TOPEKA, Kansas — It’s little surprise that the candidates for Kansas’ open U.S. Senate seat sharply disagree on taxes, trade, immigration and climate change. What’s unclear is who voters will most agree with in November: Republican U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall or Democratic state Sen. Barbara Bollier.
Bollier, a retired doctor, believes Marshall’s down-the-line support of President Donald Trump has created an opportunity for her to ride anti-Trump sentiment in the state’s population centers to an upset.
But Marshall is betting on his support of Trump’s tax cuts, trade tactics and hard-line position on immigration to carry the day in a state where the president remains relatively popular with voters. Summing up his core message at a primary debate, Marshall declared, “I’m running to keep standing by this president and to stop the left’s socialist agenda” — including “radical” immigration and environmental policies.
Bollier, however, said those tax cuts benefited the wealthy over middle-class Kansans and that the president’s trade policies were “reckless” and punished Kansas farmers. Essentially, Bollier said in the first debate of the general election, Marshall is voting “the way he is told (by party leaders) rather than what’s best for Kansas.”
“We need political leaders in Washington who will stop the political bickering, stop attacking one another and just get things done,” said Bollier, a moderate former Republican who switched parties in 2018.
Marshall, a two-term congressman from western Kansas and retired obstetrician from Great Bend, claims the federal tax cuts enacted in 2017 spurred the pre-COVID-19 U.S. economy to record heights and substantially lowered taxes for middle-income Kansans.
“It was the greatest economy of my lifetime,” Marshall said in a recent interview with the Kansas News Service. “The average Kansas family was keeping $2,000 more of their hard-earned money.”
A pro-Marshall campaign ad produced by One Nation, a political action committee that doesn’t have to disclose its donors and is connected to Republican political operative Karl Rove, praised Marshall for supporting tax cuts that it said “will increase average household income by $4,000.”
Both that claim and Marshall’s are misleading, according to Frank Sammartino, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
“There was an increase in people’s after-tax income,” Sammartino said, “but it wasn’t anything like $4,000 across the board.”
The figure used in the ad comes from projections Trump’s Council of Economic advisers formulated to boost support for the legislation as Congress was debating it. A Tax Policy Center analysis shows that the cuts reduced federal taxes for Kansas families earning between $50,000 and $75,000 by an average of $930, and 60% of the benefits went to the wealthiest 20% of Kansans.
Other provisions in the tax bill, Marshall said, such as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act mandate that required Americans to purchase health insurance, added to the savings.
But Bollier pushed back, pointing to the uneven distribution of benefits and the fact that the tax cuts “ballooned” the federal budget deficit,
“We need a tax system that is fair to all,” she said.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is proposing to repeal the tax cuts for those making more than $400,000 a year. Bollier doesn’t support “a full repeal of the Trump tax plan,” spokesperson Alexandra De Luca said. Instead, she favors making the middle-class tax cuts permanent and closing “loopholes for corporations and the wealthy that are driving up our national debt.”
