AG Kris Kobach’s popularity among Kansas voters is underwater. Will he change course? | Opinion

Kris Kobach is quietly in trouble.

The Republican attorney general of Kansas is — by far — the most unpopular statewide elected official in the Sunflower State, according to a Fox News exit poll of 1,612 voters taken during the November election. (Washburn University political scientist Bob Beatty highlighted the results over the weekend in The Topeka Capital-Journal.)

Just 34% of voters had a positive opinion of Kobach, while 41% had a negative view. Nearly a quarter of the electorate, 23%, said they didn’t know enough about the attorney general to express an opinion about him.

Those are what we call “underwater” numbers, folks.

For comparison’s sake: Gov. Laura Kelly, who beat Kobach to win Cedar Crest in 2018, did a lot better: She had a 51% approval rating, while 38% of voters disapproved. That made her the most popular official in Kansas — a striking number for a Democrat in a GOP-dominated state.

Sen. Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall did less well than the governor but better than Kobach. Moran had a 42% approval rating, while 29% of voters disapproved. Marshall came in just behind — 40% of voters liked him, while 35% did not.

That leaves Kobach as the only major elected official who has more Kansas voters against him than for him.

Which sure looks like bad news as he looks ahead to 2026 — either to run for reelection as attorney general, or to try (again) to become the governor of Kansas.

But it’s no surprise. Kobach is a right-wing ideologue. And Kansas voters, though they lean conservative, don’t tend to much like right-wing ideologues.

Machine gun mentality

Remember 2018? Kelly shocked the country by beating Kobach to win the governorship. But it was easy to see why Kansas voters didn’t much like the Republican candidate — Kobach campaigned with a replica machine gun and seemed to delight in the outrage that stirred, right up to the moment it cost him victory.

Oops.

His loss to Kelly that year left such a bad taste in the mouths of GOP voters that they rejected him for Roger Marshall during the U.S. Senate primary two years later.

So when Kobach ran for attorney general in 2022, he left the machine gun at home. He won this time — in a squeaker. (He was perhaps aided by Democrats’ decision to leave their candidate Chris Mann under-resourced in that race.) It wasn’t exactly a mandate.

But Kobach has run the office with what you might call a machine gun mentality, using his office less to serve Kansans and more to challenge the Biden administration in Washington D.C.

He has filed suit — or joined suits brought by other Republican attorneys general — to ensure that so-called “Dreamer” immigrants cannot obtain affordable health care, to challenge the federal government’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, and to limit transgender protections sought by the feds.

To be fair, he’s won a few of those fights. It’s just not clear those are the fights that Kansans want him to fight.

The Fox News poll suggests maybe not: More voters had a “very unfavorable” opinion of Kobach (28%) than had no opinion of him at all (23%).

History shows trouble

We’ve seen this story before. In recent decades, Attorney General Phill Kline and Gov. Sam Brownback both won office in Kansas as right-wing warriors only ultimately to fail — Kline was booted from office, while Brownback’s popularity dipped so hard and so fast that he fled for service in Donald Trump’s first administration.

The good news for Kobach is that Joe Biden is leaving office, to be replaced by Trump. The attorney general has both time and an excuse to pivot away from his ideological crusade and win back the support of Kansas voters.

Will he? Kobach was smart enough to leave the machine gun at home in 2022. Can he also leave behind the machine gun mentality, if only for the sake of electoral victory? It’s not clear that he wants to, even if he could.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.