Paul Davis is the quiet turtle vying to unseat hare-brained Gov. Sam Brownback

Dedrie Hawkins watches the Wyandotte County Juneteenth Parade from the folding chair she has propped up on the corner of 18th Street and Parallel Parkway. June 14 has turned into a steamy day, and she sits in the sun as marching bands and Shriners move along hilly 18th Street, in the heart of Kansas City, Kansas.

Hawkins describes herself as a political observer, and she knows that various people seeking public office are on the route today. Most, like judges and state representatives vying for re-election, sail on by from the comfort of their automobiles, waving at the crowd and letting political signs affixed to their vehicles do the talking.

Then there’s the tall, rail-thin man in jeans, sneakers and a button-up shirt crisscrossing 18th Street on foot, shaking hands with folks standing along the parade route.

He reaches Hawkins, a General Motors employee, and greets her. She has never heard of Paul Davis, candidate to unseat Gov. Sam Brownback.

“Is he a Democrat or a Republican?” Hawkins asks no one in particular as the candidate returns again to the parade route and crosses Parallel Parkway.

It’s a fair question for Hawkins to ask. She’s the secretary of the United Auto Workers Local No. 31. The labor union is getting ready to screen candidates for the upcoming midterm election, and it is unlikely to endorse Brownback, now on his quest for another term. She holds the governor at least partly accountable for a plague of disinvestment she can point to in Wyandotte County: the closed-up grocery stores, the frozen development. “As for education,” she adds, “we’re not going anywhere.

“I’ll tell you, if Kansas City, Kansas, can get a Democratic governor, we’ll support him,” she says.

Davis is running as a Democrat. But for many like Hawkins, he’s still an unknown. Published polls reveal that, while Davis is running a closer-than-expected race against the well-known Brownback, his name recognition has lagged.

Davis tells The Pitch that he thinks he’s running a visible campaign. If nothing else, it’s a mobile campaign — one that has stopped so far in Wichita, Galena and places in between.

“We have spent a lot of time getting around the state,” he says. “It’s a slow process of getting better known, and I think that we are doing very well at that.”

Davis, a lifelong Lawrence resident and the top Democrat in the Kansas House, got off to that slow start in part because of a long legislative session that didn’t end until May, making campaigning difficult.

But signs have emerged that he will run a far closer race against Brownback than many had predicted when he announced his candidacy in the middle of 2013. A slew of public polls over the past month show that Davis is within the margin of error, and in some cases even leads Brownback. Some, like those from Public Policy Polling, which consistently show Davis with a strong chance of beating the incumbent, have a reputation for left-leaning push polls. Other pollsters have told The Pitch that public-poll results for the Davis-Brownback race track well with private, unpublished polling numbers.

Brownback’s campaign, which describes the sitting governor as a Reagan Republican, in contrast to an Obama-style Democrat, has been dismissive of polls. But it may be harder to ignore Davis’ campaign fundraising, which is closing the gap between the candidates (especially if you set aside a $500,000 loan that Brownback running mate Jeff Colyer donated to the re-election effort).

Meanwhile, considerable attention around the country is being paid to the Kansas governor’s race. That’s not because of Davis — and he may not necessarily benefit from it.

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National media figures, including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, have directed attention to the race with dispatches about the troubled state of Kansas’ economy under Brownback’s tutelage. The Wall Street Journal has also chronicled the state’s budget woes, describing how even neighboring states with conservative-minded leadership are not eager to replicate Brownback’s drastic income-tax approach.

Those findings largely mirror what many Kansas government observers have known for a while: Brownback’s risky income-tax plan, which even the governor called an experiment, is gutting state resources. And while the state shows some signs of economic recovery, it’s bouncing back slower than neighboring states in most metrics.

Top Democrats in Washington, D.C., and other policymakers see the Sunflower State as a winnable seat for Democrats in a midterm election that otherwise looks like a strong year for Republicans.

Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor for Washington, D.C.’s Cook Political Report, had listed Kansas as leaning toward Brownback for much of 2014, a designation owing in large part to the state’s typical support of Republican candidates. But now the wonky political publication lists Kansas as a tossup.

“There’s been a lot of polling out there that suggests that this is a much closer race that we’re paying attention to,” Duffy tells The Pitch. “I think these problems are unique to Brownback.”

The idea that Kansas may swing toward a Democratic governor, which the state has done several times in its history, has more to do with Brownback’s struggles than with Davis’ allure as a candidate. Besides Kansas’ unmistakable fiscal crisis, in which deep cuts in income-tax rates for nearly 200,000 businesses have not resulted in the economic growth that Brownback promised, the governor is now also associated with an FBI investigation into his closest political confidants.

“I think people are aware of Brownback’s problems,” Duffy says. “They’re aware the Democrats have a good candidate.”

But do the Democrats have the best candidate? Already, Brownback’s messaging paints Davis as a liberal from Douglas County, one of the three reliable Democratic enclaves in Kansas. Davis, if all that one reads is Brownback’s campaign literature, is intractably linked with the increasingly unpopular President Obama. Davis once worked with Kathleen Sebelius, the former Kansas governor who roams the Earth as a living symbol of the Affordable Care Act’s disastrous start.

Davis brushes aside the liberal label.

“I’ve got a strong record in the Legislature of working with Democrats and Republicans,” he says. “The level of Republican support that I expect is unprecedented in a Kansas election for a Democrat. I think it will show voters that I’m very much a moderate and someone who has a track record of working in a bipartisan manner. Sam Brownback is going to try and make this election about anything but his record.”

As proof, Davis held a press conference on July 14 to announce that 104 Republican luminaries, many former legislators such as Overland Park’s Dick Bond, were lending their support to Davis’ campaign and repudiating Brownback’s performance in office. The list of Davis’ GOP supporters includes some high-profile names, including Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, but most have not held office in years.

The list also names former U.S. Rep. Jan Meyers, who later disputed that she had agreed to endorse Davis. The retraction, along with her subsequent show of support for Brownback, was an embarrassment during what should have been a proud moment in the campaign.

One person who isn’t unsure about his support for Davis: Steve Morris, a Hugoton Republican first elected to the Kansas Legislature in 1992. In those days, Morris fashioned himself as a conservative. But Morris’ fellow Republicans grew more conservative, and he came to seem more like a moderate. His position in Kansas politics, even in rural Cherokee County, seemed secure, particularly considering his ascendancy to Senate president. But in 2012, his record proved too moderate for Brownback’s tastes.

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With the financial support of Koch Industries–linked Americans for Prosperity and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce (organizations ideologically aligned with Brownback), the Brownback campaign began funding out-of-nowhere conservative Republicans in the 2012 primaries with noisy campaign advertisements and aggressive mailers. Morris faced off against Larry Powell in 2012.

“There are 12 radio stations in this area that people can pick up on,” Morris recalls. “It seemed like it was 24/7, every five minutes there was a nasty, nasty radio message. I listened to some of it, but I couldn’t make myself listen to very much of it.”

As is well-known by now, many of those moderates, including Morris and Leawood pragmatist John Vratil, were excised from power. There were 21 seats at play, and moderates lost 16 of them that year.

Brownback turned out not to need those results to pass his tax-cut plan, which went through before Election Day, over the objections of moderate Republicans and Democrats. After the election, the governor and the Legislature’s most conservative members seemed eager to punish moderates for their refusal to get in line.

Since the 2012 election, Brownback has enjoyed largely unfettered power. And he has completed a transformation from what some describe as a temperate Republican, back when he served as the state’s secretary of agriculture, to the hard-right conservative formed by the ex-senator’s lengthy Beltway tenure.

“I knew him then,” Morris says of the governor in his pre-Washington, D.C., days. “I didn’t sense that he was very ultra-hard-right or conservative when he ran for the U.S. House. I still didn’t get that sense when he decided to run for the Senate. From that time on, my sense is that he is the way he is now: very, very ultra-conservative. I think he’s surrounded himself with the same kind of people.”

One of those closest to the governor is David Kensinger, a Brownback ally and lobbyist who is the target of an FBI investigation into allegations of legislative payola. 

But that investigation may turn out to be a mild annoyance during the gubernatorial campaign, compared with the explaining that Brownback is having to do about his tax policy.

The 2012 tax-cut legislation lowered state-income-tax rates for most, and eliminated them altogether for owners of businesses structured as limited liability corporations and Subchapter S corporations. It also increased the standard deduction for taxpayers.

The idea, a trickledown-economics plan that Brownback paid Reagan economic adviser Art Laffer $75,000 to formulate, appealed to tea-party types, conservatives keen on shrinking all types of government on the old “starve the beast” principle.

But to placate business interests, Brownback promised that the plan would add nearly 23,000 new jobs and generate $2 billion in disposable income for Kansans. The thinking was that companies would keep more of their money, instead of paying income taxes, and thus hire more people and pay them better wages. Those employees would then spend more money to set off decreases in state revenues.

For the math to work, the state needed to add thousands of jobs quickly. That hasn’t happened.

Per-capita disposable income, one of the metrics that the Brownback campaign has touted as evidence that his policies have worked, has grown since 2010. But at an 11 percent increase, the growth in disposable income lags behind increases experienced by most states in the region. Kansas has outpaced only Colorado and Missouri in disposable-income growth, while nearby states with less aggressive tax policies — Nebraska, Oklahoma and Iowa — have seen higher rates of income growth for their residents.

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Another earmark of Brownback’s plan, reducing the number of children under the poverty level, has yielded an opposite result. In 2010, 18.1 percent of children younger than 18 lived in poverty, according to the U.S. Census. By 2012, that percentage had increased to 19 percent. Regional states such as Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma have been more successful in getting children out of poverty.

And while Kansas’ unemployment rate has improved, all neighboring states have lowered their unemployment at a much faster pace.

There’s also the matter of the state budget. 

Kansas bean counters have inexplicably overestimated the amount of money that the state would take in during April and May, by a combined $310 million. ;June also missed the mark by $28 million.

Brownback in April assigned blame to President Obama’s capital-gains policies — an odd straw man for a state with very limited bands of personal wealth.

The thinking was that jittery Kansas investors, concerned about a possible increase in capital-gains tax rates in 2013, declared income from the sale of things like property and stocks in 2012, resulting in a dip of taxable income in 2014.

Brownback’s logic presupposes that there’s vast wealth in Kansas and that those with the wealth offloaded assets in numbers unseen in other states. But overall state revenue fell short of the 2014 budget by a staggering $338 million.

“The main reason for that is the tax cuts that were put in place,” says Duane Goossen, the Kansas budget director under Govs. Bill Graves and Kathleen Sebelius.

The Pitch asked Brownback campaign manager Mark Dugan to discuss the race and the state’s finances and Brownback’s continued support of his tax-cut philosophy. Dugan asked for a list of questions; the campaign has not responded to any of them, despite repeated requests.

The state is forecast to spend down its cash balance of $700 million to just about half in order to pay bills in the 2015 fiscal year, which started July 1.

That means the Legislature will probably have to enact more cuts in state services when it returns to duty in January.

That puts the state budget in serious trouble. For all the bluster about cutting government, spending in 2015 in Kansas will be higher than it was in the final year of Democratic Gov. Mark Parkinson’s tenure. It’s difficult to find a way around increasing spending because Medicaid and the public-pension system always shoulder growing costs. To cut spending, that money typically comes out of education and other services.

There’s little reason to expect that revenue forecasts for the 2015 budget year are accurate, given how far off they were toward the end of fiscal year 2014. Even if they are, the state’s savings account is in danger of running dry by the end of this budget year. If that happens, legislators have to put together a budget for 2016 that goes entirely without a safety net.

“That’s a difficult budget,” says Goossen, who worked on tricky state spending and cutting plans during the throes of the Great Recession.

But Brownback supporters say the budget doesn’t tell the full picture.

Ronnie Metsker, chairman of the Johnson County Republican Party, says if Brownback and fellow GOPers have a problem in Kansas, it’s because their messaging gets outmaneuvered by their opposition.

“Once we share the facts, then it engenders a completely different response,” Metsker tells The Pitch. “Most of the people I find are dissatisfied are simply running on misinformation, or they’re running on something they’ve heard or saw on somebody’s blog site.”

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Metsker points to job growth — 38,790 more Kansans with jobs in May 2014 than in the same month in 2010, according to the Kansas Department of Labor. He also points to an unemployment rate well below the national average.

Such talking points are not persuasive to Davis. In fact, he seems more motivated to seek higher office because of Brownback’s performance than owing to his own political ambitions, underscoring the idea that a vote for Davis is more of a vote against Brownback.

“This isn’t necessarily something I’ve been aspiring to do since I was a little kid or anything,” Davis says. “What prompted me to run was watching the last three and a half years and the direction Sam Brownback has been taking the state.”

But what direction can Davis take the state if he gets elected? Details from his campaign haven’t been clear.

It was two years ago that Davis proposed a measure to leverage state revenues in order to provide property-tax relief. The idea didn’t gain traction, but it’s an idea he would like to revisit if he gets elected.

Davis has proposed assigning a commission to look at the state’s current tax code to answer two questions: Is Kansas creating jobs? What should the state do about the property-tax burden?

Davis is less specific about what he would do about Brownback’s tax cuts.

Further cuts in various income-tax rates are set to occur on New Year’s Day. Davis says he would like to make those 2015 cuts the last ones to take effect, at least until public school funding is restored to prerecession levels.

None of that is possible unless he wins in November. Polling suggests that such an outcome is no longer a stretch.

“What I’ve seen from all the polling is really encouraging,” Davis says.

Poll numbers may be surprising, given Brownback’s brand name stacked next to Davis’ anonymity.

But sometimes lesser-known Democrats fare respectably against established Republicans, lending credence to the idea that Kansans are more populist than they are conservative.

Chris Biggs, a no-name, underfunded Democrat from Geary County, nearly defeated Phill Kline in 2002 for Kansas attorney general.

Paul Morrison, then the Johnson County district attorney and a lifelong Republican, switched to the Democratic Party just to beat Kline four years later.

It remains a cautionary tale for state officials in Kansas who go too far.