Kansas GOP supermajority continues. Is it the end of Laura Kelly’s political mastery? | Opinion

One big loser Tuesday night in Kansas? Gov. Laura Kelly.

She wasn’t on any ballot — except in spirit. The governor’s much-hyped Middle of the Road PAC poured a reported $470,000 into breaking the GOP’s supermajority stranglehold on both houses of the Kansas Legislature. The Democratic National Committee added another $660,000.

“It is very difficult to govern when you have folks who are dedicating themselves to ensuring that you don’t get anything done, so the administration is not successful,” Kelly said heading into this week’s election. “It is time to switch that out.”

There was no switch.

Instead, Kansas Republicans held onto seemingly vulnerable seats in Johnson County, and picked up additional ground across the state. The veto-proof supermajorities are here to stay, at least through the rest of Kelly’s second and final term in office. She’ll have to play defense the rest of the way.

It probably won’t be much fun.

The question now is whether Kelly’s political mastery was perhaps a bit of an illusion all along.

Kelly stunned the nation when she won the governorship six years ago. She defeated Kris Kobach — a miserable candidate who advertised his extremism by campaigning with a replica machine gun — then four years later held on to the office against then-Attorney General Derek Schmidt.

Both the victories were narrow. She didn’t muster a clear majority of the vote in either election. A win is a win, though, right?

For her efforts, she was labeled a “rock star” by my friend Clay Wirestone at the Kansas Reflector. And the national press — always amazed when a Democrat does well in Kansas — came calling, asking her advice to other Democrats looking to win in red states. She obliged, often.

“Kansas might have an answer to Democrats’ rural voter problem,” Politico blared last year. “Basically, follow my playbook,” she told the website.

The problem? Kelly’s playbook never actually won over rural Kansans — her margins of victory came from the state’s suburbs and urban areas. Her advice boiled down to “lose by less” in Kansas’ less-populated regions. Which might be smart, but it’s hardly magic.

Here’s the thing: If Kelly really is a “rock star,” she should have had coattails. She should have been able to pull up other Democrats into elected office alongside her.

That never happened. After Tuesday, it never will.

Now it looks like Kelly caught a few lucky breaks in 2018 — a noxious opponent and a Democratic wave election nationally helped thrust her into office then. A big break. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’d even argue that Kansans have benefited as a result.

And honestly, it might be that Kelly simply got unlucky in this year’s election cycle. Voters across the country shifted right, apparently fed up with inflation and perhaps still cranky about COVID-19 and its aftermath. It was simply the wrong time to try to break the GOP’s strength at the Statehouse.

It happens. Politics is all about timing.

What all this means, though, is that Kelly won’t be able to act on her priorities — or the priorities that most Kansans say they want — over the next two years. Medicaid expansion seems all but impossible, for example. Instead she’ll have to try to fend off GOP attempts to slash taxes for corporations and undermine public schools.

It will be hard, tedious, necessary work. But it won’t really be rock star stuff.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.