Competing groups with ties to Schumer and McConnell drove ad spending in Kansas race
New federal campaign finance filings Thursday confirmed suspicions about who was paying for the barrage of television ads Kansans saw in the lead-up to the Aug. 4 U.S. Senate primary.
A PAC aligned Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was the main funding source for a group that sought to boost Kris Kobach in the Kansas Republican primary. A PAC with ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spent millions to prevent his nomination.
Sunflower State, a PAC which aired ads attacking Rep. Roger Marshall as “a phony” and referring to Kobach as “too conservative,” received $3.55 million from the Senate Majority PAC, a group aligned with Schumer that works to elect Democratic majority in the Senate.
The group, which declined to disclose donors ahead of the primary, also received $1.75 million from Women Vote!, a PAC affiliated with EMILY’s List, which backs progressive women who support abortion rights. The group endorsed Democrat Barbara Bollier early in her campaign.
Sunflower State’s ads borrowed from a strategy used by former Sen Claire McCaskill in 2012 to boost Republican Todd Akin in the Missouri GOP primary before his implosion in the general election.
Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2018, was generally seen as the weaker Republican candidate by strategists of both parties. Marshall won the primary by double digits.
“Chuck Schumer’s friends in the DC abortion lobby tried to save Bollier’s chances in a shady and dishonest way, and Kansans saw right through it,” said Eric Pahls, Marshall’s campaign manager.
“They wasted their cash, and we couldn’t be happier to have helped them do it.”
Rachel Irwin, a spokeswoman for the Senate Majority PAC, said the ads were effective early attacks against Marshall. She did not directly comment on the tactic of boosting Kobach.
“Republicans’ extraordinarily weak field of candidates gave us an opening to engage here. Our early investment forced Republicans to burn precious resources and allowed us to get a jump on the general by branding Marshall before he could define himself,” Irwin said.
“McConnell’s allies spending millions more in Kansas post-primary shows just how weak of a candidate Marshall is,” she said, noting that GOP groups are spending on pro-Marshall ads following the primary.
Ben Ray, a spokesman for EMILY’s List, said “Marshall’s unpopular record and the strength of Barbara Bollier’s focus on results over politics are why this is a margin-of-error race today, and Republicans know it,” referencing a recent poll the group paid for that showed Marshall with a 1-point lead.
But in addition to the Democratic spending that sought to boost Kobach, new filings show that a PAC linked to Senate Republican leadership was behind the ads that targeted his campaign with allegations of ties to white nationalists.
Plains PAC received $3.35 million, the bulk of its funding from the Senate Leadership Fund, a McConnell-aligned PAC that seeks to maintain the Senate GOP majority.
Kobach had repeatedly— and correctly— claimed that McConnell’s allies were behind the attacks, but the group had declined to disclose its donors before the primary.
C.J. Grover, the executive director of Plains PAC, declined Friday to comment on the money the group received from the Senate Leadership Fund. SLF had also separately spent roughly $2 million on pro-Marshall ads ahead of the primary.
Jack Pandol, a spokesman for SLF, responded to a question about the anti-Kobach ads by sending a chart showing Marshall’s 14-point margin of victory over Kobach. He said that was the organization’s “official comment.”
Marshall told The Star the day after the primary that the spending by national Republican groups helped counteract the attacks he had faced.
“I would’ve preferred to keep it within the family. I wish we could have had only Kansas money in the race,” Marshall said. “The monies you’re referring to were important to counter the Washington swamp ads… We needed some gunpowder to neutralize attacks.”
