Progressives turn tide, dominate Wichita elections. What’s it all mean? | Opinion
It was a big election night for progressive candidates in Wichita.
It’s been a while.
In local elections for three seats on the Wichita City Council and four on the USD 259 school board, progressives won six out seven races.
On the city side, incumbent Mike Hoheisel easily handled challenger Genevieve Howerton and Maggie Ballard strolled to victory over two challengers, Brett Anderson and Margaret Wheeler Shabazz. The third race for council was Democrat against Democrat, with Joseph Shepard, widely perceived as the more liberal candidate, beating LaWanda DeShazer.
Although the elections are nominally nonpartisan, in reality they seldom are.
Howerton and Anderson were openly backed by Republican money, local and national, and had the full-throated support of Sedgwick County GOP Chairman John Whitmer, including repeated appearances and endorsements on his political talk show on KNSS radio.
The school races were even more telling. GOP incumbents Hazel Stabler and Kathy Bond lost their seats to Amy Warren and Amy Jensen.
For the second time in four years, incumbent Julie Hedrick curb-stomped Republican Party-backed Brent Davis.
The only GOP candidate to hold serve was Diane Albert, who easily held off a challenge from Mackenzi Truelove.
It was a significant turn of events from four years ago, when the Republican Party recruited and heavily backed a slate of candidates in an attempt to seize the board majority in one election cycle, riding a wave of dissatisfaction over the disruption caused by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic and mask mandates when schools reopened.
They came within one bad idea of pulling it off.
Stabler, Bond and Albert all won, but Davis lost his race after floating an insane idea to run COVID experiments on children.
What’s changed since four years ago?
“Republicans who don’t turn out to vote elect Democrats,” Whitmer said after the final tallies came in Tuesday night. “I’ve said that before. I said that on my show Sunday night, and that’s what happened today. Republicans that didn’t show up to vote elected Democrats. And that’s what happened today.”
Whitmer and Wichita State University sociologist Chase Billingham both cited a change to how the school board gets elected.
In previous elections, primary voters narrowed the field to the top two in each school board district, but all USD 259 voters participated in the general election.
“Part of the reason why Kathy Bond and Hazel Stabler and Diane Albert were able to win in the last election is because in some of the most progressive areas of Wichita, you allowed voters from the most conservative areas in the district to vote for the school board,” Billingham said.
Said Whitmer: “I think one of the major issues was the change to how those positions are elected, changing them from citywide to district. I think that was a major factor.”
So mark this day in history as the time John Whitmer and Chase Billingham agreed on something.
But beyond that anomaly, I think there’s something more going on here.
I think people are getting sick and tired of the chaos going on in politics all around us.
One-off or political shift?
There was another significant political development outside the election itself that happened Tuesday and bears mentioning.
Tuesday was also the day that Kansas legislators abandoned their effort to call a special session to remap the state’s congressional districts, to try to force out the state’s lone Democratic representative, Sharice Davids, as requested by President Donald Trump.
As I write this, I’m looking at a press release from Senate President Ty Masterson, vowing that “The Senate will continue to deliver for President Trump . . . including making redistricting a top priority when the Legislature reconvenes in January.”
It may come to pass. It’s easier for legislative leaders to twist arms when everybody’s under the Capitol dome.
But right now, it sounds like empty bravado, given that they couldn’t get enough members of the House to sign on to bring everybody back for a naked political power grab, that would move tens of thousands of Kansas voters from district to district like pawns on a chess board.
Also, I think the “No Kings” demonstrations are starting to bear fruit. Smart politicians generally try to accommodate movements that put thousands of their constituents in the streets protesting what’s going on.
And specific to schools, Kansans have seen what happens when right-wing ideologues take over.
Just south of us, Oklahoma has suffered from a state superintendent who pushed Christian nationalism over education, with disastrous results. Oklahoma schools are now ranked 48th to 50th in the nation, and nobody here wants to go there.
Wichita, Kansas’ largest city, sent a message to the Republican-dominated political establishment Tuesday.
That message is: Calm down and get things back to normal, or we’ll find someone who will.
They’d do well to listen.
