TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A former Kansas attorney general’s successful political comeback in Tuesday’s election kept an open U.S. House seat in Republican hands while the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation won reelection.
Republican Derek Schmidt won the 2nd Congressional District seat held by retiring two-term Republican Rep. Jake LaTurner. Schmidt, who served three terms as attorney general, was coming off a narrow loss in the 2022 governor’s race. He defeated Democrat Nancy Boyda.
Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids won her fourth term by defeating Republican Prasanth Reddy, a doctor and former vice president of two medical research companies. Most of the district’s voters are in suburbs that have been friendly to Davids.
In the state’s two other districts, Republican Reps. Tracey Mann and Ron Estes won reelection comfortably.
Schmidt celebrated at a barbecue restaurant in his southeastern Kansas hometown of Independence and pledged to work on inflation and border security and to fight what he called “the nanny-state mentality” of the federal government.
“We’ve got to push back against this notion that people on the East Coast are going to decide here in Kansas how we use our farmground, what cookstove we use to make our supper, what kind of car we’re supposed to drive by 2035,” Schmidt said in an interview with WIBW-TV.
Democrats have held the 2nd District seat previously, but not since Boyda served a single, two-year term and lost her race for reelection in 2008. LaTurner won both of his two terms by about 15 percentage points and would have likely cruised to victory again, but he announced in April that he wanted to spend more time with his young children.
After wishing Schmidt well in a statement, Boyda said: “For the sake of our democracy I can hope that the next Congress will get serious about governing and set aside the divisive posturing that has been tearing us apart.”
Schmidt and the three incumbents seeking reelection all had big fundraising advantages over their opponents. Schmidt’s total of $1.2 million would be relatively modest for a hotly contested race, but that was five times as much as the $235,000 Boyda raised — and her figure included loans of more than $105,000 to her campaign.
Schmidt is often affable in public, and he worked early in his career for two moderate Republicans, U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker and Gov. Bill Graves, before serving in the state Senate and being elected attorney general in 2010. That’s created lingering distrust among hard-right Republicans.
But Schimdt easily won a five-person primary this year — partly because former President Donald Trump declared in a social media post that Schmidt was “An America First Patriot” and, “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
In the 3rd District, Davids gained national attention when she unseated a Republican incumbent in 2018 as a Native American, lesbian and former mixed martial arts fighter. Republicans try to portray her as among the most liberal members of Congress. Her vocal support of abortion rights has helped her in her district, and she’s positioned herself as a business-friendly and pragmatic centrist.
“I want to make sure that we’re doing what we can to start getting past all this partisan bickering, the partisanship, the awful rhetoric,” she told supporters during an election night watch party in the Kansas City area.
The key to a 3rd District victory is heavily suburban Johnson County, the state’s most populous county. Trump’s support has waned there since his victory in the 2016 presidential race, hurting Republicans, while Davids’ margins of victory have grown over time.
Davids raised $5.7 million for her reelection campaign — more than three times the $1.8 million the challenger raised while putting $87,000 of his personal funds into his campaign.
Reddy congratulated Davids in a statement but added, "The values we campaigned on remain, and this is not the end of our fight.”
Mann raised $1.4 million and Estes, almost $2.1 million, and neither of their Democratic challengers reached $100,000.
The 1st District that Mann represents includes the liberal northeastern Kansas enclave of Lawrence, home to the main University of Kansas campus. However, Lawrence’s influence can’t match the GOP’s strength in the rest of the district, the state’s western third and much of central Kansas. Mann is a former Kansas lieutenant governor who’s had no trouble winning his two previous terms.
His Democratic opponent was Paul Buskirk, an academic counselor and adviser for student athletes at the University of Kansas.
The 4th District of south-central Kansas is centered on Estes’ hometown of Wichita, and he’s a former two-term state treasurer. He’s held the seat since winning a special election in 2017 to replace Mike Pompeo, who was appointed by Trump to be CIA director and later U.S. secretary of state.
His Democratic opponent was Esau Freeman, a painter and union leader who is best known for advocating the legalization of marijuana.
John Hanna, The Associated Press
