The Black-Brown Alliance That’s Turning Kansas Blue

Act Locally » October 20, 2014

The Black-Brown Alliance That’s Turning Kansas Blue

Why is Pat Roberts running for his life in the Kochs’ home state? Ask community organizers.

BY Sam Ross-Brown

Heading into the November elections, you could be forgiven for assuming the GOP hold on Kansas isn’t going to loosen. The home base of the Koch brothers, the state has become a poster child of Tea Party Republicanism, toeing the far-right line on voter ID laws, abortion restrictions and a host of other issues. In 2012, the National Journal rated the congressional delegation from Kansas as the most conservative in the country—and that was before a Koch-funded campaign succeeded in ousting moderate Republicans in that year’s primaries. Oh, and Secretary of State Kris Kobach happens to be a leading author of Arizona’s SB 1070, the infamous immigration law that critics say encourages racial profiling. Kobach helped write the bill while serving as legal counsel at the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform.

But in the lead-up to November, Kansas’s red-state armor began to show some cracks. Since mid-August, Gov. Sam Brownback, a Tea Party darling up for re-election this fall, has been polling 2 to 6 points behind challenger Paul Davis, a Democrat. Same with Kobach, whose cozy 5-point lead over his leftwing challenger shrunk to within the margin of error last month. Even Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, whose tenure in Congress predates the Reagan era, appears poised to lose his seat—polls show him trailing his little-known challenger, Independent Greg Orman.

Kansas People’s Action (KPA)—an black- and Latino-led organization dedicated to fighting crony capitalism, racism and big money politics—isn’t shy about taking credit for the turnaround. “Their poll numbers are down in large part due to the work that we’ve been doing,” says KPA’s executive director, Sulma Arias. That work includes reaching out to a set of 112,000 less-frequent voters who are black and Latino. The message they tell voters? “Kobach is trying to game the system by messing with the ballot and pushing restrictions on voting that help him and his friends, like Brownback and Roberts,” says Arias.

Arias is referencing measures like the state's voter ID law, authored by Kobach. It requires that would-be voters in Kansas prove U.S. citizenship when registering and show a valid photo ID on Election Day—a dual test 7 percent of eligible U.S. voters cannot pass, according to a Brennan Center for Justice study. African Americans and Latinos are particularly disenfranchised by such laws: 25 percent of blacks and 16 percent of Latinos lack the requisite ID.

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http://inthesetimes.com/article/17231/a_black_brown_alliance_aims_to_turn_kansas_blue1