When Phil LeVota was appointed to replace former Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. following a landslide recall election, he was definitive about his political future.
“There is no way I’m going to run (in 2026) at all,” LeVota told The Beacon when he was first appointed interim county executive in October 2025.
“Period,” he said.
At the time, the Jackson County Legislature had required any of the possible candidates to replace White to sign a notarized affidavit affirming that they did not intend to run for reelection in 2026.
They reasoned that the interim county executive should focus their short 14-month term on fixing problems at the county ranging from property tax relief to problematic stadium negotiations with the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. A seven-month reelection campaign, the legislators believed, would distract from those goals.
LeVota signed that affidavit and made multiple public promises that he only intended to serve in the role as an interim for 14 months, then step aside for someone else to take it from there.
“Someone comes and says, ‘Here’s a million dollars for a campaign.’ I’m not doing it,” he said.
Politicians, though, have a predilection for changing their minds. LeVota is the latest.
Two minutes before the candidate filing period ended on March 31, LeVota registered as a candidate for the 2026 county executive election, joining a crowded race of six other Democrats — including one of the five county legislators who appointed him to his position.
Here’s why LeVota decided to step into the race and how some of his colleagues and competitors have reacted.
Appointments with destiny
When the office of the county executive is vacated, the Jackson County Charter assigns the County Legislature the duty of appointing a replacement.
That’s how White initially became the county executive in 2016.
Then-County Executive Mike Sanders resigned from the position, and the legislature appointed White — who was at that time an elected legislator — by a unanimous vote without any application process.
This time around, the legislature fielded applications for the job and interviewed each of the nine candidates during a public meeting.
All nine candidates, including LeVota, were required to submit a signed affidavit affirming that they only intended to serve out the remainder of White’s term and did not intend to run for election in 2026.
(It is considered perjury under Missouri law to knowingly testify falsely to any material fact on a notarized document.)
“I wanted to make sure we were appointing someone who was not going to run for office,” said Republican County Legislator Sean Smith, who represents the 6th District in southeastern Jackson County, “because I wanted their whole focus to be on fixing the problems in the county.”
LeVota said that ultimately the document is not legally binding because Americans have a constitutional right to run for office if they so choose. And ultimately, he said, it was true that he did not intend to run for election when he signed the document in October. His intent only changed within the past few weeks.
The legislators “didn’t want someone in there that was going to run that they’d have to run against (in 2026),” LeVota said. “So it was very self-serving of them to do it. It’s unconstitutional to ask someone — it’s not an enforceable issue. You can’t restrict someone’s ability to run for office.”
Stacy Lake, a Democratic candidate for county executive in 2026, told The Beacon in October that she would have preferred a special election to select White’s replacement.
That’s because whoever ended up getting the appointment would have a leg up in the 2026 election as an incumbent.
The phenomenon is called the “incumbency advantage” in political science.
Essentially, it’s much easier to run for election to an office as an incumbent than as a newcomer. Incumbents benefit from name recognition and the ability to leverage their position for media coverage.
Lake was concerned that appointing a county executive would be anti-democratic because the legislature would effectively be selecting who among the candidates would get that incumbency advantage in the 2026 election. She chose not to apply for the interim position because she wanted to be elected to the job, rather than appointed.
“Our last county executive (White), our prior prosecutor (Jean Peters Baker) and our current sheriff (Darryl Forté) were all decided by appointments,” Lake said at the time. “I think it’s autocratic.”
The Phil LeVota switch-up
LeVota was narrowly selected at the end of the application process with five votes, followed by former County Legislator Dan Tarwater, who received four votes.
Once appointed, he continued to say emphatically that he had absolutely no interest in running for election.
“I signed the affidavit, and I was going to poke my finger and put blood on it too,” he told The Beacon at the time.
But two months ago, a website appeared called DraftLeVota.com, which called on Jackson County residents to “Encourage Phil LeVota to run for the full term as County Executive!”
LeVota denied having anything to do with the website, and he said he did not know who created it.
The website shows a screenshot of a petition claiming that 6,378 signatories wanted him to run for election. That petition has since been removed from Change.org, so the number of signatures cannot be verified.
It also cites two polls showing LeVota defeating other candidates by more than 30 points.
Those polls claim to have surveyed 800 and 850 likely voters in February 2026 but do not include any information about who performed them or how the question was worded, as is standard for most polls. One of them also had 9% of respondents say they were “undecided,” but that category disappears when the results are broken down by location, age and party affiliation.
LeVota told Fox 4 in late March that he was reconsidering his pledge not to run for county executive.
Then, at 4:58 p.m. on the final day of the candidate filing period, LeVota officially registered as a candidate for county executive.
He told The Beacon that he had been considering it for the past month after hearing from community members who wanted him to run.
“Someone put up a website,” he said. “‘Tell Phil to run.’ Did you see that thing?”
He said people have come up to him both thanking him for stepping up to serve as the interim and asking him to reconsider his commitment to stay out of the 2026 race.
“I’m getting people stopping me five times a day — at Costco, at church, in the street,” he said.
He said four out of nine county legislators have encouraged him to run but declined to say which ones.
The other candidates
When he was first appointed, LeVota predicted that community members would encourage him to run for election, but he said that it would not change his mind.
“People get in positions and they will say” that they won’t run, he said in October. “And then they get in there, and they’re, number one, doing a good job and want to do more. Number two, they get into the trappings of the office, and they kind of like it. And number three, you got people that (tell you), ‘No, you need to run.’ None of those three things are going to happen.”
The Beacon repeated the quote back to LeVota last week, after he announced his bid for election, and asked what changed since then.
He responded that he should have been more specific.
“I think it’s inferred,” LeVota said, “that I wasn’t going to get in there, work hard, get things going and then pass it off to someone who has no qualifications and is going to be worse than Frank White.”
And LeVota said his decision to run for reelection was solidified when he saw the list of people who had filed as candidates.
That list includes seven Democrats (including LeVota) and one Republican:
- DaRon McGee, current Jackson County legislator representing the 4th District in southeastern Kansas City and Raytown. He was one of the five votes for LeVota in October 2025.
- Stacy Lake, an attorney who nearly unseated White in the 2022 primary election for county executive with 47% of the vote.
- Ryan Meyer, a marketing consultant and board member for the Streetcar Transportation Development District who previously ran for county legislator in 2022.
- Holmes Osborne, a financial analyst who serves on the Metropolitan Community College Board of Trustees.
- Bill Baird, the current mayor of Lee’s Summit, a commercial real estate broker and a former member of the Lee’s Summit school board.
- Erik Steffen, a major-account manager at a cybersecurity company.
- Alan Rohlfing, a former U.S. military service member from Lee’s Summit and the only Republican in the race.
Lee’s Summit Mayor Bill Baird balked at the idea that there were no other qualified candidates in the race before LeVota jumped in.
“There’s seven of us, if you count him, on the Democratic side,” he said. “The voters can choose the best candidate of the other six of us. I certainly feel that I’m qualified. In fact, my resume is really strong as mayor and as a school board member.”
Manny Abarca, who represents the 1st District in the county legislature, including much of downtown and western Kansas City, said he’s nervous about whether the county executive race will affect the dynamics between the legislature and the current executive.
That’s because McGee and LeVota will be running against each other in the Aug. 4 primary.
Abarca said that’s one of the biggest reasons he wanted the interim county executive candidates to sign the affidavit promising not to run in 2026 — he didn’t want county leaders “sniping” at each other.
“They both agreed that they’re going to keep that campaign out of the legislature, but we’ll see,” Abarca said. “I mean, time will tell. We’ve got eight months to lead this county in a more stable way than we have, and I hope we do that. But I do have concerns that, given the two candidates that are positioning themselves in the coequal branches of government, that could change swiftly.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
