In a Democratic primary race already loaded down with five candidates, former legislator and state ag secretary Josh Svaty hopes his rural credentials will set him apart in his bid to be the next Kansas governor.
Svaty, whose main rivals for his party’s nomination are former Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer and current House Minority Leader Jim Ward, was in Iola Tuesday evening to make his case before members of the Allen County Democratic Party.
The race, which marks the state’s first contested Democratic gubernatorial primary in nearly two decades, includes another novel fact: the fifth candidate (after Olathe physician Arden Andersen) is a 16-year-old high school junior from Wichita, who, in the unlikely event that he secures the nomination, would, as a minor, be disallowed by Kansas law from casting a vote in his own election.
But a precocious leap onto the political stage isn’t a move alien to Svaty. The 37-year-old rural Ellsworth native was something of a political wunderkind himself.
Elected to the Kansas House when he was just 22, Svaty recalls moving back into his parents’ home after his senior year of college, by which time he was already a state legislator. “When people wanted to call their state rep,” laughed Svaty, “they had to call my mother to get ahold of me. It was a remarkable leap of faith on the part of the people of the 108th District.”
Svaty served in the Kansas House from 2003 to 2009, when he resigned his seat to become the state’s secretary of agriculture under Democratic Gov. Mark Parkinson. Svaty then became senior adviser in the Environmental Protection Agency and was later named vice president of The Land Institute, an agricultural research nonprofit located near Salina. Today, Svaty and his wife own and operate a small crop and livestock operation in Ellsworth County.
SVATY IS IN THE MIDST of a 105-county whistle-stop tour of the state, one that has taken him from one corner of Kansas to the other, “from Galena, in the far southeast part of the state, to Saint Francis, in the very northwest.”
The point of Svaty’s junket has been to introduce himself to Kansas voters and to lend an ear to their concerns. Svaty says he’ll conduct a more issues-focused tour beginning this fall.
Still, on Tuesday, issues surfaced.
Asked to point to any overarching citizen worries that have emerged from Svaty’s county-by-county circuit, the young farmer pointed to Kansans’ worries about the “overall stability of state government.” Svaty dilated briefly on issues surrounding Medicaid expansion and teacher pay and declining industry and the hemorrhaging of good state employees, but he reserved most of his energy for an analysis of Gov. Brownback’s 2012 and 2013 experiment in tax policy.
“The state has tried a number of tax incentives to draw businesses here,” explained Svaty. “Sometimes those are effective, but a lot of times they involve us spending a huge amount of money at the state-level trying to play a shell game with other states around us that often have more money than we do, and it ends up being a wash in terms of how many jobs we attract versus how many jobs we lose. In the meantime, there’s that silent element of economic development business that is not going to move here if they see state revenue wildly swinging up and down, because they begin to wonder, ‘If I move here, five years from now are they going to turn to my industry to balance the budget in a particular tax or an excise tax scenario?’ So that sort of stability in state finances is a big deal.”
Svaty is nostalgic for the halcyon days of Kansas politics, back when Republicans and Democrats got along — a time not all that long ago. “What I was able to witness [when I entered politics in 2002] was a high-functioning government. … During those eight and a half years — both as a legislator and administrator — I felt that the institutions were strong enough and secure enough to withstand any sort of hiccups that we might see. To my surprise and concern, in the last six years I have begun to realize that that is not the case, that holding our institutions to a high degree of competence requires constant attention.”
POLITICS, NOT POLICY, occupied the majority of Tuesday night’s discussion. Mike Bruner, the ever-trenchant head of the ACDP, called Kansas Secretary of State and current gubernatorial favorite Kris Kobach “the most dangerous person in American politics.” “He’s like Trump with brains,” said Bruner.
Svaty, while eliding the descriptive flair, agreed: “Kobach is coming like a freight train through that Republican primary. … He has the capacity to be on Fox News every night, building name recognition and raising money nationally.”
Responding to Kobach’s famously hardline views on immigration and his calls for increasingly narrower interpretations of voter ID laws, Svaty floated this bubble of optimism for despondent Dems:
“Part of the reason that I think there’s an opportunity for Democrats to win statewide is because a large constituency of what you might consider traditional Republican voters in the western third of the state are engaged in the feedlot industry, the dairy industry, and the packing plant industry. These folks have come to discover just how vital and vibrant a strong immigrant community can be to their local economy. It’s of course important to the labor base, but I think a place like Garden City is a wonderful example of a community that has realized, ‘Wow, these people are wonderfully entrepreneurial — they start businesses, they buy homes and they become wonderful members of the community.’ … I believe these people are uniquely concerned about the prospects of a Kobach governorship. Because whether or not there’s any legislation attached to it, his language alone has a chilling effect [both on the immigrant population living in that region as well as on any immigrant thinking about moving to Kansas].”
According to the former agriculture secretary, Kansas generates $15 – $17 billion in ag receipts. Of that, about $7 billion stems from the beef industry. Beef is big business in the Wheat State.
It’s Svaty’s view, then, that Kobach’s rhetoric on immigration will not only hurt the Republican’s chances in the western half of the state that engages directly in the feedlot and meat packing industry, but will also damage his reputation among the beef industry’s corporate class, whose headquarters are in Sedgwick and Johnson counties.
“These are very traditional Republican voters that I believe in this instance will cross over. And one of my appeals to Kansans is this: these people are not going to cross over for just any Democrat. It’s going to have to be a Democrat that they are comfortable with, and that knows how to speak their language and that they know has an ag background.”
SVATY SEES his rural pedigree and his reputation for speaking across party lines as vital ingredients for winning election in a state as bright red as Kansas.
“I am the first Democrat to run for governor from west of Highway 81 since 1982…and I think that that is substantial. If you look at Democratic successes in the past, statewide, they involve winning counties in the 1st Congressional District” — a section encompassing Western and northcentral Kansas. “Now, you don’t have to win all of them, but you have to win some of them. Kathleen Sebelius won many of those counties in Western Kansas. At the very least, you cannot lose those counties 80/20 or 75/25, and Democrats in the past few election cycles have been losing rural counties at that percentage point. That simply cannot work in a statewide race. We have to have a candidate that can reach a broad group of people and make a compelling case as to why we need to have a substantial shift in the way government has operated.”
Svaty, who has experience winning elections in majority-Republican districts, may face his stiffest winds yet in the Democratic primary thanks to a voting record that displays strong support for a concealed-carry law — “That was back during a time when we required this crazy thing called eight hours of training,” joked Svaty — and his unerring support for pro-life legislation. Planned Parenthood and other national outlets on the left have come out strongly against Svaty’s candidacy.
But of course these are factors that could bolster his chances in the general election. Clay Baker, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, was quoted in the Kansas City Star last month: “I think Svaty right now is probably the one we’d see as the biggest challenge. He’s young, he’s dynamic. … He’d pull from areas Democrats don’t always pull from.”
Svaty says he doesn’t want to be distracted by the political sideshow that this hotly contested race will likely entail; he is engaged in “an effort to make sure we keep moving Kansas back to the way that it’s been for most of its 150-year history, which was a state that was working and working for everybody.”
