make the presidential primary more inclusive and more binding on the political parties.
I’m not holding my breath.
This story was originally published October 3, 2023 at 5:18 AM.
