Kansas Democrats are seeing red, but not for the reasons you’d expect

Kansas Democrats, still smarting from a disappointing 2014 as they head into a crucial 2016 election cycle, are considering a rebrand.

Instead of referring to the statewide party as the staid Kansas Democratic Party, they may start calling themselves Red State Democrats.

That’s the idea promulgated by new KDP Chairman Larry Meeker, the former Lake Quivira mayor and banker who took over for Joan Wagnon in March. Meeker got the nod over former Kansas Rep. Dennis McKinney, a western Kansas Democrat who didn’t want the job.

“It’s a statement of predicament,” Meeker tells The Pitch. “We’d like to be blue or purple, but it’s a statement about our conservatism. We’re fiscally conservative.”

Party leaders plan to discuss the rebranding idea this week, ahead of Demofest in Wichita, the second-largest confab of Kansas Democrats after Washington Days, which was held in Topeka in March.

Not everyone is thrilled with the idea.

“I don’t like it,” says Terese Johnson, the Sedgwick County Democratic Party chairwoman. She presumably knows something about what’s in a name — she prefers to go simply by “T.” “I think there are more effective ways of rebranding the Kansas Democrats.”

The Red State Democrats moniker is quietly seen by some party observers as another sign that Kansas donkeys are too eager to mule for already dominant Republicans. Kansas’ Democratic leadership has been criticized in the recent past for tepid stances on gay rights, Medicaid expansion and other issues.

Paul Davis, the Lawrence Democrat who served as the House minority leader until he lost last year’s gubernatorial race against Sam Brownback, was quoted in a July 24 Politico story complaining that the national Democratic Party has made business difficult in red states such as Kansas.

“The national Democratic Party’s brand makes it challenging for Democrats in red states oftentimes and I hope that going forward, the leaders at the national level will be mindful of that and they will understand that they can’t govern the country without Democrats being able to win races in red states,” Davis told the Beltway publication.

The story’s headline: “Red-state Democrats fret about leftward shift.”

The KDP’s bigger issues, however, are closer to home. As the off-year election summer winds down, the KDP has made only one candidate announcement. That was last week’s news that Lynn Rogers, a Wichita Public Schools board member, would run against Kansas Sen. Michael O’Donnell.

Rogers had been a Republican until that announcement.

Democratic Party leaders tell The Pitch that other Democrats are mulling their 2016 prospects, but they won’t say who.

“The key to successful elections are good candidates,” Meeker says. “Some candidates are lined up. Some are scratching their heads. Some are coming to us and wanting to run for office.”

Only one Democrat has filed to run for office in Johnson County. That’s Michael Czerniewski, running for Senate District 21, currently held by Overland Park’s Greg Smith.

In May, the KDP announced its new executive director, Kerry Gooch. By nearly all accounts, Gooch is a rising star in the party.

But for a time, he was the only employee in the KDP’s Topeka office. Carlos Lugo, the KDP’s Hispanic-outreach and field director, left for a different job in Washington, D.C. Mollie Moravac, the KDP’s former finance director, also left for another job.

The KDP is lining up new employees, including Cheyenne Davis and Kyle Gardner, but the party remains unstable. The KDP still lacks a communications director, for instance. It fired Dakota Loomis last year for calling rural Kansas towns “crap holes,” a statement that continues to sting outstate Democrats who feel that the party establishment overlooks them.

Despite the changes, Gooch says he’s optimistic.

“One thing I’m realizing is, people are more fired up than ever,” he says. “They’re really angry at what’s going on in the state.”

That anger hasn’t translated to money — so far, anyway.

Federal Election Commission records show that the KDP has $37,000 in cash. That’s a third of what the Kansas Republican Party has at the moment. (Compare that with the Democratic Party in Montana — a state roughly a third as populous as Kansas but more party-balanced in its Legislature — which has three times as much in the bank.) And most of the donations in the KDP’s most recent fundraising report are $25 chip shots.

Meeker says some major Democratic donors are tapped out from the last election.

“From what I can tell from past history, we’re probably about where we would normally be in a year with new elections,” Meeker says. “I think we’re about where we should be. That said, I’m an old banker, and there’s never enough money.”

Money isn’t everything in politics. Cohesion matters, too. And Kansas Democrats don’t appear to be the most cohesive bunch these days.

Tom Burroughs, the House minority leader from Kansas City, Kansas, wrote a letter last month to the party caucus apologizing for the fractious nature of the previous legislative session. Burroughs, a far more reserved member of the leadership than Anthony Hensley, the sharp-elbowed Topeka schoolteacher who serves as the Democratic leader in the Senate, drew criticism during the last session for conceding ground to Republicans on various issues and not taking stronger positions on Democratic Party platforms. In his letter, he pledged to do better next session.

It’ll be easier for him to say he did better if he can call himself a Red State Democrat.