The Kansas City Star’s endorsement in the Kansas US House Dist 2 general election | Opinion

Here is the candidate we endorse for the general election in Kansas 2nd District for the U.S. House of Representatives. For more information about the Nov. 5 election, check out our Voter Guide, a collaboration between The Kansas City Star and the KC Media Collective.

It has been 20 years since Democrat Nancy Boyda first campaigned to represent Kansas’ 2nd District in the U.S. House of Representatives, at the height of the Iraq War.

She lost the first time — by 15 points, to the incumbent Republican, track star Jim Ryun — then won the second time as part of a midterm Democratic wave election. She served a single term before losing to Lynn Jenkins in 2008.

The seat has been in GOP hands ever since.

Now Boyda is running again, against GOP candidate Derek Schmidt, for the seat being vacated by Jake LaTurner. She deserves to win: The last Democrat to represent the 2nd District should also be the next one to do so.

We give Nancy Boyda our endorsement for two reasons.

First, her centrist politics — while frustrating at times to many left-leaning Democrats who would prefer that a full-throated progressive represent the party, especially on issues such as transgender rights and climate change — are a decent fit for the conservative district she is running to represent.

Boyda is arguably most liberal on the issue of abortion. She vows to vote for national legislation that would restore protections for reproductive rights that were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022.

“It is about reproductive freedom; it’s about bodily autonomy,” she said. “It’s ‘How dare you think that you should come in and a bunch of make important decisions for women?’” That reflects the sensibilities of most Kansans, who voted overwhelmingly in 2022 to reject an antiabortion amendment to the state constitution.

She is also a critic of Donald Trump’s proposals to impose widespread tariffs on imports, a position that makes sense in a largely agricultural district where farm exports would be hurt by a trade war.

Otherwise, Boyda’s stances seem solidly centrist. She made waves during the primary campaign when she said transgender women and girls should be blocked from competing on women’s sports teams. That produced a backlash from LGBT activists.

And while she believes that human-caused climate change is a problem that must be addressed, she favors technological solutions to expand renewable energy — along with eliminating federal subsidies for oil and gas production — instead of imposing restrictions on planet-warming sources of carbon pollution. “I do not support telling Kansans what they can and cannot drive or what temperature to keep their homes,” she says on her campaign website.

Some of this, it seems, is driven by pragmatism. Many voters, Boyda told us, simply want “the price of gas to come down.” They don’t trust Democrats to make it happen. And those are the voters she has to win.

The 2nd District has been redrawn over the years to strengthen the GOP’s hand, after all. When Boyda first ran for the seat in 2004, the district included the heavily Democratic college town of Lawrence. No longer.

Now the district stretches from the top of the state to the bottom, extending from just outside Kansas City to Marion County in east-central Kansas. It is a conservative map, by design.

“I will tell you that the 2nd District will never in my lifetime elect a liberal Democrat,” Boyda told us. “It’s not going to happen.”

That leads to the second reason for our endorsement of Boyda: The conservative Republican who is running for the seat — Schmidt, the former Kansas attorney general and a onetime moderate — has disqualified himself from representing Kansas in Congress.

Under normal circumstances, Schmidt’s 12 years as the state’s top lawyer might make him a no-brainer for the seat. But as we noted before the August primary election, his efforts as attorney general to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election make him unfit for the job.

We don’t expect Schmidt to recant at this point. Neither can we give him our nod.

Boyda brings experience to the race — not just her term in the U.S. House, but also from service in the Pentagon under then-President Barack Obama. She also brings the energy of a political novice to the task, a generation after her first campaign. “I’m intense,” she acknowledged.

She will need that intensity.

Boyda is running her campaign on a shoestring, without much in the way support from the national Democratic Party. If ever there was a time to root for the underdog — even one who has been running for office for 20 years — this is it.

This story was originally published October 11, 2024 at 5:06 AM.