WASHINGTON — Sam Brownback hasn’t gone away.
Even if the longtime Kansas politician no longer holds office, even if he’s not on the ballot, even if he’s not out campaigning for Republican candidates, his name is echoing on televisions across the state.
In the governor’s race, the Democratic Governors Association put out a video showing Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Brownback, who stepped down as governor in early 2018, as two Spider-Men pointing at each other in reference to a popular internet meme. In the Kansas 3rd Congressional District campaign, two of incumbent Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids’ recent campaign ads have focused on her Republican opponent Amanda Adkins’ ties to Brownback.
“When Sam Brownback’s career was on the line, he put his trust in Amanda Adkins,” a narrator says toward the end of both ads. “Think she’ll really work for you?”
Tying Adkins, a former Brownback campaign staffer, to the former Kansas governor and senator is not a new tactic for Davids. It’s not new for Kansas Democrats either.
Brownback won five statewide elections in Kansas beginning with his election to the U.S. Senate in the 1996, but by the time he gave up the governor’s office to take an ambassadorship in 2018 his political stock in the state had dropped severely.
Since Brownback launched his tax experiment in 2012 and the experiment went south — draining funding needed for schools, infrastructure and local services — his name has served as a weight around the ankles of Republicans in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson and hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since the Great Depression.
“His legacy is not a positive legacy, it’s negative,” said former Kansas Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat and one of Brownback’s most vocal critics during his governorship. “I think people still remember how bad shape we were in financially because of his tax policies. And that’s why even today, he is an albatross for the Republican Party in Kansas.”
Democrats attacked Brownback in 2014, when he narrowly won his reelection bid. They attacked him in 2018, which helped Democrat Laura Kelly get elected governor in a state that had voted overwhelmingly for former President Donald Trump. And they attacked him in 2020, helping Davids win reelection.
But as Democrats once again ramp up their efforts to highlight Adkins’ and Republican gubernatorial nominee Schmidt’s ties to Brownback for the third election cycle in a row, the strategy may not be as potent as it once was.
“Voters hated the man, let’s not dance around the point,” said Patrick Miller, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. “He was super unpopular and memories of that linger. But the power of that appeal does decrease over time. Appealing to Brownback or appealing to (former President Barack) Obama becomes less powerful of an appeal when that person actually isn’t the chief executive anymore.”
Brownback is to Kansas Democrats what President Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to Kansas Republicans. They are high-profile, disliked figures among each party’s base.
Campaigns use those high-profile personalities as a shorthand, using distaste as motivation for voters to show up and to the polls in a midterm election, which typically have a low turnout.
“It’s really a strategy of campaigns, especially in midterms to motivate your party’s base,” Miller said. “And you do that partly with these symbolic and emotional appeals to personalities that are divisive.”
Republicans across the country have attacked Biden and Pelosi, just as Democrats nationally have stepped up their attacks on former President Donald Trump and — as Biden emphasized in a speech in front of Independence Hall two weeks ago — “MAGA Republicans,” short of “Make America Great Again,” Trump’s campaign slogan.
But Biden and Pelosi are still in office.
“Laura Kelly and her allies have spent millions of dollars campaigning against someone who hasn’t been on a ballot in eight years because she cannot defend her own record,” said C.J. Grover, Schmidt’s campaign manager.
Kelly’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Once a standard name in Kansas politics, Brownback hasn’t been on the ballot since 2014. He last held office in January 2018 and left to serve in the Trump administration as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. The appointment gave him a political parachute out of the office where he was consistently ranked the least popular in the country.
Still, his reputation lingers.
Democratic polling in June found that Brownback remains extremely unpopular, with only 25% of voters in the 3rd Congressional District viewing him favorably. His unfavorable numbers were much lower than former President Donald Trump, whom 43% of voters saw favorably.
The Davids campaign has been quick to seize on those numbers, emphasizing Brownback far more than they talk about Trump, even as the former president has come under investigation for keeping classified documents at his Mar-A-Lago resort.
Miller said the Democrats may also be looking to use Brownback as a way to define Adkins — a campaign term for influencing how voters perceive a candidate — given that Adkins has never held elected office and is less well known than some of the other candidates on the ballot even though she ran in 2020.
Democrats are betting that Adkins ties to Brownback — coupled with motivation in the Democratic base on abortion — will drag her down enough that Davids can overcome the Republican Party’s edge in the midterm.
“For almost two decades, Amanda Adkins shaped, supported, and celebrated Sam Brownback’s disastrous policies, working at his side even when it meant Kansas kids suffered,” said Ellie Turner, Davids’ spokeswoman. “A record like that is not something you can brush off, especially when Kansans are still recovering from the harm Brownback and his allies did to our state.”
Republicans, meanwhile, are wielding Biden’s name the same way that Democrats are using Brownback’s.
“It’s no surprise that Sharice Davids would rather turn to lies than run on her own record of voting with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi over her constituents in Kansas one hundred percent of the time,” said Anna Mathews, Adkins’ campaign manager. “Amanda Adkins never worked in Gov. Brownback’s administration and never received a paycheck from the State of Kansas; instead, she spent the last 15 years of her life building business at Cerner making healthcare more affordable.”
Adkins served as a campaign manager for Brownback’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign and was the chairwoman of the Kansas Republican Party when Brownback was elected governor. He appointed her to the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund.
Schmidt never worked directly for Brownback, but he served as attorney general when Brownback was governor, which put him in a position where he defended Brownback’s policies in the courts. As Democrats have criticized his defense of those policies, Republicans have said Schmidt was just doing his job as attorney general.
Both Republicans and Democrats acknowledge Brownback remains unpopular. Most, when asked about why his name is still invoked years after he left office, said it was because of the impact everyday Kansans felt from his policies.
Under the tax cuts implemented from Brownback, the state faced massive funding shortfalls, making it difficult to fund the state programs voters feel in their everyday lives. Eventually, the Republican-controlled legislature stepped in to eliminate Brownback’s tax cuts, using a supermajority to override his veto. Brownback has insisted that his program just needed more time to work.
Because Brownback’s policies affected the state budget, they may have had a more personal impact than national policies, which often take years to be felt by the average voter. Davids has spent much of her campaign emphasizing some of the laws Democrats have passed, in an attempt to convince voters that her party is attempting to address their needs.
Republicans say that even if Brownback is perceived poorly by voters, that he’s been out of office for long enough that the strategy won’t work for Democrats. Former Kansas Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning, an Overland Park Republican, said voters are more focused on the economy and how inflation affects their lives than they are concerned about Brownback’s tax cuts.
“I just think that it’s losing its firepower for them,” Denning said. “You know, eight years is quite a distance. And everybody has a short memory.”
Denning called the Brownback years “history” and said “we’ve got a whole new set of problems that The Democratic Party is wanting not to talk about.”
But Brownback isn’t exactly disappearing from public view. In a recent speech, Brownback compared voters rejecting an amendment to the Kansas constitution that would have eliminated the right to abortion to the first battle of the Civil War, reigniting an issue that Republicans like Schmidt and Adkins have preferred to leave untouched.
State Rep. Troy Waymaster, a Republican from Bunker Hill, said he wished Brownback’s name would stop coming up in politics.
“I think just where the state was at budget-wise and otherwise,” said Rep. Troy Waymaster, a Republican from Bunker Hill. “I would just prefer them to focus on what they want to do and just leave Brownback out of it.”
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(Kansas City Star reporter Katie Bernard contributed to this report.)
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