John Skubal and other Kansas moderates push to unseat hard-right conservatives

Seven men and women wearing shorts and tennis shoes collect around a black Lincoln SUV at Hawthorne Plaza, a shopping center in Overland Park. It’s 4:30 on a recent Thursday afternoon, and from a distance they look like a group of Royals fans consolidating into one vehicle before heading out to Kauffman Stadium.

John Skubal is wearing a Royals cap, but it’s his name on the front of his blue T-shirt. A 69-year-old Overland Park city councilman, Skubal is running for a seat in the Kansas Senate. He’s a moderate Republican challenging a conservative incumbent, Jeff Melcher, in the August 2 primary, having decided that the state was being failed by its conservative leaders.

“I’ve done the Overland Park City Council now for 10 years,” Skubal says. “I think we have a pretty gosh-darn good city. I’d like to take those same values to Topeka. Because I think the direction we’re going now is not good.”

For several weeks, Skubal has spent evenings and parts of each weekend knocking on doors in Overland Park and Leawood. On this Thursday, Skubal is walking with a group that includes his wife, Susan; a campaign worker, James Krotz; and Jan Kessinger, another moderate who hopes to unseat a member of the House. As the members of the walking party stuff brochures into their waist aprons, Skubal reminds them of his key issues: the state budget, education, transportation funding and local control.

Krotz walks ahead of Skubal and the others as they enter a neighborhood off Tomahawk Creek Parkway. A map loaded into Krotz’s phone indicates which of these houses, with their similarly lush lawns and plump hydrangea blooms, are occupied by people who identified as Republicans or independents in recent elections.

Skubal walks past a house with a Hawthorne Valley Yard of the Month sign near the front door, and sweat begins to stick to the back of his shirt. A woman slows her car and rolls down a window. “You guys playing Pokémon?” she jokes.

People around here have answered their doors to Skubal in previous council races. He seems comfortable with the routine. He compliments one homeowner on his technique for pulling empty trash cans up the driveway. “I like people,” he says between doorsteps. “I like talking to folks.”

On this day, a new poll has been released indicating that 72 percent of Kansas adults hold an unfavorable view of Gov. Sam Brownback, a conservative who is blamed for the state’s budget problems after enacting sweeping tax cuts. Skubal, Kessinger and other moderates are counting on voters being fed up with Brownback and the conservative lawmakers who implemented his agenda.

“We don’t have enough money to run our government,” Skubal says. “They keep saying that there’s waste. Well, my opponent has had four years to find it. If there’s waste, cut it out and be done with it.”

At one home, Skubal meets the type of voter who can propel him to victory.

Erin Perila is a Republican who has lost faith in her party’s conservatives. She says she did not vote for Brownback when he ran for re-election in 2014. “And I like him even less now,” she adds.

Perila asks Skubal for his position on the tax exemption for LLCs. An LLC is a limited liability company. In 2012, Kansas enacted a tax cut that exempts more than 330,000 farmers and business owners from paying taxes on income earned through LLCs and similar entities.

Perila believes the exemption is bad policy. “I’m sure there are businesses that think it’s great, but I don’t see where it’s brought all these businesses to Kansas,” she says.

Skubal agrees. He tells her that the LLC exception is one of the first things he wants to address if he is elected. 

“They had a chance to make it work,” the candidate tells Perila. “It doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work,” Perila says.

Jeff Melcher was elected to the Kansas Senate in 2012. He is unusual for a state lawmaker in that he’s a business executive in his prime earning years. He runs NetStandard, an IT-services company in Leawood.

Melcher is conservative, but not in predictable ways. He believes, for instance, that the state’s farmers are not paying their fair share of property taxes. At a candidate forum sponsored by the Leawood and Overland Park chambers of commerce, Melcher complained that the state was building and expanding roads in less populated areas. “You can drive out to other parts of Kansas and you can put a picnic up in the middle of some of these highways and never see an automobile,” he said.

The Senate District 11 candidate forum, the only occasion during the campaign when the two candidates agreed to appear together, took place on a Tuesday morning at a building in Corporate Woods. (Skip Fannen is unopposed in the Democratic primary.) About 40 people attended. Melcher and Skubal made opening remarks and then were asked a series of questions.

In addition to describing some of the legislation he supported, Melcher defended Brownback’s tax cuts. Every taxpayer benefited from the income-tax reduction, he said. “The small-business tax cut,” he added, “was the key item which turned around our private sector job growth.” He acknowledged the budget shortfalls but blamed them on low prices for oil and crops, the struggles of the aviation industry, and the Kansas Supreme Court’s rulings in the lawsuit over the way state funds education. “I think we have to understand there are things within our economy that are beyond our control,” he said.

Skubal, who spent the bulk of his career at Johnson County Community College, where he was the director of campus services, countered that the state’s budget problems were self-inflicted. He said the state’s revenues and expenditures are out of balance, and he noted that rating agencies had downgraded the state’s debt.

“We’re currently balancing our budget with one-time money,” he told the room. “They talk about borrowing money from the transportation account. That money’s not borrowed. It’s never going to be paid back.”

Skubal added that, in his experience as a city councilman, businesses are not focused on taxes. “They want to know about schools and infrastructure,” he said. (Skubal’s campaign has received $1,000 donations from the Kansas Contractors Association and several engineering firms.)

Melcher’s campaign went after Skubal’s stewardship of Overland Park in a mailer that arrived in homes a few days after the forum. It featured a photograph of a cow and said Skubal had “milked” voters by voting to raise property taxes. (Melcher’s donors include Koch Industries and the Koch-supported Kansas Chamber of Commerce.)

Skubal responded to the ad on Twitter: “I’m sorry, but my opponent criticizing me for raising OP taxes when he voted for the largest tax increase in Kansas history? C’mon.”

The “largest tax increase” was a reference to the increase in sales and cigarette taxes the Legislature passed in 2015 to close a $400 million hole in the budget.

Melcher’s attendance at the chamber forum was rare instance of a Kansas conservative accepting an invitation to appear with a challenger.
In June, the League of Women Voters of Johnson County held two forums for candidates in contested primaries. No conservative incumbents showed up at either event.

At the League of Women Voters event in Overland Park, moderates hoping to oust conservatives argued that Brownback and other conservatives had put cutting taxes ahead of quality of life. “Life in Kansas was good to us until it wasn’t,” said Joy Koesten, a moderate who is opposing state Rep. Jerry Lunn in a House primary.

The League of Women Voters forums were not the only events that conservatives skipped. State Rep. Rob Bruchman did not attend a District 20 candidate forum hosted by the Overland Park and Leawood chambers of commerce. Moderate Jan Kessinger, Skubal’s occasional canvassing buddy, had the audience for himself.

Kessinger says it’s instructive that a Republican refused to make time for an event sponsored by a local chamber of commerce. “He’s hiding from his record,” Kessinger tells me.

Without dismal news from Topeka to explain to voters, the moderates positioned themselves as sober-thinking realists who have their priorities straight. Skubal’s campaign T-shirts read “Kansas common sense” on the back.

There’s a “happy warrior” aspect to the moderates’ campaign. Last week, Skubal’s Twitter account posted a picture of the candidate wearing a T-shirt soaked with sweat after a night of canvassing in the high heat. He was smiling.

Kessinger, too, seems to relish the role of challenger. He tells me he knocked on the door of a house with his opponent’s sign in the front yard. Kessinger says he was greeted by a man who told the candidate that he had “some balls” to ring the doorbell. “I said, ‘Isn’t that someone you want in the Legislature — someone with balls?’ ”

Will sweat and moxie be enough? This is not the first election in which moderates have tried to push back against conservatives. Usually, the conservatives prevail. “They work, and they’ve got money,” says Burdett Loomis, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
Conservative politicians rely on evangelical Christians to show up and vote in primaries. The moderates running in Kansas are hoping that support for public schools and other government functions will eclipse the evangelicals’ passions.

A friend of Skubal’s helping him campaign in Overland Park asked Skubal what he should to say to a voter who asks about his position on abortion. Skubal encouraged him to keep the discussion brief. “I’m not a social-issue candidate,” he said.