A second Republican candidate has joined the race to challenge conservative state Sen. Dennis Pyle, who made waves earlier this year when he dropped his Republican Party affiliation to run for governor.
Craig Bowser, who ran unsuccessfully for the state Senate two years ago, has launched his campaign to run in Senate District 1.
Bowser along with Republican state Rep. John Eplee of Atchison are running in the Republican primary to challenge Pyle, who is now an independent.
Eplee filed for the seat last month. The election is in 2024.
“I’m running for the state Senate to return conservative leadership to the 1st Senate District,” Bowser said in a statement.
“We do not currently have a Republican senator, and the alternative isn’t conservative. I’m the conservative Republican ready to serve.”
In 2020, Bowser ran against Democratic state Sen. Tom Hawk of Manhattan while he was living and working in Manhattan at the Servicemember Agriculture Vocation Education Farm, which helps members of the military move into agriculture.
Bowser lost to Hawk by 776 votes in the race for Senate District 22.
After concluding his work in Manhattan in 2021, Bowser returned to his farm in Holton and started work at the Kansas Department of Revenue in Topeka.
The district covers a swath of northeast Kansas including Atchison, Brown and Leavenworth counties.
Bowser earned a bachelor’s degree from Emporia State University and a master’s in business administration from Washburn University.
He was member of the U.S. Army Reserves, where he served for 24 years and completed multiple combat tours in Iraq.
Here’s a campaign video that Bowser rolled out this week.
Pyle has drawn the anger of many in the Republican Party after he dropped his GOP affiliation to run as an independent in the governor’s race against Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt.
Pyle got 20,057 votes in the governor’s race. The difference between Kelly and Schmidt was 20,886 votes, not quite enough for Pyle to hand the race to the Democratic incumbent.
Pyle, however, received help from Democrats who signed his petition to help him get on the ballot.
And an outside group with ties to an influential Democratic law firm in Washington, D.C., also sent out mailers and bought radio ads promoting Pyle’s candidacy.
Eplee, a physician who just won a fourth term in the House, said Pyle should share some of the blame for Schmidt losing the governor’s race.
Pyle has already said that he thought the Republican Party establishment would try to remove him from office.
Pyle, of Hiawatha, has said it was wrong to assume that all of the votes that he received in the governor’s race would have gone to Schmidt.
He said those Kansans either would not have voted or would have supported the Libertarian candidate in the race.
