Republican state Rep. John Eplee has filed to run for the state Senate against incumbent Dennis Pyle, saying the longtime senator from Hiawatha contributed to the Republicans losing the governor’s race to Democrat Laura Kelly this year.
First elected to the House in 2016, the Atchison lawmaker just won a fourth term in the Legislature as he positions to run against Pyle in Senate District 1, which covers a swath of northeast Kansas including Atchison, Brown and Leavenworth counties.
“It’s unfortunate what went down in our election,” Eplee said in an interview Monday morning with the Sunflower State Journal.
“I do think that Sen. Pyle must assume some responsibility for how the governor’s race turned out,” Eplee said. “If he’s OK with that, then that’s on him.
“We’ve got to have a good solid Republican in that seat in my opinion,” Eplee said.
“We’ve got to be unified in the Republican Party. We can’t have people doing what he’s doing.”
Eplee, a physician, said he had considered running for the Senate before the governor’s race but thought he would wait to see how circumstances evolved.
The Senate election isn’t until 2024.
“After the midterms, I thought there was no reason to wait,” Eplee said.
“I want to make sure I make it crystal clear that I think he needs to – at the next election – cease to be our senator from District 1,” he said.
“I don’t think he represents Kansans well. I don’t think he represents District 1 well.”
Pyle said it was “free country” for Eplee to run for the Senate in as much as he was free to run for governor as an independent.
“You still have the freedom to have an open and competitive race and to have full disclosure and discussion of the issues,” he said.
Pyle said Republican leaders are already trying to sanction his supporters within the party who signed his petition to get on the ballot to run for governor.
“Why would they not come after me?” he asked.
Pyle said Eplee is from the “left wing of the party” because he supports Medicaid expansion.
“It’s obvious the establishment and the elite of the left wing of the Republican Party always want to come after the conservatives,” Pyle said.
Pyle has drawn the ire of many in the Republican Party after he dropped his GOP affiliation to run as an independent in the governor’s race against 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.
Pyle has said his critics drew the wrong conclusions about the results of the race.
“These people that are angry, they’re assuming that all of the votes that I got would have gone toward Derek,” he said in a recent interview. “That is just false.
“Were there a few? Yeah. But for the most part, those people wouldn’t have voted. Those people would have gone to the Libertarian.”
Pyle’s supporters said Schmidt – known as a moderate when he was in the state Senate – lost the governor’s because he was soft on conservative issues such as immigration.
Now that he’s unaffiliated, Pyle said he has been notified by the Senate president’s office that his office has been moved to the ground level of the Capitol from the second floor.
Pyle was first elected to the Kansas Senate in 2004 and is now in his fifth term after he was reelected in 2020.
He defeated Democrat Kirk Miller with 72% of the vote in 2020, and he defeated former Democratic state Rep. Jerry Henry with 58% of the vote in 2016.
At the start of this year, Pyle’s Senate campaign account had $78,192 cash on hand.
