(UPDATED to reflect more events from his Senate term)
Democratic state Sen. Patrick Schmidt on Tuesday filed a statement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate with the Federal Election Commission.
Schmidt is in his first term in the Kansas Senate after he was elected in 2024 when he defeated House Minority Leader Vic Miller in the primary and Republican Tyler Wible in the general election.
Schmidt started his political career in 2022 when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress against Republican incumbent Jake LaTurner. He lost with about 42% of the vote.
There are already five Democratic candidates running for the U.S. Senate.
They include Kansas City developer Erik Murray, retired businesswoman Sandy Spidel Neumann of Merriam, former congressional candidate Christy Davis of Cottonwood Falls, Overland Park immigration lawyer Anne Parelkar and perennial candidate Michael Soetaert.
There also is speculation about whether Democratic Congresswoman Sharice Davids will run for the U.S. Senate after she recently toured Kansas with stops outside her district that included Wichita, Dodge City and Colby.
Schmidt was on the phone and declined to talk to a reporter in his Senate office Tuesday morning.
Schmidt has served in the U.S. Naval Reserves and worked in Naval Intelligence from about 2016 through 2021.
Before leaving the Navy, Schmidt worked as an intelligence watch officer for the Naval Undersea Research and Threat Analysis Center.
He also worked as a targeting analyst for the Joint Special Operation Task Force Arabian Peninsula where he led a countersmuggling intelligence and cryptologic team supporting U.S. Central Command.
And he served aboard the Reagan aircraft carrier, where he worked as a division officer and a fleet intelligence watch officer.
His work aboard the carrier included directing a multisource intelligence team providing air, surface and subsurface threat warnings for the carrier strike group.
He graduated in 2015 from Tufts University with a bachelor’s in international relations.
Last year, Schmidt – a lawmaker who supports abortion rights – amended a bill so it would provide a tax deduction for a fetus.
The amendment was added to a bill holding fathers responsible for picking up the cost of child support from the moment of conception.
The bill provided a $2,320 tax exemption for one year after a live birth in addition to the same tax exemption for which the child would typically qualify.
At that time, Schmidt defended his record on abortion.
“Please know, I am the most pro-choice legislator in this body,” Schmidt said on the Senate floor.
“But I also will always speak out for the people that need it most, people that are struggling and the people that are trying to start a family in Kansas,” he said.
“I have spoken out against the attack on women’s rights as long as I’ve been running for office,” he said.
Abortion rights supporters opposed the amendment, which they said “doubled down on the idea of fetal personhood.”
They said that Schmidt, an abortion rights supporter, didn’t alert them about his plans to amend the bill.
“I think he’s tried to emphasize his support for abortion access and that he did have a strategy going in, it just isn’t one we’re aligned with,” Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said at the time.
“I think he thinks there are creative ways to call out some absurdities from anti-abortion legislators,” he said. “I think you have to get from him what his strategy was.”
In 2024, Schmidt agreed to pay a $500 fine as part of a consent order entered into with the state ethics commission after sending campaign mailers without a paid-for attribution.
The ethics commission approved the consent agreement, meaning that if the issue went to a hearing that “clear and convincing evidence” would be introduced to support a finding of a series of facts including that political mailers were sent without proper attribution.
Schmidt agreed to a finding that his campaign sent out two mailers in July that expressly advocated for his election to a state office, but the mailers lacked the paid-for attribution required.
During his term, Schmidt raised eyebrows in the Senate when he tried unsuccessfully to amend a bail bonding bill in an indirect way of criticizing fellow Republican state Sen. Stephen Owens of Hesston. He tried to name the bill after Owens.
The move was seen by some as extraordinary since Robert’s Rules of Order directs against maligning the motives of other members, and it’s the chamber’s custom and precedent not to mention other senators by names in a negative way.
