The Republican primary to take on Congresswoman Sharice Davids has grown to three women with former Roeland Park Mayor Adrienne Foster filing to run for Congress.
Foster, mayor of the Johnson County suburb from 2009 to 2013, filed organizational papers with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday.
An official campaign announcement is expected next week at the Shawnee Indian Mission in Fairway.
She did not return calls seeking comment.
Foster’s filing sets up a primary with former Kansas Republican Party Chairwoman Amanda Adkins and former chief executive and president of the National Down Syndrome Society Sara Hart Weir.
Foster gets in the race after Adkins and Weir have been building up their campaigns for the last several months. Adkins just announced on Tuesday that she raised more than $290,000 for the quarter ending Sept. 30. The next round of campaign finance reports are due Oct. 15.
“The financial reports will tell us who is a serious candidate and who is not,” said Republican strategist David Kensinger.
The unusual number of female Republican candidates running in the 3rd District comes as the number of GOP women in Congress is plummeting.
Their number dropped to 13 this session from 23 during 2017-18 when several Republican women – Barbara Comstock in Virginia and Claudia Tenney in New York for example – lost in swing districts.
The number could shrink even further with the retirements of Susan Brooks in Indiana and Martha Roby in Alabama when their terms end after next year.
It was the lowest number of Republican women to serve in the House since 1993-95, when 12 Republican women served in the chamber, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics.
Now, the Republican Party is trying to turn the corner and the candidacies of Adkins, Weir and Foster offer hope.
“To see any Republican woman get in a primary is a big win for the party. To see three women is beyond encouraging,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, spokeswoman for the Winning for Women Action Fund, which seeks to elect Republican women to Congress.
“It’s a good problem for us to have.”
Most recently, Foster worked as the Region 7 advocate for the Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration.
In that role, Foster supported the work of small businesses in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska, helping them interact with state and local government agencies, lawmakers and trade associations.
She worked for Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration as the executive director of the governor’s Hispanic & Latino American Affairs Commission from 2011 to 2018.
Foster was involved in a flare-up in 2016 that went national when she voiced support for Donald Trump’s presidency.
She told former Kansas City Star columnist Steve Kraske that she supported Trump’s border wall because so many Latinos have waited for years to become citizens.
“We don’t like people skipping the line,” Foster told Kraske in the March 2016 column. “I don’t teach my children that society owes you anything. You’ve got to earn everything, including your grades.”
When asked if Trump was mean, Foster told Kraske “he had done a lot of great things” that the media doesn’t portray.
Three Democratic lawmakers — Reps. Louis Ruiz of Kansas City, John Alcala of Topeka and Ponka-We Victors of Wichita — sent a letter to the governor’s office wanting Foster to resign from her state position.
At the time, Ruiz called Foster’s endorsement of Trump “irresponsible, unthinkable and entirely unacceptable.”
Brownback’s office defended Foster’s comments as freedom of speech, pointing out that she made the comments in response to a posting by a Kansas City Star reporter on Facebook.
Foster lists her treasurer as Paul Kilgore, founder of the political finance firm Professional Data Services in Athens, Georgia.
Kilgore worked as the financial and compliance officer for the late U.S. Sen. Paul Coverdell. He later worked as the controller for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s reelection campaign.
The firm’s website says that Kilgore oversaw a “direct mail operation that raised the bulk of the record setting $7 million dollars in the 1998 election cycle.
“The reporting required by such volume was a challenge but, even under the intense scrutiny of that environment, the campaign was completely unscathed in the reporting arena,” the firm’s website says.
