Surprise Upsets in Tuesday's Primary

KCUR | By Frank Morris

Published February 23, 2011 at 12:00 PM CST

Mike Burke (left) faces Sly James (right) in the March 22 general election.

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kcur/local-kcur-954126.mp3

Kansas City, Mo. – Tuesday's primary elections in Kansas City yielded some serious surprises: a pink-haired Libertarian is still in the running for a seat on the City Council; a Kansas City mayor has been denied a second term for the first time in almost a century; and the woman who, until recently, was the highest-ranking politician in Johnson County, Kansas showed up at the victory party of one of the winning mayoral candidates.

Lynn Horsley covers City Hall for The Kansas City Star, and she's been all over this race. Speaking with KCUR's Frank Morris, she said yesterday's turnout was the big disappointment.

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Frank Morris

I’ve been at KCUR almost 30 years, working partly for NPR and splitting my time between local and national reporting. I work to bring extra attention to people in the Midwest, my home state of Kansas and of course Kansas City. What I love about this job is having a license to talk to interesting people and then crafting radio stories around their voices. It’s a big responsibility to uphold the truth of those stories while condensing them for lots of other people listening to the radio, and I take it seriously. Email me at frank@kcur.org.

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