Secretary of State Mike Pompeo keeps insisting he’s not running for the open Senate seat in his home state of Kansas next year, but he’s not really acting like a man content with his current role.
Pompeo’s friends in Congress keep publicly urging him to go for it, while he has met privately with GOP mega-donors. He even met with the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which usually hosts events for possible candidates. But if Pompeo really is aiming for Senate, that’s a mistake.
Since the former congressman and CIA director was sworn in as head of the State Department, Pompeo has been one of President Trump’s closest allies. And his steady presence is quite the anomaly in an administration with an ever-swinging door.
Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson, was fired amid a public feud with the president, and he wasn’t the only one. Former officials ranging from John Kelly to Omarosa to James Mattis all left the White House amid intense and often public disagreements, fueling the narrative that Trump cannot keep his White House in order.
Yet somehow, Trump has almost never publicly criticized Pompeo, noting that they “have a very similar thought process.” Pompeo has diligently fought for Trump’s foreign policy in places such as North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, avoiding any contradictions of the president’s official line — a feat that White House officials such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway proved can be difficult.
As Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker puts it in a recent profile, Pompeo is Trump’s “most loyal soldier.” His departure from Trump’s Cabinet to run for the Senate would throw the White House into disarray yet again. And the ensuing chaos of finding a suitable replacement would only further cement his boss’s reputation as the president with the highest turnover rate in modern political memory.
Of course, McConnell and his Senate GOP allies are correct that Pompeo would be a shoo-in for the open seat in Kansas. The perfect congressman-secretary-intelligence-officer trifecta, Pompeo has more experience than any other Republican or Democratic candidate who might run for the seat, and his high-profile connections would give him a war chest much larger than any of his opponents.
Plus, Pompeo’s election would help ensure a Republican majority in the Senate amid fears that vulnerable incumbents such as Susan Collins, Martha McSally, and Joni Ernst could lose their seats. But rather than trying to get himself elected, Pompeo could instead use his political clout to campaign for an already-declared Republican.
Someone such as Susan Wagle could do the trick. As president of the Kansas Senate and a state representative since 1990, she has decades more legislative experience than any other candidate, either Republican or Democratic. And, as a female senator, her election to Congress would also bode well for the GOP’s diversity problems — especially if Collins, McSally, or Ernst lose their seats. And since Kansas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since the 1930s, Wagle would really face only one obstacle: Kris Kobach.
The former Kansas Secretary of State is running for the GOP nomination and faces a whole set of controversies. Kobach has proven through a career full of election losses that he alienates all but the most fundamentalist of the electorate, including last year’s gubernatorial defeat that resulted in reliably-red Kansas electing a Democratic governor. If Kobach wins a GOP nomination yet again, he pushes McConnell’s fears of a blue Senate ever closer to reality.
But an endorsement from Pompeo, as well as some on-the-ground stumping, could very well send the less-divisive Wagle flying past Kobach, securing her nomination and general election win. So Pompeo wields an enormous amount of influence in the Kansas race, whether he runs or not. For the sake of the presidency, a Republican majority in the Senate and the good of the GOP overall, he should wield it — while staying right where he belongs.
Brian Ericson is a political writer from Nashville, Tennessee, and a Young Voices contributor. Follow him on Twitter @brianscott67.
