Congratulations to Jason Kander, who has already sewn up the 2019 race for Kansas City mayor

This is almost cruel, I thought yesterday morning, reading through the press release announcing Jason Kander’s candidacy for the 2019 Kansas City mayoral race. 

I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of the other eight people who, until a week ago, thought they might be the next mayor. Imagine: you’ve spent the last several years strategizing, kissing the asses of all right people, raising money, living very carefully. You’ve got what you think is a solid plan for how to stand out among the rest of the pack and win this thing. 

Then you open up the Star last week and see a rumor that Jason Kander is going around asking local politicos for mayoral endorsements. Or, worse yet, Kander calls you personally to inform you of his plans — as one imagines he did fellow Democratic Party up-and-comers Jolie Justus and Quinton Lucas, both Kansas City Council members — and you have to be nice to this carpetbagging punk! 

Except Kander isn’t a carpetbagger — not really. He lives in Kansas City. He served four years in the Missouri House, and three more as Missouri Secretary of State. He gave Roy Blunt a run for his money in the 2016 U.S. Senate race. In theory, it’s perfectly sensible that he would run for mayor of Kansas City. 

After 2016, though, it looked as if Kander was done with Missouri, recognizing it as an unkind state for an ambitious Democrat. He founded a voting rights organization, Let America Vote, that laid the groundwork for some national name recognition. He started a podcast, Majority 54, brought to you by Crooked Media, the liberal outlet founded by former Obama communications staffers. And he was turning up so frequently in New Hampshire and Iowa that most of us assumed Kander was planning a run for president in 2020, despite his lack of experience and a crowded field. 

Now, Kander has opted to address his lack of experience by wading into Kansas City’s crowded field of 2019 mayoral candidates. Perhaps wading is not the correct word. It is more like a great white shark is hurtling toward the beach, ready to bite off the arms and legs and torsos of those dumb enough not to get out of the water. 

Justus was smart enough to flee for the dry sand. Hers was among the murderers’ row of Kansas City endorsements Kander rolled up over the last few weeks and unveiled in Monday’s official announcement. Justus will instead run for reelection in the 4th District, which has in turn caused two candidates who expected her to vacate the spot — Matt Staub and Jared Campbell — to withdraw their bids. Just to reiterate: Justus was the frontrunner in the race a week ago. 

Everybody else, though, seems to be digging in their heels. Lucas announced his long-expected candidacy on Saturday, knowing full well Kander would be on the ballot. And none of the other candidates — Council members Scott Taylor, Scott Wagner, Jermaine Reed, and Alissia Canady, plus Phil Glynn, Steve Miller, and Rita Berry; apologies if I’m forgetting somebody — have yet signaled they’ll be dropping out. 

Several of the people on that list — Justus, too — would be good mayors. But that is not how politics works. Politics in 2018 is not about governing. It is not about experience. It is about branding, and it is about messaging. It does not matter to voters that Scott Wagner and Scott Taylor have spent the last eight years in the civic trenches, sorting out problems with roads and airports and water rates. Or, rather, that experience does matter — but voters will not reward them for it when Jason Kander’s name is next to theirs on the ballot. 

Everybody who sticks around will — and should — take swings at Kander’s big, glaring soft spot, which is that he is a politician who is seeking to use the mayoralty of Kansas City as a stepping stone to higher office. (Although, let’s be real: most politicians in this field would use the mayoralty as a stepping stone to higher office. Kander just happens to be in the best position at the moment.) The other candidates should trumpet their work on the ground in Kansas City and their ties to the community. They should use their campaigns to advance specific issues (affordable housing, infrastructure, minimum wage, whatever) and keep those issues in the news.

But it’s spitballs against a battleship. Jason Kander is too big. People already love him, and the reason they love him is because, on Twitter, and as a guest on CNN, and on his podcast, and in that campaign ad with the gun, he has demonstrated an almost unrivaled ability to articulate what ordinary people — by which I mean liberals and moderates in the age of Trump — already feel inside. Kander arranges their jumbled political thoughts, then serves them back to them as smarter, more coherent, easily digestible sound bites. (Full disclosure: I am trying to do the same thing right now.) In this regard, Kander is an ideal fit for Kansas City’s weak-mayor system, where the mayor’s real power is the bully pulpit — words, stories, cheerleading, browbeating. This is not to minimize Kander’s other formidable political skills. He is an excellent candidate: undeniably hard-working, solidly progressive, Army vet, photogenic family, knows his Royals. Is he the most qualified Kansas Citian to formulate new housing policies and reign in the ballooning airport budget? No, probably not. But we do not live in a world where the most qualified person wins. Donald Trump is the President of the United States. And absent some kind of earth-shaking scandal, it’s hard to see how Kander could possibly lose. He’ll learn about potholes on the job. 

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Tips? Email david.hudnall@pitch.com. Twitter: @davidhudnall