(Updated to reflect Kobach’s response to Maine secretary of state’s letter)
It’s fair to say we’ve reached an all-out boiling point this political season with the primary election just days away.
A new poll. Accusations of racism and meddling. A candidate saying he was offered a deal to stay out of the governor’s race.
Just another day in Kansas politics.
Colyer/Kobach deadlocked in new poll
The Capital-Journal broke this story late Friday with a new poll showing that Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer and Secretary of State Kris Kobach are tied up at 32 percent in the race for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.
The poll was done by a firm associated with Kansas City’s Axiom Strategies, which has done about $72,000 worth of work for the Colyer campaign.
Consultants at Axiom, which also has done work for a dark money group campaigning for Colyer, said the polling is separate.
The new Remington poll shows the race for the Republican primary knotted at 32 between Gov. Jeff Colyer and Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
In a Remington poll from June with a larger sample size of about 1,400 voters, Colyer was leading Kobach 32-29. In May, Colyer’s lead was 29-27.
The new poll, done Thursday, showed Barnett with 13 percent and Selzer with 9, according to the C-J’s report. The May poll showed Barnett with just 9 percent and Selzer with 5.
Colyer offers Barnett a job?
The New York Times was in town to write up a profile of the unfolding Kansas governor’s race. Former state Sen. Jim Barnett told The Times that one of Gov. Colyer’s donors offered a him a job in the cabinet if he stayed out of the race.
The Colyer folks have been spinning the narrative that a vote for Barnett, or Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer for that matter, is effectively a vote for Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
However, the governor said he was not aware of any deal being put on the table.
The Wichita Eagle followed up on The Times story where Barnett went into more details about an offer he received offer while waiting at the Salt Lake City airport. The Colyer campaign said the governor met with Colyer but no deals were made.
Meddling in 3rd District race?
Democratic congressional candidates in the 3rd Congressional District race accused Republican incumbent Kevin Yoder and billionaire Joe Ricketts of trying to influence their primary.
Democratic candidates Tom Niermann and Sharice Davids accused Yoder and Ricketts of conspiring to bring in a dark money group to spend money on a television ad boosting Democratic rival Brent Welder.
Critics say Yoder wants to run against Welder, who arguably pushes to the furthest left of any of the candidates in the Democratic field.
The ad is financed by the super PAC, Ending Spending, which was started by Ricketts, also the founder of TD Ameritrade The Niermann campaign said the ad buy, which began Friday, was $160,000.
“Kevin Yoder and the Republicans are clearly worried about his re-election,” Niermann and Davids said in a joint statement.
“Yoder decided a long time ago to vote with party leaders instead of his community, counting on billionaires to bail out his campaign when he faces tough challengers, as he does now.
“He has now gone yet another bridge too far – calling in Republican dark money to elevate an opponent of his choosing, rather than answer to his constituents for his egregious votes.”
FEC cites congressional candidate
The Federal Election Commission on Friday cited Republican 2nd District Congressional candidate Vernon Fields for failing to file a 12-day, pre-primary report leading up the Aug. 7 primary election.
The pre-primary report was due on July 26 and should have included financial activity for the period July 1 through July 18.
The committees that did not file by the due date were notified on July 27 that their reports had not been received and their names would be published if they did not respond within four business days.
Further enforcement action is decided on a case-by-case basis. Federal law gives the FEC broad authority to initiate enforcement actions.
Fields had raised just $20,000 for the 2nd District GOP primary, which also includes state Sens. Caryn Tyson, Steve Fitzgerald, Dennis Pyle, Army veteran Steve Watkins, former House Speaker Doug Mays and state Rep. Kevin Jones.
Fields only raised $105 in the last quarter.
Voter integrity commission criticized
The Maine secretary of state on Friday accused the White House and Kris Kobach of setting up a commission to investigate voter fraud to only affirm President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about rampant fraudulent voting.
Matt Dunlap sent letters to Kobach – vice chair of the panel – and Vice President Mike Pence, saying there was no evidence of voter fraud found in the thousands of page of documents that he obtained through a court order as a member of the now-disbanded Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
Dunlap said that White House claims of “substantial evidence of voter fraud” were aimed at bolstering a “pre-ordained objective: ratifying the President’s statements that millions of illegal votes were cast during the 2016 elections.”
“Now, however, after months of litigation that should not have been necessary, I can report that the statements of Vice Chair Kobach and the White House were, in fact, false,” wrote Dunlap, a Democrat.
“I have reviewed commission documents made available to me and they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” Dunlap wrote. “That the commission predicted it would find widespread evidence of fraud actually reveals a troubling bias.”
For his part, Kobach released this statement:
“It appears that Secretary Dunlap is willfully blind to the voter fraud in front of his nose,” Kobach said in a statement.
“The commission was presented with more than 1,000 convictions for voter fraud since the year 2000, and convictions represent a tiny percentage of the total,” he said.
“The commission was also presented approximately 8,400 instances of double voting in the 2016 election looking only at 20 states,” he said.
“Had the Commission done the same analysis of all 50 states, the number would have been exponentially higher.”
Court strikes down change in workers’ comp law
With everything exploding on the political front, there was a significant appeals court ruling Friday that found a 2013 change in the state’s workers compensation law was unconstitutional.
The new law, which started in 2015, provided for smaller awards in workers’ comp cases. The appeals court said it violated the Kansas’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitutions due process guarantees.
The Lawrence Journal-World’s Peter Hancock has some good coverage of the decision on a very thick subject. And here’s the court ruling.
Kobach’s campaign workers
Admittedly, we have some questions on the sourcing of this story from the Topeka newspaper about the backgrounds of some of Kris Kobach’s campaign workers. But it’s out there making the rounds. So, we can’t hide it. We’ll put it out there for you to read and form your own opinion.
