Can anyone revive Kansas’ decimated Democratic Party?

Washington Days is coming unglued.

The annual meeting of the Kansas Democratic Party has ground to a halt. In the windowless meeting room of the downtown Topeka Ramada Inn March 7, party leaders can’t figure out where eastern Kansas ends and western Kansas begins. They can’t even agree on the meaning of their own party’s bylaws.

A proposal to elect two vice chairs, which was overwhelmingly rejected earlier in the day, is resurrected and approved, when delegates realize that they don’t want to choose between the two nominees: Kathryn Focke of Manhattan and Melody McCray-Miller of Wichita.

“They were all drunk last night, and they’re all fighting today,” one delegate mutters.

The last order of business at this meeting, which resembles a contentious family reunion, is to pick a new party chair to succeed Joan Wagnon, who is stepping aside after four years of toil in the Sunflower State’s hardest political job.

The choice should be easy — one of the nominees doesn’t even want the job. Former state Rep. Dennis McKinney, of Greensburg, declined a nomination by western Kansas Democrats who, like McKinney, feel that the party has abandoned them.

“If your great-grandparents came to this country to work in the mines, and they were dirt-poor and they were part of the early labor movement in Kansas that helped us to be one of the first states with unemployment compensation and … workplace safety rules, and then one day you wake up and your town is described as a ‘craphole’ small town, you have to understand why we’re not connecting with the people and culture of Kansas,” McKinney says, recalling the pejorative for rural Kansas towns that got party communications director Dakota Loomis fired just before last year’s elections.

McKinney’s remarks draw a long standing ovation. But he has bowed out of the race. So, by default, the duty falls to former Lake Quivira Mayor Larry Meeker.

A fixture in Johnson County’s arts and civic scenes, Meeker made a career as an economist and vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The gregarious, ebullient Meeker takes the party’s reins after the disastrous 2014 election cycle, one in which Meeker also found himself on the losing end again.

Despite his professional and civic credentials, Meeker couldn’t overcome northwest Johnson County’s proclivity for Republican candidates. Voters there re-elected Brett Hildabrand, whose background is obscure, whose participation in local politics is scant and whose legislative achievements are few. (In February, Hildabrand introduced the Fantasy Sports Legalization Act to protect the sanctity of his couch-potato hobby.)

Meeker likes to point out that he lost by 6 percentage points last November, bettering 2012’s 10-point defeat, which first sent Hildabrand into office. Moral victories don’t count in politics. Winning does. These days, Kansas Democrats aren’t doing much winning at the polls.

In fact, they’re winning less often than ever before — even in a state historically known for its populism and now besieged by failing Republican policies.

Democrats have failed to put a statewide candidate in office over the last three election cycles. In Johnson County, they’ve been nearly eradicated, save for state Reps. Nancy Lusk and Jarrod Ousley. In reliably blue Wyandotte County, House Minority Leader Tom Burroughs came within 145 votes of losing his seat. This was in a year when Democrats seemed poised to reclaim relevance.

The party bet big on state Rep. Paul Davis to unseat Gov. Sam Brownback. Davis turned out to be a wooden, flimsy anti-Brownback candidate, who offered few original ideas and ultimately let Brownback’s aggressive campaign define him.

Davis and other political analysts pin the loss on the national attention cast on independent Greg Orman’s bid to defeat U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts. With Republicans clamoring to regain control of the U.S. Senate, national-party activists spent $8 million to fend off Orman. The infusion of cash supposedly helped bring more GOP voters than usual to the polls, which also helped propel the down-ballot candidates Brownback and Secretary of State Kris Kobach to victory.

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Equally to blame was Kansas Democrats’ one-way strategy that emphasized Davis over other candidates, urban counties (Sedgwick, Shawnee and Wyandotte) over the rest of the state, and an education-only message over other campaign planks that would have attracted more diverse constituencies to the polls.

Meeker acknowledges that he has his work cut out for him to restore Kansas Democrats to relevancy. Is he the right man for the job?

Last summer, the Kansas Democratic Party’s executive director, Jason Perkey, was confident in his party’s chances in 2014. Intuitively, he was right. Brownback’s tax policy wasn’t producing the jobs promised when the tax cuts passed in 2012. Instead, headlines told of the disastrous effect they were having on the state’s finances.

Strategically, Perkey missed. Perkey, who has been executive director since 2012, described a strategy that would identify potential donors and crossover voters. The big-data approach to campaigning mirrored the technological ground game that the national party used to send Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 and keep him there in 2012.

Perkey added that the 2014 effort was to focus on boosting turnout in Johnson, Sedgwick and Shawnee counties, as well as target Hispanic voters in southwestern Kansas.

“It’s very sophisticated stuff,” he told The Pitch last May.

For all the party’s data, here are some troubling numbers. Since 2008, there are 46,000 fewer registered Democrats in the Sunflower State. In that same period, Republicans have added about 24,000 voters to their ranks. In Democratic stronghold Wyandotte County, turnout was 35 percent in 2014, making it one of three Kansas counties with a turnout of less than 40 percent.

Despite the emphasis on four counties with large concentrations of Democrats, Davis carried only Shawnee and Wyandotte. Johnson County was crucial to Davis, but he lost there by 3,000 votes. Davis also failed to carry Sedgwick, even though he ran with Wichita businesswoman Jill Docking on the ticket.

The Hispanic outreach also bombed, with the party losing in predominantly minority counties Seward and Finney.

Democratic strategist Chris Reeves, who lives in Overland Park, recalled Kansas Democrats’ clumsy effort to court Hispanic voters as part of a lengthy exegesis on liberal blog Daily Kos. In it, he wrote that Docking appeared before a Hispanic organization in Dodge City, but she found out that the party had failed to print any campaign literature in Spanish.

“It didn’t exist,” Reeves wrote of the party’s Hispanic strategy. “No one was there to run it.”

Reeves traveled to Kansas’ 105 counties to try to organize the party’s campaign effort. But he learned that Democrats had little infrastructure and had made too few inroads to rural parts of the state.

“Kansas is becoming more red and it’s easy to see why,” Reeves tells The Pitch in an e-mail. “Small towns in the west and southeast are shrinking, some dying. The kids leave those communities and come to Johnson County and Sedgwick and the metro areas. They come to the metros, and they are already diehard Republicans, at least in part because we’ve never made a serious effort to talk to them.”

Wagnon rejects the notion that the party hasn’t made an effective effort in rural Kansas. She points to 51 organized Democratic parties in the state, roughly twice what she inherited in 2011. She adds that there are 10 more that are forming.

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But even with 61 organized county parties, that covers little more than half the counties in the state and shows a significant weakness in western Kansas, where Democrats once had solid representation in the Statehouse with 10 House members from central and western districts.

Democrats now don’t have a single lawmaker west of Wichita.

“We did not have good showings in western Kansas, in the Big First [Congressional district],” Wagnon concedes. “And that needs to change.”

U.S. Rep. Tim Huelskamp carries himself more like a rascally schoolyard troublemaker than a member of Congress. The two-term tea-party Republican’s demeanor is no different on an October 8 evening in Salina. Seated at a table during a debate before about 250 people, he listens to Kansas State University professor and 1st District Democratic candidate Jim Sherow field a question about the state’s 50-year energy plan.

With a minute to answer, Sherow nervously replies that fossil fuels will remain a critical part of the economy “for some time to come,” and he adds that other countries are well ahead of the United States in their investment in energy alternatives, biofuels and wind power.

“We need to step up our game because not only does it improve the global climate situation we are all facing but it also creates jobs here in Kansas,” Sherow says, eliciting applause from this central Kansas crowd.

Talk of energy alternatives draws a smirk from Huelskamp, Kansas’ 1st District congressman, whose politics are so far to the right that even House Speaker John Boehner finds him repellent. Once the clapping dies down, Huelskamp rolls his eyes and goes to work on his opponent.

“Clearly the professor does support the president’s global-warming agenda that would involve less use of coal, less use of natural gas, less use of oil products, and would cost thousands and thousands and thousands of Kansas jobs,” Huelskamp says, borrowing from the first page of the GOP playbook: Tie your opponent to Obama. He then makes a case for the Keystone XL pipeline.

“If we could build a pipeline from Keystone, we could create more Kansas jobs,” Huelskamp adds, above a growing din of groans and derision from the audience.

Sherow, a relative unknown, polled in a statistical dead heat with Huelskamp for much of the summer. The former Manhattan mayor seemed to ride a wave of dissatisfaction with Huelskamp, who earlier in the year helped engineer a federal government shutdown.

Sherow attracted support from a klatch of moderate Republicans who had grown tired of the GOP’s move to the right, as well as most major newspapers in the sprawling district that covers more than half the land area of Kansas.

But, as the campaign wore on, Sherow had trouble getting support from the state party. The well-funded Huelskamp campaign bombarded western Kansas households with mailers that Photoshopped Sherow next to Nancy Pelosi.

Sherow couldn’t match his opponent’s messaging and couldn’t get help from an unwilling state party.

“Ever since he was in the Statehouse, Huelskamp has been putting together a sizable voter contact list, and by this time, it must be huge. There’s good field organization throughout the 1st District” for Huelskamp, Sherow says. “The Democrats lack that. We failed to build organization.”

There was a time when Democrats held a majority in the Kansas House. That was in 1991.

The “Summer of Mercy,” a weeks-long protest of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller, marked a new and unusual chapter for the Kansas GOP — and the beginning of the end for Kansas Democrats. The protesters included a young Huelskamp, who went to jail for being too overbearing. They galvanized Kansas Republicans, spawning a wave of GOPers obsessed with abortion and social issues propelling them to candidacies in typically nonpartisan local races, such as school boards and county commissions. The movement also organized Republicans on a precinct level for the next 20 years.

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Democrats shied from the hyper-local races.

The result was a well-organized party infrastructure for Republicans in which higher offices, such as state House and Senate seats, were filled with dependable, motivated candidates from lower offices who had years of support and legislative experience. It also generated a donor base, while the same for Democrats eroded, particularly in rural Kansas.

Democrats bet big on more visible races. In 2002, they won when popular Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Sebelius ascended to the governor’s mansion over Tim Schallenberger. Sebelius won again in 2006, crushing Emporia Sen. Jim Barnett. She didn’t depend on an organized state Democratic infrastructure, instead leaning on support from moderate Republicans who were willing to vote for the daughter-in-law of longtime Kansas Republican Congressman Keith Sebelius.

But the political foundation that supported Sebelius and other statewide Democrats, such as Paul Morrison, was brittle.

Morrison, who switched parties out of political expedience more than adherence to Democratic principles, believed that he had a better chance of defeating incumbent Attorney General Phill Kline with a “D” behind his name. He was right. (The highly organized Johnson County GOP precinct committee people quickly installed Kline in Morrison’s old job.)

Morrison resigned amid a sex scandal after barely a year in office. Sebelius left Topeka to take a cabinet position with the Obama administration. That left Mark Parkinson, a lame-duck governor who had no interest in running for office or, party insiders say, building a network.

“What they didn’t do is, they didn’t spend much time building a party infrastructure,” Wagnon says.

In 2010, Brownback took back the governor’s office, and a wave of conservative lawmakers soon followed in 2012 to further isolate state Democrats.

And Kansas Democrats remain slow to learn their lessons. The party’s all-in strategy with Davis failed, and the party provided little help to candidates such as Sherow.

“They had expended their budget by the time they saw an opportunity in my race,” Sherow tells The Pitch. “Water was under the bridge and long gone.”

Davis nearly matched Brownback’s fundraising dollar for dollar. (Brownback took loans from Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer that are now the subject of an FBI probe.)

The Davis campaign focused almost entirely on education and the state budget. Sherow says those issues weren’t top priorities in rural Kansas compared with wages, agriculture, rural health care and water resources.

“When we first started our campaign, there was a Democratic field plan to turn out voters, especially mail-in ballots, and make sure we had our voters going,” Sherow says. “There were supposedly field representatives in offices in all the districts, the congressional districts. And I forget how much money my campaign put in, $5,000 or $7,500. I asked, ‘Where’s the field rep in Dodge City?’ It never got there. Finally, my campaign manager and I talked to my staff members, and I said, ‘We’re going to quit paying.’ We said, ‘That’s it. We’re done.'”

The story of education cuts didn’t play well, either, among the counties that Davis’ campaign courted, such as Johnson, where schoolchildren are given iPads to complement the curriculum.

Much like the national party, Kansas Democrats were reluctant to take firm stances that would resonate with constituencies. An obvious issue was the party’s weak stand for gay rights.

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Early in the 2014 legislative session, Rep. Charles Macheers, a first-term Shawnee Republican, introduced a bill that would allow Kansas businesses to refuse service to gay customers.

Davis, the party’s legislative leader, cast a vote against the measure but refused to take the floor to speak out against it. (It took hard-line conservative Sen. Susan Wagle to kill the bill.)

The meek handling of the bill by Democrats infuriated LGBT advocates in Kansas.

“The problem is much bigger than just LGBT issues,” says Thomas Witt, executive director of Equality Kansas. “The problem with this party is, it won’t stand up for anything. … We can’t get Democratic leadership to talk about Medicaid expansion to save our lives.”

When he traveled to Europe for the first time, as a teenager, in 1967, Meeker says Kansas had meaning to the people he met on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Europeans then understood that Kansas was the home state of Olympic distance-running star Jim Ryun and of the Menninger Foundation, a renowned psychiatric facility that moved to Houston, in 2003.

When he traveled to Istanbul more recently, he checked into a hotel where a concierge saw “Kansas” on Meeker’s travel documents.

“No evolution,” the hotel worker quipped.

Kansas may suffer an image problem abroad, but in the state, Republicans easily outmaneuver Democrats with a simple slogan: “Small government, low taxes.” That tagline has become the mantra of Republicans in Kansas and elsewhere, a simple, succinct message that quickly describes what the party stands for.

Kansas Democrats have no equivalent.

“At the end of the day, we end up being for a laundry list of things,” Meeker tells The Pitch. “These days, laundry lists don’t sell too well.”

Meeker’s idea for a Kansas Democratic slogan? “Restoring economy.”

“I think most people understand it’s broken,” Meeker says.

“At least it’s a theme,” he goes on. “We have NRA members. We have pro-choice members. We have Greenpeace members. We need a message that resonates with the NRA members, the pro-choice members, the Greenpeace members.”

Meeker’s plans for reassembling the party is a long play, one that eyes success in 2020.

“You don’t build a party overnight,” Meeker says. “You don’t build it in one election.”

While Meeker has some obvious tasks — recruit better candidates, raise more money, build a wider party infrastructure — his most challenging problem may be mending fences within his own party.

The often-described chasm between Kansas moderates and conservatives is deep. But the divisions are more significant within what remains of the Kansas Democratic Party. The infighting was apparent at Washington Days in March as well as in Reeves’ travels across the state.

“I think there are a lot of bright minds in the party, and no one is expecting to agree with everyone,” Reeves tells The Pitch in an e-mail. “Someone told me on the trail Democrats in Kansas view each other as mortal enemies first — they will do whatever they can to defeat or stop another Democrat far before they go after Republicans. It’s largely true and, unfortunately, it isn’t always wrong. That said, it happens way too often.”