Susan Wagle says only a woman can win Kansas Senate race. But her reasoning needs work
Here’s what Susan Wagle, president of the Kansas Senate, is telling Republicans who wonder why they should pick her over former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall or even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in next year’s U.S. Senate primary: “The only person who can beat their liberal female is a conservative female.”
Actually, two Democratic women, state Sen. Barbara Bollier and Manhattan Mayor Pro Tem Usha Reddi, are running to replace retiring Sen. Pat Roberts. But the further Wagle walks down the road of reasoning that only a woman can win, the iffier her whole fire-with-fire proposition sounds.
Because the reason only a woman can succeed, she told about 20 members of the Wyandotte County Republican Party the other night, is that “we have women who just tend to vote for women.” Their thinking, according to Wagle, goes like this: “I can relate to her. She’s been a mom and drops her kids off.”
She may be the first candidate in history to argue that only a woman can win over women, because women are so simple-minded.
But in an interview at the event, she said she’s just stating facts: “I don’t like the new identity politics, but it’s happening.”
In her remarks at the Frontier Steakhouse, where you should definitely vote for the chicken fried steak, she returned several times to the threat posed by Democratic women in particular: “You lost your congressman to a Democrat female,” she reminded them, recalling Kevin Yoder’s 2018 loss to Sharice Davids.
Reddi, one of Wagle’s Democratic rivals, scoffed at her gender-based argument: “I’m not running because I’m a woman,” but on convictions, ideas and experience as a teacher, union leader and advocate for mental health. “If she wants to go that route,” Reddi said, laughing, “I look forward to that conversation.”
Some years ago now, political scientists Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon found that Republican women generally have to be more conservative than their male rivals to get elected, because they have to go further to offset the impression that women are more liberal.
Given the competition, I wouldn’t say Wagle is to the right of her GOP rivals, but she’s definitely right alongside them, and acknowledges that policy differences “haven’t evolved yet.”
She takes credit for passing “the first pro-life bill” in the state, in 1996, to give women information about fetal development. That was important, she said, because “sometimes women can get very emotional” and fail to realize “everything out there to support them.”
On social spending, she feels “welfare benefits are for people with a disability,” and that such support even “causes mental illness” because able-bodied beneficiaries then “don’t have a reason to get up.”
To a man at the meeting who asked Wagle whether she was sure she’d never vote for any limit at all on gun rights, she promised she would not.
And to a woman who asked what the party should do to win over young people seduced by Democratic promises of college debt forgiveness, “free this and free that,” she said, “If you take on student debt, I believe you should pay it back. My goodness, I worked three jobs. I didn’t take on debt.”
The cost of attending Wichita State, where Wagle studied in the ‘70s, has tripled in the last 20 years. But whatever you think about loan forgiveness, I’m going to say that rare is the person of any age who’d be persuaded by an insult like this: “I’m shocked our young people can’t comprehend what’s going on in Venezuela” and so don’t realize that “socialism doesn’t work.”
At least she isn’t pandering? And those who turned out to hear her reminded me that everyone in this crowded race has a minute to work on messaging.
Though you have to be a pretty devoted partisan to come to a political meeting on a foggy night during a holiday week, those following every sigh and smile from potential candidate Pompeo might be surprised to hear that almost no one I talked to said they had heard the secretary of state was considering a run. And no one at all said they’d decided whom to support.
“At this point I’m not even thinking about it,” one woman said. “I’m thinking about cleaning my house for Thanksgiving.”
