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Campaign archive · 2014 campaign

July 15, 2014: Over 100 Republicans endorse Davis

This address held the 2014 campaign's release on the Republicans for Kansas Values endorsement. The release is not reproduced. Here is what the press reported about the event, the disputes around it and how the race ended.

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Date of the original item
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Archive note written by the Public Record editors. The campaign's original text is not reproduced.

What happened

On Tuesday, July 15, 2014, a group of current and former Republican officeholders gathered in Topeka to endorse Davis, then the Democratic House minority leader, and his running mate Jill Docking against Gov. Sam Brownback. The group called itself Republicans for Kansas Values. The campaign's release on this page was dated a day earlier and put the number at 104; the Lawrence Journal-World used the same figure in its headline, and the Associated Press described the group as more than 100 people.

The list reached back several decades of Kansas Republican politics. It included two former lieutenant governors, three former Senate presidents and three former House speakers, along with many former legislators and some sitting local school board members. Names singled out in coverage included Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, who was still in office, former Senate President Dick Bond of Overland Park and former Rep. Wint Winter Jr. of Lawrence, who spoke at the announcement.

What the endorsers said

Speakers at the event said Brownback had moved the party too far to the right on taxes and school funding. Bond tied his decision to what Brownback himself had called a "real live experiment" with the state's tax policy. A former State Board of Education member said school funding was the issue that mattered most to her. Several of the speakers were moderates who had lost primaries to more conservative Republicans, some of them in 2012 to candidates Brownback backed.

The response

Brownback disputed the charge that he had cut education. His campaign said total K-12 spending, counting state payments into the teacher retirement system, had gone up every year he had been governor, and it attributed the drop in base per-pupil aid to the end of federal stimulus money after the recession. A spokesman said the governor was focused on growing the economy.

Disputes over the list

Two days later, former U.S. Rep. Jan Meyers, one of the most prominent names on the list, said she had not endorsed Davis. She told reporters she would never publicly back a Democrat over a sitting Republican governor and suggested there had been a miscommunication.

The October expansion

On October 14, 2014, the Davis campaign said the coalition had grown to more than 500 Republicans, counting officeholders together with community leaders and educators. That number is the campaign's own count and was not independently verified. The same day, Brownback announced an endorsement from a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.

Context

Courting moderate Republicans was the route that Democrat Kathleen Sebelius had used to win the governorship in 2002 and 2006. In 2014 about 45 percent of registered Kansas voters were Republicans, 29 percent were unaffiliated and 25 percent were Democrats, so a Democrat needed crossover votes to win statewide.

How it turned out

Brownback and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer won the November 4 general election, 49.8 percent to 46.1 percent. Davis tried a similar approach in 2018, when about three dozen Republicans endorsed him for Congress. See the elections page for the full results.

Sources

  1. Lawrence Journal-World: 104 Republicans endorse Davis for governor (July 15, 2014)
  2. KCUR: More than 100 GOP officeholders endorse Democrat for Kansas governor (July 15, 2014)
  3. KMUW: Current, former Kansas GOP officials endorse Davis (July 16, 2014)
  4. Lawrence Journal-World: Former congresswoman denies endorsing Davis (July 17, 2014)
  5. Lawrence Journal-World: Davis says more than 500 Republican dissidents support him (Oct. 14, 2014)
  6. Ballotpedia: Kansas gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2014

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