Elections are contests, but they’re also interpretive opportunities. In that spirit, here are some interpretations (along with some predictions) of my own.
–Becky Tuttle will be re-elected to the Wichita City Council in District 2, Dalton Glasscock will be elected over his opponent Judy Pierce in District 4, and J.V. Johnston will be elected over his opponents Gary Bond and Ben Taylor in District 5. This means that, aside from the mayor’s race, the partisan leanings of the city council won’t change, at least not in any obvious way. Tuttle, the incumbent Republican candidate in District 2, will be re-elected; the Republican candidate to replace retiring Republican city council member Jeff Blubaugh in District for will be elected; and a Republican candidate to replace retiring Republican city council member Bryan Frye will be elected.
–The potential for less-obvious changes are partly a matter of avoidance, and partly a matter of possibility. Johnston is, by every indication available to the public, a perfectly representative example of an establishment social conservative: a long-time businessowner, a faithful conservative Catholic, a lifelong Republican, a competent and well-respected member of Frye’s own district advisory board. There is, therefore, every reason to believe that his approach to decisions on the city council will be quite similar to Frye’s—conservative, but also practical and responsible. The Republican running against him, Gary Bond, whose wife Kathy Bond was elected to the Wichita school board as part of the statewide Republican effort to place strong conservative opponents of LGBTQ rights and curricula on school boards, is a very different, and much more radical, conservative. Johnston’s election therefore potentially avoids the trouble of someone ideologically focused on upsetting the apple cart elected to the city council.
–The more positive possibility is the election of Dalton Glasscock, another lifelong Republican, but also one whose identity as an outgoing, culturally engaged gay man has made him a target by extreme elements in his own party, even while he served as the chairperson of the Sedgwick County Republican Party. This has, by his own frequent admission, soured him somewhat on partisanship. While there is no reason to think his basic dispositions towards the bread-and-butter budget issues that confront the city council will be markedly different than Blubaugh’s, I strongly suspect that, especially in regards to environmental and social issues, he’ll be open to new ideas from and possible compromises with the Democratic members of the city council (all of whom, it is worth noting, are much closer to him in age than the Republicans Tuttle and, presumably, Johnston).
–Before moving on the mayoral race, a couple of points that need to be elaborated upon: first, why am I predicting the winners here that I am, and second, why am I talking about them in connection with party identity, when elections to the city council is non-partisan?
–My prediction of Tuttle’s, Glasscock’s, and Johnston’s wins are all based on basic political science fundamentals: fundraising, campaign themes, name recognition, etc. According to late October campaign finance reports, each of these three candidates significantly outraised their opponents, both in terms of amounts of money and number of donors, as well as significantly outspent them on advertising and organizing, sometimes by more than a factor of ten. Tuttle’s campaigning has benefited from the advantages of incumbency, while Glasscock’s and Johnston’s campaigns have benefitted from established connections with government and party networks which have opened doors and wallets. And they have all simply been far more present than their opponents. I will be surprised if any of them win by less than five points, if not by much more.
–As for employing a partisan framework, this is an arguments I’ve made for years: partisanship in elections and governing, whatever its limitations and harms, is an entirely reasonable (and not necessarily polarizing) response to voters who wish to organize and express their preferences in a manner designed to allow them to maximize their effective voice. As such, to whatever extent partisanship creeps into nominally municipal politics (as it inevitably will, and should, despite the—I think ultimately counter-productive—tradition of treating city politics as something “professional” and thus apolitical), it is simply acknowledging a necessary, and appropriate, small-d democratic reality. Everyone knows that Districts 2 and 5 and (somewhat less so) 4 are districts of the city which tend to elect Republicans, and that the city councilmembers elected from those Districts—Tuttle, Blubaugh, and Frye—all share that party label and, by and large, the conservative political instincts which that party reflects. Pretending that such isn’t a perfectly straightforward part of the calculus in determining votes and funding when election time rolls around is silly.
–With that being said, what about the mayoral race, which depends upon voters all across Wichita, and not just individual districts? What do the political science fundamentals say there?
–Insofar as fundraising and name recognition goes, there is little contest. Brandon Whipple, as the incumbent, certainly enjoys all the advantages that being the candidate in the mayoral office allows—and indeed, he has maximized on many of those, by having been a particularly active and, to put it tactfully, contentious presence on the council, around the city, and in the media. But Lily Wu is a longtime television journalist, a charismatic and compassionate communicator whose campaign, thanks to the support of a large majority of wealthy interests (mostly developers, but also business and community leaders of numerous sorts, whose political affiliations are decidedly Republican), as well as conservative and libertarian organizations like Americans for Prosperity, has outraised and outspent the Whipple organization overall by more than a 3-to-1 margin. She’s had more (and better) ads on television, placed more signs in more yards, and connected with (or at least attempted to) segments of Wichita’s electorate that have never been the focus of such campaign outreaches before. I strongly suspect that if some kind of straightforward public approval poll regarding these two could have been managed in the midst of this election, her favorables would have been higher, maybe much higher, than his. She received more votes than the mayor in the primary, and as Chase Billingham detailed in a thoughtful Facebook post six weeks ago, there is good reason to believe that that win will be magnified in the general election, requiring a huge overperformance by Whipple to catch up. So all of the fundamentals point, despite the advantages of incumbency, to a Wu win, correct?
–Yes, it is correct–as far as that goes. And yet, how far is that? Not all the way to the finish line, I suspect. It’s not a strong suspicion; my prediction here isn’t nearly as confident as it is for the wins I foresee in the other city council races. All of Wu’s assets in her making a case for her election could easily bury Whipple. And yet I still feel slightly bullish on his re-election. Part of that is probably just bias; I’ve known him for years, and for all his annoying qualities (many of which he freely admits to), I like the man a lot. (I’ve met and been able connect some with Wu as well, and I like her also, particularly the fact that she’s occasionally willing to make outright urbanist arguments about Wichita’s ridiculous addiction to parking that the mayor tends to steer clear of.) But I’m not sure all of it is personal preference. Some of it, I think, is that there is one more fundamental to consider: that while the primary electorate, in a nominally non-partisan municipal primary, is overwhelming candidate driven, the general election electorate, even in a nominally non-partisan municipal election, is more likely to be more factionally driven—maybe even significantly so.
–In that spirit, consider the following two images, courtesy of Dr. Brian Amos, an assistant professor of political science at Wichita State University:
Kansas Governors Election, November 2022 Winner by Precinct
–The numbers in the first image are the same that Chase drew upon is his above-linked post, and they tell the story well: the support that Wu (and to a lesser, but still significant, degree Frye) received in the primary completely surrounds the base for Whipple’s support, and it is logical that the mostly suburban Republican demographic of voters who turned out to support Frye will turn out to support Wu, as will, of course, the demographic which supported her. While the demographic of voters who supported Whipple, concentrated in Wichita’s urban core, reflects the demographic of voters who supported Laura Kelly in her campaign to be re-elected Kansas’s governor. Who are they? Democrats, of course—but also a small (but apparently still significant!) number of Republican moderates and independents who chose her over Derek Schmidt, no doubt primarily because of his association with Governor Brownback, as well as because of his association with Republican efforts to change the Kansas state constitution to end abortion rights in Kansas in August 2022.
–In 2022, Sedgwick County, thanks to Wichita, voted against the “Value Them Both,” abortion rights-opposing amendment by an eight-point margin. This was general throughout Wichita (a majority of voters supported the amendment in only three of the Wichita area’s 25 state house districts, all of them in the far west of the county and mostly outside of Wichita’s city boundaries; in the city, even the 13 state house districts which elected Republican representatives also included a majority of no voters). And, of course, it was due to Wichita—as the suburban and rural red which surrounds the city in the image above demonstrates—that Sedgwick County also was one of only 8 counties, out of Kansas’s 105, that went for Kelly. But considering the raw population advantages of those more urban counties, that was enough for her to win.
–With that in mind, considering two more images from Brian Amos:
–What I’m seeing here is the concentration of deep red, Whipple-supporting high voter turnout precincts in the primary election, versus the relative diffusion of deep red Wu-supporting high voter turnout precincts. That can, of course, be read as more support for Chase’s math: that overall support for Wu is widespread and general across the city. But it can also show the limitations of that sort of extrapolation: if the general election electorate, come Tuesday, turns out to have been more factional than general, more partisan than otherwise, then the demographic of voters most likely to support Whipple may turnout in sufficient numbers so as to be able to punch above their weight, as they did twice in 2022.
–In a recent, lengthy profile of the mayor, Whipple defended his partisan frame of mind: “Wu…says Whipple has lost people’s support…because, after serving seven years as a Democratic state rep, he brought the divisiveness of Topeka politics back to Wichita. Whipple says the so-called partisan bickering she critiques is transparent government in action: ‘If it looks messy, it’s supposed to look messy. If you create your own club that is so anti-partisan to the point where you assume that any partisan-type debate, anyone who is arguing conservative viewpoint versus progressive viewpoint, is bickering and you’re just not going to have it, then did you create your own ideology?’” I was happy to see this attitude in a mayoral candidate back when Whipple first ran for the office, and I wish he’d been more consistent and successful in articulating this vision of effective partisan leadership over the years since. (As it was, the only candidate during the mayoral primary who genuinely talked about the political structures of leadership in our city was Jared Cerullo, who was willing to explicitly touch the third rail of local politics and push back against the decisions of our city manager; he was rewarded with less than 5% of the vote for his efforts.) Still, Whipple’s willingness to be partisan, as discomforting as it is to many, is a source of his strength as well as a cause of criticism, and it likely will be essential to whatever chance he has to retain his office.
–Months ago, long before the primary and long before Republican and real estate and other power players centered around Wu as their best shot against the mayor, when the race facing him seemed to shaping around, on the one hand, Brian Frye, a straight-up Republican opponent, and one the other, Celeste Racette, a reform-minded candidate and former Democrat who felt burned by Whipple (at least partly justifiably so), I figured that Whipple would have to lean into his small but real politically progressive accomplishments in the city to succeed. I think the same today, but in a context entirely unlike what I imagined nine months ago.
–Wu, of course, isn’t running as a Republican (or a Libertarian, her actual voter registration); she insists that she’s running solely as a “Wichitan,” with a vision for the city that–besides her relentless focus on public safety and building up the Wichita Police Department—has far more to do with “morale,” with boosting Wichita’s accomplishments and empowering voices around the city. That’s an appropriate message to hear from someone who intends to serve as Wichita’s ambassador—and for people already disinclined to think in a structural or partisan manner about how decisions are made in our city, it’s deeply appealing. How to run against someone, especially someone who probably has higher favorables than you, who is presenting themselves as a booster and ambassador? As I see it, it requires two steps: one, insisting that the job is actually more about political fighting than morale boosting, and two, making the case for one’s political fighting skills and priorities.
–Taking those steps won’t matter to the voters who are Anyone But Whipple, whether for reasons of party (the great majority of Republicans who bother to vote in the municipal elections won’t support him) or policy (despite being, for the most part, an entirely conventional mayor when to budget priorities and land use decisions, he nonetheless hasn’t been the advocate for development that many insiders wish) or personality (his divisiveness and self-acknowledged lack of filter hasn’t always served him well). But it may matter to those voters, particularly those in the core urban demographic of the city, who are primed to vote for Democrats in state and national election cycles, but might not be fully engaged by municipal concerns.
–Of course, those municipal concerns don’t readily map onto warnings about the conservative and libertarian “dark money” supporters behind Wu, and the implications that supposedly has on where Wu may stand on abortion rights, immigrant protection, police violence, climate change, etc. In fact, the specific context of city issues—fixing bridges, maintaining parks, housing the homeless over the winter—are such that partisan claims of that type, which have been a fixture of Whipple’s ads and speeches, could easily backfire on him, fitting into Wu’s narrative about the mayor as someone too political to pay attention to the basics. Still, there is reason to believe that the voters he needs are out there, or at least may be.
In sum, Wu’s basically undetailed and generally positive campaign fits her personality and obviously connects well with many. But is it the kind of thing that has expanded the number of voters that will likely show up to cast votes for her? Whipple’s campaign, on the other had, has followed a strategy for getting likely voters to show up. Whether it’s successful or not will be revealed come Tuesday night.
–In for a penny, in for a pound. Wichita certainly isn’t a blue city, but like every other big city, it is, at the very least, purpling, however slowly. Hence, I predict Whipple’s re-election by a hair, and thus also predict the maintenance of the slight Democratic majority in Wichita’s city government, with the addition of Glasscock possibly mixing things up a little.
–Also, if nothing else, I promise that when (if!) I am proved wrong, my mea culpa will be far shorter than this post has been.