Kansas Republicans vote in Senate primary, and establishment GOP fears a Kobach win

These establishment figures fear that Kobach would take the most reliably Republican seat in the Senate — by the end of this year, the GOP will have held it for 152 of the 160 years it has existed — and put it in peril in a general-election season in which Republicans are playing defense in four times as many races as the Democrats.

Kansas is one of five states holding primary elections Tuesday, with Democratic voters in Michigan and Missouri refereeing the latest disputes between the younger, far-left activists pushing for a more ideologically aggressive Congress as opposed to an older, more establishment-friendly liberal base. Voters in Arizona and Washington state also are casting ballots.

In Detroit, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) faces a rematch, of sorts, of her upset victory in the 2018 race to succeed John Conyers Jr. (D).

Tlaib, who made national headlines her first day in office in January 2019 by crudely guaranteeing to impeach Trump, faces off against Brenda Jones, the Detroit City Council president who lost the 2018 race by just 900 votes.

Tlaib benefited then from running in a crowded primary, which splintered the district’s majority-black electorate among several candidates vying for the job. This time, she faces only Jones, who has sought to consolidate support for the other candidates.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who clashed early with Tlaib and other young female freshmen in the so-called “Squad,” announced her endorsement for the incumbent after an outside group supporting Jones distributed a leaflet of Jones standing next to Pelosi, smiling.

In St. Louis, Rep. William Lacy Clay (D) faces a rematch against Cori Bush, a community activist who lost by about 20 percentage points in 2018 but who has run a more aggressive campaign this year.

Justice Democrats, a political outfit that helped launch Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) two years ago, is supporting Bush.

Both of those House seats are safely in Democratic hands and will not impact the size of the majority, but the Kansas Senate primary could open up another road map for Democrats to pick up the net gain of four seats they need in November to win the majority in that chamber.

State Sen. Barbara Bollier, a former Republican who left that party in 2018, is cruising to the Democratic nomination and has built a massive war chest that her campaign will immediately get to turn on against whichever GOP candidate emerges the winner.

As of July 15, she had $4.2 million left to spend, while Marshall was down to $1 million and Kobach less than $150,000.

Kobach, who lost the governor’s race to Democrat Laura Kelly in 2018, is facing an unrelenting line of attack from a McConnell-aligned super PAC that is recycling criticism that he faced two years ago from Democrats.

The Harvard, Yale and Oxford-educated candidate captured the secretary of state’s office in the 2010 tea party wave. Capitalizing on the controversies around ACORN, a community organizing group with an expansive voter registration program, Kobach obtained new powers for his office and began tightening voter registration rules and pursuing lawsuits to punish suspected voter fraud. At the same time, he shaped Arizona’s S.B. 1070 immigration law, which gave police new powers to detain undocumented immigrants and barred “sanctuary” policies.

Marshall’s big break came in 2016 when he defeated a flamboyantly conservative incumbent, Tim Huelskamp, who served as an irritant to GOP leaders. It left some far-right conservatives untrustworthy of Marshall.

Democrats are also eyeing what might be a similar dynamic with a wounded incumbent, Rep. Steve Watkins (R-Kan.), who was charged last month with voting illegally in a 2019 election and then obstructing the inquiry, as he faces state Treasurer Jake LaTurner in Tuesday’s primary.

Watkins shrugged off the charges of three felony counts, calling the errors an innocent mistake and saying he looked forward to “setting the record straight.”

“This is clearly hyper-political,” he said during a televised debate that began shortly after news broke about the charges on July 14. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Topeka Mayor Michelle De La Isla is expected to be the Democratic nominee for a seat that Watkins won with just 47 percent of the vote in 2018.

Source:WP