Kansas primary: Biden and Trump dominate, but who’s the ‘real winner’ here? | Opinion
Certain people these days have a hobby of proclaiming their patriotism — and judging everybody else’s.
Usually, it’s about some culture-war nonsense like who’s standing and singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at a football game or who has the most expensive fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Well, let me tell you something. You have to be pretty darn patriotic to show up for an election like the one we had Tuesday.
The Kansas presidential preference primary, our first in 32 years, had absolutely nothing on the line — unless you count democracy.
Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican former President Donald Trump were prohibitive favorites to win the Kansas vote by runaway margins. And they didn’t disappoint their fans.
As of this writing, with nearly all the votes counted statewide, Biden has 84% of Democrats and Trump 75% among Republicans. Former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is second among Republicans with 16% and Biden’s closest competitor was none of the above, 10%.
Trump initially had some high-profile challengers in Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but both dropped out of the race before it got anywhere near Kansas.
And to put a cherry on the sundae, both Biden and Trump already had enough convention delegates to have sewn up their parties’ respective nominations.
I spent Tuesday afternoon talking with voters — there weren’t many of them — and poll workers who were more or less bored out of their skulls by an election where they could go a half hour or longer between voters.
I really only had one question: “Why are you here?”
“I’m just doing the patriotic thing,” answered Edward Meister, a retired Goddard pharmacist, who voted at the Reliance Community Church in West Wichita. “I just do it every election.”
His wife Jo said she came because she wanted to show her support for Biden, whether the nominating process was over or not.
At the nearby polling place at Evidence Church, Randall McKinney was doing the same thing as Jo Meister, but for Trump. “I voted to show some support and enthusiasm for my candidate, even though it’s a foregone conclusion,” he said.
Reliance Church is my polling site and I was voter No. 49, (not counting two provisional voters) approximately seven hours into the election.
I hung out for about an hour, and counted five more regular voters, one provisional voter and one guy who just wandered in to find out what was going on, and left without voting because he didn’t know what party he’s a member of.
At Evidence Church, it was much the same. They had 54 votes cast by about 3 p.m., eight hours into the election.
Poll workers: long hours for low pay
It’s a time-honored cliche among political pundits to point out who the “real winner” is in situations like these.
My nomination this time goes to the poll workers.
They got paid $8.50 an hour ($11 for supervising poll judges) for a 15-hour day that included maybe a little over two hours of actual work, mostly setting up and taking down the equipment for the polling place.
That works out to somewhere around $127 for the regular workers and $165 for the judges (the obvious downside being that they had to get there at 4:45 a.m. and stay until around 8 p.m.).
At Evidence Church, poll worker Cindy Gillihan said she planned to spend her check from the county on a pair of fancy multicolored Hoka athletic shoes, like her polling place co-worker Bob Bishop was sporting.
We have a winner.
What really impressed me about the workers at both sites I visited was that they treated the primary seriously, like a dress rehearsal for the real elections to come.
At both sites, the workers rotated stations after each small group of voters, so they’ll all know how to do every job when November rolls around and they’re likely to be swamped.
Despite this primary being kind of a dud, my hope is we’ll continue to have them.
It’s the first time I ever got to vote in one in Kansas and I spent too much time in Topeka watching the Legislature cancel primaries every four years due to lack of interest or lack of money.
This primary didn’t count for anything significant, but it was still better than the party caucuses we’ve been using to parcel out the state’s delegates to presidential nominees.
I’ve covered every caucus since I got to Kansas in 1998.
The Republican ones have been so regimented that they were actually kind of creepy in a George Orwell sort of way. And Democratic caucuses have been so chaotic that they echoed Will Rogers’ famous quote: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
So to Edward and Jo Meister, Randall McKinney, Cindy Gillihan, Bob Bishop and all the others who put in their time as voters and poll workers, thank you for doing your duty as Americans — and patriots.
You done good. We’ll get ‘em next time.
This story was originally published March 19, 2024 at 10:08 PM.
