Kris Kobach didn’t lose the Kansas governor’s race because he was outspent by his Democratic opponent, Laura Kelly. He lost because he was a terrible candidate.
I’m not just talking about his platform, which amounted to little more than, “I ♥ President Trump.” I’m talking about his inability to run a functional, competent campaign.
Kansas’ Republican secretary of state went into the 2018 midterm elections as the frontrunner in a three-way race against two liberal challengers, including independent Greg Orman. Yet, Kobach lost to Kelly by 4.5 points in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2 to 1. He lost by nearly five points even with the liberal Orman siphoning away some of Kelly’s support.
Only an exceptionally inept candidate could manage something like that.
The problems of Kobach’s campaign were many, according to the Kansas City Star, which interviewed more than a dozen GOP officials and strategists. The problems include that he “refused to listen to advice, was unwilling to put energy into fundraising and failed to set up a basic ‘get out the vote’ operation.”
“Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, struggled to pay his campaign staff on time and at one point lacked a working phone system at his Johnson County campaign office, according to GOP sources familiar with the campaign. And people who offered to volunteer were never contacted,” the paper reports.
One Kansas GOP operative told the paper, “It was the most dysfunctional thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Another source said, “The joke was, you’d say ‘the Kobach campaign’ and (then) you’d say, ‘what campaign?’”
Kobach reportedly thought his cable news appearances and his support for President Trump would put him over the top. He also assumed that Orman and Kelly would split whatever chance the Left would have for claiming the governorship. Kobach was so confident he’d win, the paper reports, that members of his senior staff even “did a walk-through of the governor’s office.”
The GOP candidate’s apparent disinterest in putting together a basic get-out-the-vote operation combined with his incoherent message and a lack of fundraising effort is breathtaking considering his approval rating was underwater long before the Tuesday election. It’d be one thing to get fat and lazy if surveys showed he was enormously popular. But when they showed the opposite?
A Fort Hays State University survey, conducted from March 19 to April 2, found Kobach had a net favorability rating of minus-17 percentage points. A survey conducted between July 19 and 20 by a Kansas-based GOP polling firm found that 55 percent of surveyed voters in Kansas had an unfavorable opinion of him. Later, a Public Policy Polling survey held between Aug. 24 and Aug. 26 found that 49 percent of Kansas voters had an “unfavorable” view of him. A separate PPP survey conducted from Sept. 12 to 13 found that a slightly smaller 47 percent of Kansas voters had a low opinion of him. An Emerson survey published on Oct. 29 showed Kobach’s unfavorable rating at 46 percent.
Let me put it this way: He is so disliked in the state that the liberal independent in the gubernatorial race came away Tuesday evening with 6.5 percent of the total vote. And Kobach still lost.
The fact that Kobach thought Fox News appearances would turn everything around is reason enough for why he deserved to lose. That he also did little to court votes or raise cash is just icing on the cake.
