Did Republican and pro-life backing sink a Wichita City Council candidate? | Opinion
Practically anywhere in Wichita, backing from the Sedgwick County Republican Party and the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life are like Willie Wonka’s Golden Ticket to public office.
But there are always exceptions. And one of the biggest is Wichita City Council District 1.
There, the dual endorsements of two of the most potent political forces in Wichita history didn’t lift Aujanae Bennett. It looks more like they dragged her down.
In our still very segregated and carefully gerrymandered city, District 1 is a deep Democratic blue island in a sea of Republican red.
The two biggest voting blocs there are people who live in the city’s historically African-American sector — the lingering result of pre-civil-rights-era real estate redlining — and the largely white, liberal bastion that we call College Hill, although it has neither a college nor much of a hill.
City Council and school board races — the only offices on Tuesday’s primary ballot — are supposed to be nonpartisan.
Occasionally, they even are.
But in recent years, the Republican Party has been actively recruiting candidates and campaigning for them to try to add the City Council and the USD 259 board to its conquests, which include a veto-proof more-than-two-thirds majority in the state Legislature and the entire Sedgwick County Commission.
Democrats have also provided some logistical support to city and school board candidates who are party members, but not nearly to the extent Republicans have.
In District 1, all five candidates on Tuesday’s ballot were Democrats.
Bennett is the most conservative — and passed the pro-life litmus test the GOP applies to all its potential candidates.
Her introduction to Republican circles began at a June 15 campaign forum at Wichita State University, sponsored by the Wichita Journalism Collaborative, a group of 10 local news and information organizations (of which The Eagle is a founding member).
In the crowd that night was Ben Davis, a local GOP operative and consultant. After hearing the candidates speak, he introduced himself to Bennett.
“So we just began to talk, and he invited me out to coffee. We talked, and then he introduced me to (Sedgwick County Republican Party Chairman) John Whitmer,” Bennett said. “We had a great conversation, and they came on board. And then I spoke with Larry Damm, with Kansans for Life, and they endorsed me. Just a great group of people.”
Bennett made an appearance on Whitmer’s radio show on KNSS. And that’s when the trouble started.
Chase Billingham, a Wichita State sociologist, put a post on Facebook, including this quote from Whitmer about Bennett: “She is the only choice for GOP voters. She’s more conservative, frankly, than some elected Republicans I know.”
That association didn’t sit well with local Democratic leaders, some of whom objected to Bennett using the Democrats’ “Vote Builder” election software at the same time as the Republican Party was sending out email blasts to their voters supporting her.
In the end, the order of finish was former Sedgwick County Democratic Party Chairman Joseph Shepard in first, well ahead of the second-place finisher, community activist LaWanda DeShazer. They’ll face off in the general election Nov. 4.
Former Park Board member and Democratic political consultant Chris Pumpelly finished third in Tuesday’s primary. Bennett was fourth, with FEMA employee Darryl Carrington bringing up the rear.
I talked to Bennett after the votes were counted and asked if she thought the support from the Republicans helped or hurt her campaign.
She said “I’m not really sure.”
Neither am I, but the way things turned out, I have a really strong suspicion.
I’m going to surmise that Shepard was the biggest beneficiary of the Republicans endorsing Bennett’s campaign.
It gave him insulation from some early campaign grousing among Democrats that he might be too chummy with his old WSU college friend, council member Dalton Glasscock, a conservative who served as Sedgwick County Republican chairman at the same time as Shepard was chairing the Democrats.
With Bennett out of the way, we’ll see if that resurfaces as an issue between now and November.
