Kris Kobach is using Kansas treasurer and congressional candidate Jake LaTurner in his us-against-them narrative as he seeks the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate.
A recent fundraising email painted LaTurner’s decision to pull out of the Senate race and run for Congress in the 2nd District as part of a larger plot to keep Kobach from winning the nomination.
“LaTurner dropped out because the GOP elites pressured him to do so,” Kobach’s fundraising email said. “They are trying to thin the field and block me from winning the U.S. Senate primary. They don’t want a solid conservative like me in the field. They want a puppet.”
Kobach’s fundraising email reinforces the widespread idea that the former secretary of state needs a crowded field in order to win the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate with somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% of the vote, political observers said.
“I think it’s strange to go the route of claiming that by thinning the field, he’s more likely to lose,” said Beth Vonnahme, a political scientist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
“That is generally not the approach candidates take in the sense that they emphasize how great they are regardless of the opponents,” she said. “This is kind of a different take on that.”
The LaTurner campaign declined to comment on the solicitation.
The Kobach campaign said in an emailed statement that the ad was not intended to malign LaTurner, who was encouraged to run for Congress by former Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer.
“The message says nothing about Jake LaTurner, who has done a terrific job as our treasurer,” said Kobach campaign manager Steve Drake. “It recites headlines to give non-Kansans context about what’s happening in Kansas.”
However, some were skeptical about why Kobach would draw LaTurner back into a race that he dropped out of to run for Congress against Republican Steve Watkins.
“It is a little ironic that Kobach is spending time and effort criticizing a candidate who is not running for the Senate in Jake LaTurner,” said Neal Allen, a political science professor at Wichita State University.
“There clearly is an orchestrated effort to try to keep Kobach from getting the Republican nomination for Senate,” he said. “Whether Jake LaTurner dropping from the Senate race to the House race is an important part of this effort to block Kobach is not clear.”
The fundraising email preceded a Wall Street Journal report about a National Republican Senatorial Committee poll that showed Kobach trailing Democrat Barry Grissom by 10 percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup.
The poll was leaked to The Wall Street Journal on the same day that Kobach was set to hold a fundraiser in New York hosted by entrepreneur Peter Thiel and political commentator Ann Coulter.
Both Allen and Vonnahme said the fundraising email is a typical Kobach strategy of fighting party elites.
“He does have a consistent tactic of going after elites, and this gets him that mantra that elites are trying to thwart the efforts of real conservatives,” Vonnahme said.
But Allen said Kobach’s relationship with the Republican Party power structure is more estranged after running unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 in a campaign marked by difficulties.
The NRSC, for instance, has been vocal about Kobach, promising to not let him put the Kansas Senate up for grabs in 2020.
“While Kobach was not a consensus choice of Republicans in Kansas to be their nominee in 2018, he still had the backing of most important conservative Republican politicians when the election came in November,” Allen said.
“But now pretty much every major Republican politician in Kansas or nationally who cares about Kansas is signaling that Kobach is not their preferred nominee,” he said. “He’s kind of stuck with this extreme outsider kind of campaign.”
