Congressman who first ran for office at age 26 suggests he’s not a ‘career’ politician

Kansas Congressman Kevin Yoder has a new campaign ad in which he tries to cast himself as an outsider.

“We all know, for many in Washington these days, it’s about a career,” Yoder says in the ad, which opens with the candidate sitting on a stool in front of a white background. “But for me, it’s about public service. My only responsibility is to the people of Kansas.”

It’s an amusing premise for an ad. A 40-year-old man who first ran for elected office at age 26 is asking voters to believe he’s not a career politician.

Yoder’s political ambitions were evident when he was an undergraduate at the University of Kansas. Yoder was the president of the student body and interned with the Kansas Democratic Party and in the office of the minority leader in the Kansas House of Representatives.

In 2002, Yoder ran for an open seat in the Kansas House. He was fresh out of law school and had lived in Overland Park only a few months when he filed for the race.

Yoder was young but not inexperienced. He had spent the previous four years working for Republicans at the state and federal level. Yes, the campus Democrat was now a Republican. Yoder has given various explanations for his metamorphosis, none as convincing as the fact that the GOP is the state’s dominant party. Why make things harder?

When the time was right for Yoder to run for Congress, in 2010, the tea party was ascendant. So Yoder crabbed about spending and deficits; once in office, took a hard-line approach. “We’re asking for Washington to change its ways, and we’re not going to go along to get along,” he said in his first term.

For all the times he’s shaken his fist, though, Yoder is a pretty conventional member of Congress. He votes with his party and commits the occasional gaffe. He accepts campaign contributions from special interests, like the payday loan crowd. 

But here he is, furrowed of brow, letting Kansas voters know he’s in it for them and not a dead space in the soul that only holding elected office can fill:

%{[ data-embed-type=”oembed” data-embed-id=”https://youtu.be/_FfRMEBtS0U” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%