Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts re-election races put Kansas on the road to political relevance

All along this route, they know these races are vital — historic even, like this old highway.

In Larned, die-hard Republican Paula Carr is so concerned about Gov. Sam Brownback and U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts — the politicians she considers the stalwarts of her Christian conservatism — that she is working harder than ever, making calls and planting signs across Pawnee County to ensure they win re-election in November.

It’s not because of any benefits the small-business owner might have reaped from Brownback’s tax reductions or because her farming neighbors have come to count on Roberts’ tenure on the Senate Agriculture Committee.

“No, no, no,” the silver-haired Carr, 66, says as she stands next to a phalanx of 6-foot-tall political signs she has planted on a friend’s property on U.S. 56. “… In the long run, it can’t be about me, me, me. It can’t be about what’s best for my business, or what’s best for my farm, or what’s best for my kids, but what’s best for this country and the kingdom of God.”

Meantime, some 300 miles east on U.S. 56, former Republican committeewoman Karen I. Johnson, 74, of Westwood has had enough of what she sees as the swing toward right-wing Republicanism.

She wants Brownback gone. And Roberts. If that happens, Kansas will send a non-Republican to the Senate for the first time since the Depression.

But as a moderate, Johnson sees hope that Kansas’ political pendulum may finally swing back toward the center. Most recent polls show Brownback trailing challenger Paul Davis, a Lawrence Democrat who is the House minority leader, by five to seven points. Roberts trails Greg Orman, a wealthy Olathe businessman running as an independent, by a similar margin.

“It’s very exciting,” says Johnson, who has planted her own lawn sign as a Republican for Davis and his running mate, Jill Docking. “Most races in Kansas aren’t often this exciting.”

That the Kansas Senate race is of national import is unquestioned. Instead of debating “What’s the matter with Kansas?” pundits and politicos are talking about just how much the perennially red state matters in this election cycle. Kansans know it.

Thirty-six Senate seats are up for grabs. Democrats hold five of the seven most hotly contested ones. Two are held by Republicans, including Roberts in Kansas. At stake is nothing less than whether the Democrats maintain their slim control in the Senate or whether Republicans, who already have a solid majority in the House, take over both chambers.

“I think everyone understands that a handful of races will decide who controls the Senate,” says Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of a Washington-based, nonpartisan newsletter that covers national politics, and Kansas is one of the states that will decide.

The choice between Brownback or Davis, others say, will be seen not only as a referendum on the incumbent’s tax, education and social policies, but also on the strict conservative philosophy that underlies them.

“What a lot of moderates in Kansas are saying,” says Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, “is that this Republican party is not their Republican party. If Pat Roberts and Brownback lose, it means the Republican Party is going to have to moderate. They are going to force the establishment and tea party to begin to compromise.”

The difference between what pundits and regular people think can sometimes be huge.

With that in mind, The Star recently took a three-day drive across much of Kansas, winding along U.S. 56 from Shawnee Mission Parkway and south past Orman’s Olathe before heading 360 miles southwest to Dodge City, listed as Roberts’ official residence.

As the highway roughly traces the old Santa Fe Trail, the path seemed fitting, being a historic route for a potentially historic election. Along the way, through more than a dozen counties, residents shared opinions that were frequently as firm as others were faltering.

Many across the state spoke of concerns about education and state funding for schools. In western Kansas, residents talked about Roberts’ importance to agriculture. And Orman remained an enigma to many; those considering him seemed to do so mainly because he wasn’t Roberts.

Some people were undecided or disaffected; others were absolute and doctrinaire.

“I will not vote for another Democrat ever. I will die first,” Bruce Rolo, 58, declares after his semi tractor-trailer, stacked with 34,000 pounds of cow hides, rolls up to a truck stop just outside Spearville.

A hamlet of fewer than 800 people, Spearville huddles along U.S. 56 just east of Dodge City in Ford County. The town of small homes and neat, square lawns sits surrounded by more than 200 slow-whirling wind turbines that stretch to the horizon like pinwheels.

Rolo values oil, he says, not turbines or green energy. He has voted for a Democrat only once, Jimmy Carter, and regrets he did. To his way of thinking, the Republicans now in office — Brownback and Roberts included — aren’t conservative enough, although they might be his only choice.

“Tea party. That’s exactly the right word for what I am,” he says.

As Rolo enters the truck stop, Marvin Hartzler, 64, is leaving. An educator for 38 years, he is the principal of Spearville’s elementary school. A Republican voter, Hartzler voices a sentiment that will be heard time and time again along U.S. 56 from teachers, parents and superintendents. Roberts, with his influence on agriculture, draws support more often than not.

“But I will not vote for the governor,” Hartzler says. “I’m not pleased at all with Brownback.”

Like the rest of the state, Ford County predominantly votes red.

In 2010, Brownback won it with 75 percent of the vote. That year, in fact, he captured all 105 Kansas counties except two, Wyandotte and Douglas, amassing 63 percent of the statewide vote. Roberts, who has spent more than 30 years in Congress, last won the state in 2008 with 60 percent of the vote. He received 77 percent in Ford County, where Dodge City is the county seat.

Hartzler says his vote against the governor has nothing to do with feeling disaffected from the party. For him, it’s about policies. He doesn’t think the governor can improve the state or its economy while cutting taxes.

“How do you pay for services?” he asks.

But mostly it’s about public education and the contention of some that Brownback is underfunding schools, thus putting them in jeopardy.

For his part, Brownback says he has increased funding for schools, with more money for infrastructure and teachers’ pensions. But his critics complain that funding that supports teachers in the classroom has actually remained flat or decreased.

The impression that Brownback is unfriendly to educators was, for some, bolstered in April when he signed legislation that all but stripped teachers of due process in employment disputes. Legislators have insisted it gives administrators a needed tool to rid them of bad teachers, but teachers fear it makes them vulnerable to dismissal without proper cause.

“I think the governor is stretching the truth,” Hartzler says.

As the trip across U.S. 56 revealed, opinions on what’s true can vary mile to mile, and person to person.

Baldwin City

The two college students agree: The election’s outcome could be electrifying.

But one, Lauren Freking, 20, of Overland Park and chairwoman of Baker University College Republicans, is worried, especially about Roberts. The other, Brittany Friedel, 23, of Gardner and a member of the College Democrats, is just excited.

They spoke together only a short distance from Baker’s Parmenter Hall, built in part with a $100 cash donation from Republican Abraham Lincoln. “Today,” Friedel insists, “he’d be a Democrat!”

Freking is concerned about Brownback. “Things are looking more and more likely that he might not win,” she says, which she’s convinced would be bad for the state. She thinks the governor needs more time to allow his economic plan to play out.

To attract new companies to Kansas and spur growth, Brownback slashed business taxes. The criticism is that whatever growth has occurred is far below what is needed to make up for the drain on the state’s coffers and to keep up with needed services.

Of Roberts: “The big thing people are talking about is how he doesn’t really live in Kansas.”

But she thinks the criticism is unfair. Roberts is a Kansan, with years of Senate seniority, who works for Kansas in D.C., she says. If he is not elected, she predicts little will continue to get done in a split Congress with the Senate controlled by Democrats.

That control is exactly what Friedel wants to assure, plus a return to blue in the governor’s office.

“My dream is that Paul Davis wins and Greg Orman wins,” she says. “I’ll see the commercials against Paul Davis and Greg Orman on TV and they’ll say, ‘He voted with Obama.’ I think, ‘Good!’

“… I haven’t felt this excited about an election since the first time Barack Obama ran.”

Overbrook

Opinions fly from the group. They’re talking about Brownback.

“He’s done a lot of things to make people angry,” shouts one.

“Education. Social Security. Taxes,” pipes another.

Twelve church group members, mostly older residents from nearby Lawrence, have come out for a tour of the Fieldstone Orchard, a 12-acre farm that grows and sells organic apples and other fruits and was bought three years ago by owners Bruce Curtis, 62, and his wife, Marianne, 53.

Jan Fox, 64, knows she’s somewhat alone in this Democrat group of friends.

Curtis describes his own politics as “not quite an anarchist.” A former minister who once ran a holistic medical journal, he is for free markets, reduced government regulations and freedom from corporate influence. He also may not vote at all.

“My view is that where you have corporations moving to a greater role in government, you move more toward an oppressive situation,” he says.

Fox, meantime, is “a typical Republican” who’s not sure she ever met a Democrat where she grew up in western Kansas.

“I’m not an Obama fan at all … at all,” she says.

But these days, as a former high school teacher, she feels torn about the governor, about education and taxes.

“But sometimes I feel like he’s doing it for a reason,” she says. “He’s trying to be fiscally responsible.”

Roberts?

“I don’t know,” Fox says. “I’ve always kind of liked Pat Roberts.”

Council Grove

Craig McNeal, the owner, publisher and editor of the Council Grove Republican — a newspaper published five days a week and around since 1872 — has always liked Roberts, too.

“He was my fraternity pledge father at Kansas State University,” McNeal, 74, says.

McNeal was class of 1961. Roberts graduated in ’58, Pi Kappa Alpha. When Roberts was in town last spring, McNeal says, the senator got his hair cut at the barbershop next door.

“So … they can say he was in Kansas at least once,” he says with a laugh, referring to the question of whether Roberts’ true home is in Virginia or Dodge City.

McNeal can’t recall one election where he voted a straight ticket. But he does know Morris County.

“When you talk about Brownback or Roberts,” he says, recognizing that both are behind in statewide polls, “I’m sure they’ll at least carry the vote here.”

The key for Roberts, he figures, is his seniority and the help that he provides Kansas on agricultural issues.

“I have nothing against the independent candidate,” McNeal says of Orman. “But, you know, you’re starting over, and it might take several years before you got a little bit of power and know the ropes over there.”

Brownback?

“Well, Brownback is a different story,” he says. “Of course, he’s got the ag background. … But education-wise, the administrators, teachers and people like that are pretty well opposed. I know the ads are kind of confusing, saying on one side that he cut a lot, and he’s saying he’s added a lot.”

McNeal knows he’ll vote for Roberts. For governor?

“That’s one I haven’t made up my mind on.”

Herington

Allan Hastings has his mind set.

“I was a Republican up until we started getting the real far right involved,” he says.

At 79, Hastings is a professor of interior architecture and product design at Kansas State University. For years he was a business owner with his own design firm who tossed his support to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush the first time around.

Cutting taxes to improve the state is not working, he says. Davis and Orman will be his candidates.

“It’s time for a change,” he says.

McPherson

At the Craft Coffee Parlor on Main Street, it’s time for Lori Shultz’s American government class to join in a prayer.

Nine students from the Elyria Christian School sit in a circle at the center of the shop, heads bowed.

“Lord,” they begin.

Around them, baristas steam milk for lattes. Other customers, students from nearby colleges, chat or type away at their laptops.

Shultz has brought the class here after an outing to the McPherson County Courthouse for a lesson in civic government and responsibility. Two of the students, both 18, registered to vote.

Shultz polls her class on the governor’s race.

“Nine students here today,” she says. “One voted for Davis.”

Meantime, shop owner Phil Parrish, 31, who also runs a design firm, Atelier Design & Print, at the rear of the building, feels distanced by much of the political process and isn’t sure he’ll vote.

“Problem is, I don’t know who to trust,” he says.

Studying at a small table is Sarah Muehler, 34. She is a mother of four who has returned to community college. She home-schooled her children for a while; three are now in public school and one in private. Her husband, Chad, works for a gas company and was in the Navy.

“He tends to be pretty Republican,” she says.

Until recently Muehler was, too. “I probably won’t vote for Brownback again.”

She’s upset about changes in education and particularly doesn’t like the Common Core curriculum. Roberts, she’s unsure of.

“He’s been around forever,” she says, meaning perhaps too long. “But I don’t know. There’s something to be said for experience.”

Ellinwood

Relations and religion count, too.

Here, Chris McCord, 27, supports gay rights. A business owner, he has also invested $180,000 and more of his own money into buying and renovating the town’s historic Wolf Hotel, built in 1894. The governor’s wife, Mary Brownback, was there recently for a political event.

McCord says his grandfather, once a Democrat, is now a Republican.

“I’m probably more Republican now, too,” McCord says, offering no real specifics as to why other than, “Grandpa and I just talk together.”

Friend Becca Maxwell, a member of the town’s school board, thinks the state’s races “will be incredibly close.”

“It makes me incredibly nervous,” she says. Her husband, Greg, 39, is a teacher who coaches their daughter, Maya, 11, on the school’s volleyball team. Because of school issues, she’s voting against Brownback.

“We’re worried about consolidation” of smaller school districts, she says.

Behind her, neighbor Jamie Harrington, 32, doesn’t have that worry. She teaches at the local Catholic school, attended by her kids. Against abortion, she says her politics often mirror her values of faith and family.

“Some of my friends have said, ‘I hope you’re not voting for Brownback,’” she says. Her husband works for an agricultural company. “From what I understand, taxes are lower under him.”

Great Bend

Shirley Luther, owner of Appaloosa Acres on the eastern edge of town, frankly isn’t even sure who will be on the ballot.

She doesn’t have to know. She’s a straight-ticket voter.

“Republican,” she says.

At 85, she has lived in town since the second grade. Fifty years ago, she and her late husband bought the farm, which now has dozens of animals, horses and donkeys as well as a handful of exotics, including two camels and her “zdonk” Carlos, a zebra-donkey hybrid.

“Even the camels are Republicans,” she jokes.

Dodge City

Eleven women in the church bell choir practice “In the Bleak of Midwinter” in one room. Four men doing Bible study discuss Scripture in another.

As in churches everywhere, there is unity and division at the First United Methodist Church.

Unity among churchgoers: About Roberts and the overall sense that, although the Senate race might be tight in Ford County — with some thinking that Roberts’ run has been long enough — he’ll nonetheless likely prevail in this agri-business town over a candidate, Orman, who is largely unknown.

“In Ford County, if we don’t deliver him more than 70 percent of the vote we’re embarrassed,” says Duane Ross, 78, a Bible study member and retired publisher of The High Plains Journal, an agriculture newspaper.

Roberts’ influence in Washington for Kansas and agriculture is just too important to lose, he says. The other men agree.

But the governor’s race is a different matter. In the bell choir, populated by several teachers, the issue of education rings out:

“I feel like my profession isn’t valued under his leadership,” says fifth-grade teacher Andrea Keck, 23, who moved to Dodge from Topeka.

“There’s probably a lot more blues (Democrats) in town than you think. They just don’t show it,” says veterinarian Mary Davis, 59, a 1973 graduate of Shawnee Mission West.

Although the Bible study men say they will vote for Brownback, they acknowledge that he is in for a race that to many voters could signal excitement. For many others, like Ross, that’s not the prevailing emotion.

“I’m stunned,” he says. “I’m really stunned.”

This story was originally published October 4, 2014 at 8:21 PM with the headline "Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts re-election races put Kansas on the road to political relevance."