Overland Park Democrat Cindy Holscher is Kansas' next governor, according to the Associated Press, after a close-race audit that pushed the official race call to more than a week after Election Day.
Kansas’ lieutenant governor will be Wichita Democrat KC Ohaebosim — the second Black person elected to a statewide office after State Auditor Edward P. McCabe in 1882.
Loading...
Holscher defeated Republican Ty Masterson, the Senate President, by about 0.6% — less than 8,000 votes.
After their inauguration in January, Kansas will have a Democratic governor, a Democratic attorney general, a Democratic U.S. senator, and no GOP supermajority in the Legislature. But both Statehouse chambers are still mostly Republican.
Holscher ran on legalizing marijuana, expanding Medicaid and placing a moratorium on data centers. With the majority of votes in both the Kansas House and Senate coming from Republicans, she’s likely to have trouble enacting those priorities.
But the same goes for Republicans, who won’t have their veto-proof supermajority anymore.
Democrats broke the two-thirds majority Republicans have held in the House since 2011 that gave them the power to easily overturn a Democratic governor’s vetoes.
Democrats needed to pick up five seats to break Republicans’ grip on the state’s legislative agenda, and unofficial results show they gained 20, with 11 of those coming from Johnson County. The makeup of the House will be 68 Republicans to 57 Democrats, or about a 55% majority for Republicans.
There weren’t enough seats up for election in the state Senate to crack the supermajority there. But Bob Beatty, a political science professor at Washburn University in Topeka, said that doesn’t really matter.
“Without that supermajority and the governor being able to veto anything, and have it stand, it’s much more incumbent upon the Republicans if they want to get things done to work with the governor,” Beatty said.
Culture war legislation
During Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s tenure, Republican lawmakers have easily overturned her vetoes on laws that banned transgender people from using their preferred bathrooms in publicly owned facilities, invalidated transgender residents’ licenses and banned transgender athletes from playing in their preferred gender’s sport.
Were a Democratic governor to veto those same laws with the new legislative makeup, the veto would likely hold, keeping those laws off the books.
“A lot got passed, so they’re taken care of a lot already,” Beatty said. “But we won’t be seeing those because they will be vetoed and can’t be overridden.”
Culture war lawsuits
A lot of Kansas’s controversial laws have ended up embroiled in legal battles. Former Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, a nationally known conservative, has defended them in court.
Those cases will change hands to Democrat Chris Mann, who narrowly beat Kobach last week. Mann will still have to defend Kansas laws — including the ones moving through the courts — unless the state overturns them, which is unlikely without majority support.
Mann accused Kobach of using the courtroom to fight culture war battles.
Kobach also got involved in a few hot-button federal lawsuits, like his partnership with the Department of Justice to end in-state tuition rate to qualified immigrants in Kansas. A federal judge issued a final court order in that case in Kobach’s favor, but it’ll be up to Mann to stay in or leave Kansas’ other federal lawsuits.
Marijuana and Medicaid expansion
Legalizing at least medical, if not recreational, marijuana and expanding Medicaid are generally popular ideas among Kansans.
But past Republican leadership, including Senate President Ty Masterson and House Speaker Dan Hawkins, was against it. House and Senate leadership determined whether bills would move forward, which meant they mostly kept those policies away from a floor vote.
Beatty said the door is open for marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion with the new makeup of the Legislature, but it’s largely in the hands of leadership. He said Republicans will need to be practical and willing to work with Democrats to get things done.
Beatty doesn’t foresee legislative leadership becoming more moderate. Masterson, a Trump-aligned Republican, ran against Holscher for the governor’s seat. He’ll return to his position as a state senator, and possibly to his position as Senate president.
Plus, Beatty said while Democrats gained an unexpected number of seats, they booted out some moderate Republicans in the process who’d occasionally switch sides to vote with Democrats.
Data centers
One of Holscher’s major campaign goals was to pause data centers for a while to get everyone on the same page with solid regulations in place.
The governor of New York did so by executive order. But the path is less obvious in Kansas.
The Kansas Legislative Research Department said it would be hard for Holscher to fully stop construction of new data centers because so many of the decisions are left to local control. Holscher may ask the Legislature to enact a new law, though that would still require a majority to pass.
Former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius faced a similar predicament when she aimed to prevent wind power infrastructure development in parts of the Flint Hills. Because she didn’t have much authority to do that herself, Sebelius helped develop guidelines for local authorities. It was coined a “voluntary moratorium.”
Ballot measures
In Kansas, it takes a supermajority in both chambers to place a constitutional amendment on the statewide ballot. Recent examples include the failed 2022 amendment that would’ve removed access to abortion from the state’s constitution and the recent attempt to elect, rather than have the governor appoint, supreme court justices.
So while Kansans likely won’t see conservative-led ballot measures for the next two years, they also likely won’t see any liberal-led ones either.
Appointing judges
If any of the judges on the state’s supreme court or appellate court are to leave the bench, Holscher will appoint their successor.
This scenario, in large part, is what statehouse Republicans were trying to prevent with the push to elect justices.
While judges are nonpartisan, they’re appointed by the partisan governor. Nearly all the justices on the state supreme court have been appointed by a Democratic governor, and that trend will continue for at least another four years.
