Inside Kris Kobach's losing Kansas campaign: 'Check logic and reason at the door'
BY HUNTER WOODALL AND BRYAN LOWRY
hwoodall@kcstar.com
blowry@mcclatchydc.com
November 09, 2018 05:30 AM
Updated 3 hours 8 minutes ago
Kris Kobach blamed money. He blamed history. He didn’t blame himself for losing a race for governor in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly 2 to 1.
“Obviously, if we’d had more money to spend on TV we probably would have done so,” Kobach said Tuesday night. “But no, in terms of the decisions made or how we structured the campaign, no, I don’t think we made any critical errors like that.”
Kobach’s campaign was marked by his parade appearances on a jeep with a mounted replica machine gun, a rally with rocker Ted Nugent and his fiery debate performances where he derisively compared suburban public school buildings to the Taj Mahal. But behind the scenes is where the circus really took place.
Interviews with more than a dozen Republican strategists and officials paint a picture of a candidate who refused to listen to advice, was unwilling to put energy into fundraising and failed to set up a basic “get out the vote” operation.
Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, struggled to pay his campaign staff on time and at one point lacked a working phone system at his Johnson County campaign office, according to GOP sources familiar with the campaign. And people who offered to volunteer were never contacted.
“It was the most dysfunctional thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said a long-time GOP operative in Kansas.
Kobach trusted that his regular presence on cable news, dominance in headlines and the full-throated support of President Donald Trump would carry him to victory, strategists told The Star. He also expected independent Greg Orman to siphon more votes from Democrat Laura Kelly than he actually did.
more
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/election/article221350970.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
