The Kansas Republican Party’s new chairman wants to eliminate nonpartisan elections for cities, counties and school boards, throwing his weight behind the concept after the GOP-controlled state Senate earlier this year rejected a similar idea.
The end of nonpartisan elections would have significant consequences for Kansas politics. Critics warn such a change would inject national ideological battles into local government, risking disrupting the often-mundane but crucial tasks local leaders confront, like filling potholes and approving budgets.
Kansas GOP Chairman Mike Brown’s support for mandating the use of political party labels in all elections is highly controversial even among Republicans. His call for partisan local races comes after Republicans in February chose Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner who lost his 2020 reelection bid and has promoted election conspiracies, to lead the party in a divisive election he won by only two votes.
“It’s time to bring Kansas common sense and recognized Republican values back to the forefront and in our local elections to remind the voters who genuinely aligns with them and their values,” Brown wrote in a newsletter to party members earlier this month.
Brown’s promotion of partisan elections suggests he and his allies will continue to push the idea when the Legislature returns in January, potentially forcing lawmakers to take more votes on it. He has embraced the position even after the Kansas Senate defeated, 16-24, a limited measure called SB 210 that would have given local candidates the option of having a party label next to their name on the ballot.
During his time on the Johnson County Commission, Brown unsuccessfully pushed to make the commission’s elections partisan. He lost his 2020 race to Shirley Allenbrand, a more moderate candidate.
Across Kansas, most local elected positions aren’t attached to a party label, in sharp contrast with state-level and federal positions where Republicans and Democrats go head-to-head on the ballot. Supporters of partisan elections say party affiliation provides voters with important information when making up their mind on low-key races that they may know little about.
But in his newsletter, Brown went further, suggesting nonpartisan races sabotage Republican candidates, allowing Democrats to “hide who they really are” when running in Republican-leaning areas.
Brown has recently signaled that the party is approaching local races as if they are partisan contests. Local elections have been “ceded to Democrats for decades,” Brown told a gathering of Northeast Johnson County Conservatives in May, according to video of the event posted on Rumble, a site popular with the far-right.
At the meeting, Brown said “there is no such thing” as a nonpartisan election and that Republicans had recruited more than 200 candidates to run in local races across the state.
Kansas Democratic Party Chair Jeanna Repass told The Star the state party doesn’t recruit candidates for local races out of respect for their nonpartisan status. She said Democrats strongly support local races remaining nonpartisan.
“I think having nonpartisan races is a unifying way to allow lots of voices at the table, including unaffiliateds and people who lean definitely toward the middle, whatever their party affiliation is,” Repass said. “I think trying to force party affiliations on these roles is going to disenfranchise the voices that I think are the more moderate in our communities.”
Still, some nominally nonpartisan elections are deeply ideological. The race for Johnson County Commission chair last fall between Mike Kelly and Charlotte O’Hara, for instance, was widely seen as a liberal vs. conservative contest; Kelly won 56% to 43%.
Roeland Park Mayor Michael Poppa said making local elections partisan would hamper civic participation by limiting the field of candidates. Like many opposed to the idea, he noted that adding party affiliation to the ballot would disqualify federal employees and military service members from those offices.
A federal law called the Hatch Act largely prohibits federal workers from holding partisan elected office. During a February debate on the bill to allow local candidates to have a party affiliation on the ballot, state Sen. Mike Thompson, a Shawnee Republican who carried the measure, dismissed concerns over the Hatch Act, saying federal workers “self-eliminate on this particular situation” by choosing to work for the U.S. government.
In Roeland Park and other communities, local officials from different parties have been able to collaborate across party lines, said Poppa, who is also the executive director of the Mainstream Coalition, a Kansas-based organization opposed to ideological extremism. It’s a practice he’s worried will be harmed if local elections are made partisan.
“The issues that they’re talking about, the community initiatives that they’re discussing, they’re not part of a state or federal party agenda,” Poppa said. “If we make those local elections partisan, then by default those platforms are going to work their way into local government and we’ve seen that already in Johnson County and across the state and local governing bodies – and it’s a detriment to the community.”
Several high-level officials have exited Shawnee’s city government over the past year as its nonpartisan council’s conservative majority has moved to implement a GOP-friendly agenda that has included slashing property tax rates beyond staff recommendations and voicing support for a statewide ban on transgender athletes participating in girls sports – a measure the Republican-controlled Legislature approved this spring over the veto of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.
At the Northeast Johnson County Conservatives meeting, Brown said “for the most part, we struggle with our local elections” but specifically exempted Shawnee from his criticism. Brown also asked for a show of hands from the crowd of people who were thrilled with their local school boards in recent years.
“No hands go up? OK,” he says in the video of event.
Mark Tallman, who has spent decades advocating at the Statehouse on behalf of the Kansas Association of School Boards, said that while school board races in some of the largest districts sometimes become more charged and competitive, many board seats across the state are often decided in relatively non-ideological elections.
“In very small districts, what we tend to hear is pretty much everybody knows everybody,” Tallman said, adding that while the community may have a sense of where board members stand politically, despite a lack of party labels, the decisions that cause controversy in these districts are not typically Republican vs. Democrat issues.
Instead, the disputes school boards face are often over choices like whether to close a building or fire a teacher. “Those are rarely matters of like heavy campaigning or, frankly, needing to know party,” Tallman said.
Even as Brown has warned that Democrats are using nonpartisan elections to infiltrate local government, making the contests partisan has faced significant bipartisan opposition. When the Kansas Senate rejected SB 210 in February, the vote sharply divided Republican senators, with 16 voting for the measure and 13 against.
“I think it’s a horrible idea. As a matter of fact, I think state elections should be nonpartisan,” said state Sen. John Doll, a Garden City Republican who briefly left the party to be the running mate of Greg Orman, a Johnson County businessman who ran an ill-fated independent campaign for governor in 2018.
“What we’re doing is we’re putting politics ahead of the people and what’s pushing that is party politics.”
During the Senate floor debate, Thompson called the proposal a “transparency issue” and said it only gives candidates the option of having a party designation.
“It just actually allows the voter more information to utilize to make a decision rather than less,” Thompson said.
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican who faced an unsuccessful primary challenge from Brown last year, remained neutral on the proposal. But his office, which oversees Kansas elections, raised questions about how the one-page bill would be implemented.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Clay Barker, who was a previous director of the Kansas Republican Party, questioned whether unaffiliated candidates would be permitted to use the term “unaffiliated” or whether other terms, such as “independent,” would be allowed.
Local governments across the state opposed the legislation. John Goodyear, general counsel for the League of Kansas Municipalities, told senators at the time that few decisions made by governing bodies have partisan underpinnings.
Goodyear told the Kansas Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee that cities already have the authority under Kansas law to pass ordinances to establish partisan elections.
“The vast majority have chosen to have nonpartisan elections,” Goodyear said.
