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.
