CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Corrected Feb. 2, 2009 – 11:07 a.m.
Tiahrt Enters Kansas Senate Race, Setting Up GOP Primary Faceoff
By Leah Nylen, CQ Staff
Eight-term Rep. Todd Tiahrt announced Saturday in the state capital of Topeka that he is entering the 2010 contest for the U.S. Senate seat of departing Republican Sam Brownback .
“As I travel across Kansas listening and sharing my vision for a more prosperous state, I have been encouraged to take my leadership to the United States Senate in 2010,” Tiahrt said, according to a release of his remarks. “I am resolute in my determination to take on tough battles in Washington to get things done for the great people of Kansas.”
Tiahrt’s entry sets up what is likely to be a fierce battle for the Republican nomination between two longtime House colleagues. Jerry Moran , a seven-term congressman from the sprawling western-central 1st District, announced in November that he would seek Brownback’s seat and filed papers with the Kansas secretary of state earlier this week making his candidacy official.
A Republican primary fight for the open seat is hardly surprising, given Kansas’ long history as a GOP stronghold.
The state — which gave Republican John McCain 57 percent of its 2008 vote for president even as he lost the national contest to Democrat Barack Obama — has gone Republican in each of the past 28 Senate elections dating to 1936.
Brownback, a social conservative activist who made a brief try for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, won a 1996 special election with 54 percent of the vote and then cruised to re-election with 65 percent in 1998 and 69 percent in 2004. Sticking to a pledge he made to serve no more than two full Senate terms, Brownback is expected to make a strong bid in 2010 for the governor’s seat that will be left open by term-limited Democrat Kathleen Sebelius .
But Democratic officials, whose party has built a solid Senate majority with huge gains across the nation over the past two election cycles, contend they will have a strong shot at winning the Kansas seat — if Sebelius, who has maintained strong popularity over two terms as a rare Democratic statewide officeholder in Kansas, were to decide to enter the race.
Paths to a Primary
The paths that Tiahrt and Moran have taken to their upcoming primary showdown are in many ways similar.
The strongly conservative Tiahrt appeared a long-shot candidate in 1994 when he challenged nine-term Democratic Rep. Dan Glickman in the 4th District, which includes Wichita, the most populous city in Kansas. A former Democrat and onetime contract manager with aviation industry giant Boeing’s local facilities, Tiahrt had won a state Senate seat just two years earlier after making his political debut in a 1990 race for the Kansas House that he lost by just 24 votes. He was best known in his brief legislative tenure for pushing legislation to allow people to carry concealed weapons.
The 4th District in the south-central part of the state was trending away from the Democratic tendencies that had long buoyed Glickman, and Tiahrt found an especially strong base within the sizable anti-abortion movement in the Wichita area.
Democrats tried to characterize Tiarht’s win, by a 6 percentage-point margin, as a fluke result of the national upsurge that year that delivered majorities in both the Senate and the House to the Republican Party. But Tiahrt, after fending off a strong Democratic challenge to his first re-election bid in 1996, settled in and has coasted to easy wins in his recent House elections.
Moran also jump-started his political career with an unexpected win, a 1988 state Senate victory over an 18-year incumbent. But by the time he first ran for the U.S. House in 1996, he was the established front-runner. In between, he was chairman of the state Senate Judiciary Committee and then ascended to majority leader in 1995, thanks to the appeal of his pragmatic conservative image to both the right and centrist wings of the often-fractious Kansas Republican Party.
His first successful run for Congress was far less difficult to achieve than was Tiahrt’s. He ran in 1996 to succeed longtime 1st District Republican Rep. Pat Roberts , who left the seat open for what would be a successful campaign to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum. Running in a largely rural and overwhelmingly Republican district, Moran won his 1996 race with 73 percent and dominated all of his subsequent re-election contests.
Ideologically, Tiahrt has often been typecast as a hard-line conservative and a party-line vote in the House. Moran has been somewhat more willing to disagree with his party’s leadership.
“Tiahrt running for seat is ironically helpful for Democrats,” said Burdett Loomis, a professor of political science at University of Kansas and longtime observer of state politics. “If Tiahrt gets the nomination, the Democratic nomination is really worth something to anyone who could track funding. Tiahrt is perceived as quite a social conservative, and he doesn’t have terrific recognition outside his district. Moran has a much broader identification around the state.”
But their voting records over the past couple of years, since the Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections, have actually been quite similar. A Congressional Quarterly “party unity” study of House votes in 2007 that broke mainly along party lines showed Tiahrt voted with most Republicans against most Democrats 91 percent of the time, while Moran did so 87 percent of the time. The party unity gap was even smaller in 2008, with Tiahrt at 92 percent and Moran at 90 percent.
Moran’s biggest breaks with the administration of President George W. Bush were based on conservative grounds. He opposed the Medicare prescription drug bill pushed by Bush in 2003 as too costly and not good for his rural constituents.
He voted against Bush’s No Child Left Behind education initiative in 2001 on grounds that it allowed the federal government to interfere too much with state and local control of public schools.
Earlier this week, Moran’s campaign released an internal poll showing Moran leading Tiahrt by 16 percentage points. The poll of 500 potential Republican primary voters also found 34 percent undecided. The poll, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, had a margin of 4.4 percent. Tiahrt has not released any poll numbers of his own yet.
Loomis said Moran currently has better name recognition in the state, but that Tiahrt’s conservative reputation will help in the primary. “When the Republican Party has a primary, the more conservative candidate often wins,” Loomis said. “Not always, but certainly any strong social conservative has a solid base of support.”
Waiting Game for Democrats
Kansas Democrats, meanwhile, anxiously await a decision by Sebelius about whether she will pursue a Senate bid. Sebelius, a Democratic moderate, was a prominent early supporter of Obama’s presidential campaign and was seen after his victory as a possible Cabinet appointee. But in early December, Sebelius asked to be removed from consideration for a Cabinet post so she could remain in Kansas to deal with an expected budget shortfall.
“It’s Kathleen Sebelius ’ nomination to have or not if she wants it, without any question,” said Loomis, who served as an aide to Sebelius in 2005. He predicted that Sebelius “could beat either Moran or Tiahrt.”
But Loomis also noted that Sebelius will have held executive positions in Kansas for 16 years — she was state insurance commissioner for eight years immediately prior to her first win for governor in 2002 — and that the idea of going to Washington and being a junior member in a crowded Democratic Senate caucus “might not be all that attractive.”
Should Sebelius bow out, the Democratic bench would be very thin, Loomis said. Six-term Rep. Dennis Moore of the eastern 3rd District, currently the sole Democrat in the Kansas congressional delegation, said he plans to again run for re-election to his House seat in 2010. Former Democratic Rep. Jim Slattery, who held a U.S. House seat from 1983 to 1995, lost a comeback bid against Republican Sen. Pat Roberts last year by a gaping 34 percentage-point margin.
Meanwhile, the races for the House seats left open for 2010 by Moran and Tiahrt also are already taking shape.
Three 1st District Republicans have already expressed interest in replacing Moran, although none have yet filed paperwork with state election officials. The field might include state Sen. Tim Huelskamp, former Brownback staffer Rob Wasinger and businessman Timothy Barker. Stephen Morris, the state Senate president, also expressed an interest in the past about a possible congressional bid, although he has given no indication about his plans for 2010.
So far, no Democrats have expressed interest in running in the solidly Republican district.
No Republicans have yet publicly announced plans to run for Tiahrt’s seat in the 4th District, although Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt and state Sen. Susan Wagle are mentioned as potential candidates. On the Democratic side, state Rep. Raj Goyle, who won his seat in a solidly Republican district in 2006, is a leading contender.
First posted Jan. 31, 2009 1:56 p.m.
Comments
My surmise is that (Gilligan) Sebelius will not seek any elective office in '10, whether or not she desires any Beltway job later on. Other (lesser) prominent Ds, for their part, seem to be focusing on retaining their current posts (e.g. Moore), burned out (e.g. Slattery), or placing greater priority on holding the top post (i.e. the office of governor) for their party. Therefore, it seems more and more likely that the (Class 3) Senate seat will stay with the Rs, no less dependably than the sun shall rise on the E and set on the W!
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