In Kansas Primaries, Conservatives Attack Fellow Republicans

But after publicly criticizing elements of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax plan this year, Mr. Kelsey found himself among a cluster of conservative Republican state senators that a more conservative coalition here is working to defeat in Tuesday’s primary elections.

Kansas politics have been tilting more to the right for at least the last two decades. And now that shift is prompting a bitter clash within the state’s Republican Party. Conservatives are feverishly working to win the Senate and drive out the last remnants of what they see as moderate Republicanism in a state with a deep-rooted history of centrist Republicans in the mold of Bob Dole, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nancy Kassebaum.

The divisive primary campaign reflects the ambivalence gripping Republicans across the country, yet the situation here is more complicated than the typical conservative-versus-establishment disputes.

What sets the battle in Kansas apart is the distance between the factions. Conservative and moderate Republicans essentially operate as separate parties, and so far, no one — including Mr. Brownback — has stepped forward to try to bridge that gap in the popular tradition of moderation. Instead, each side claims to represent the soul of the party.

“We don’t even know what it means to be a Republican in the state of Kansas,” said Casey W. Moore, a conservative Senate candidate from the Topeka area.

Nationally, conservatives have been defining the party in their image. Last week, they scored a big victory in Texas when a Tea Party favorite defeated Gov. Rick Perry’s favored candidate in the primary for an open United States Senate seat. That outcome followed conservative victories this year over established Republicans in Senate primary races in Indiana and Nebraska.

Kansas conservatives are optimistic that they can do the same on the state level and upend long-held assumptions that the people of their state prefer moderate lawmakers.

Two years ago, conservative Republicans here captured a majority in the Kansas House of Representatives — around 70 of 125 seats — for the first time in about four decades, and, for the first time in at least half a century, Kansans elected a conservative governor, Mr. Brownback. Conservatives need to pick up three or four seats to win control of the 40-member Senate, where 14 moderate Republicans and 8 Democrats often vote together to maintain a coalition that gives them a majority.

The move toward a more conservative Kansas began about 25 years ago, when a small group of fiscally conservative legislators, feeling marginalized by the Republican leadership, began promoting an agenda that emphasized free markets, tax cuts and reducing government spending. They teamed with grass-roots social conservatives and, in 1994, gained a significant number of seats in the Kansas House and ousted its moderate speaker.

Conservatives continued to gain seats in the Legislature, and the rest of the country began to take notice of their brand of politics. “What’s The Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, which was made into a film, documented that rise.

Now that conservatives are closer than ever to full control of the state’s government, fighting between the two factions of the Republican Party has become more overt, and nastier.

“The conservatives, they hate the moderate Republicans,” said Burdett A. Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. “They think they really have conspired with Democrats and have prevented conservative forces from their rightful place of dominating the government.”

Mr. Brownback is openly challenging the moderate members of his party. Interest groups like the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking moderates and rallying support for conservatives.

Moderates have gotten a lift from Bill Graves, the former two-term Republican governor who has held fund-raisers for the candidates he supports. Mr. Graves, who was in office from 1995 to 2003, is familiar with intraparty scuffling: the conservative state party chairman resigned to challenge him in 1998, when he successfully ran for re-election. Moderate candidates have also benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from labor and teachers’ unions.

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Republican Kansas Caucus Preview

Kansas is the first state to head to the polls after Super Tuesday. With all four candidates vowing to continue, the results in the Sunflower State loom larger. Here's a rundown of how the process works in Kansas and what's at stake on Saturday, March 10:

* Kansas sends 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention, putting it on par with Massachusetts and Oklahoma, which voted on Super Tuesday. Mississippi, a critical test coming up next week, has the same number of delegates.

* Kansas has four congressional districts. Each district has three delegates. The districts are winner-take-all; the candidate with the highest total wins them all. In the event of a tie (in vote count, not statistically), each candidate receives one delegate, and the third goes to the convention uncommitted.

* The 25 remaining at-large delegates are assigned proportionally based on the statewide vote. Candidates that pass the 20 percent threshold are allocated delegates. If only one candidate passes the threshold, or no candidate does, then the threshold no longer applies to any candidate.

* The three party leaders (State Republican Party chair, National Committeeman and Committeewoman) are bound at the convention to vote for the candidate with the highest statewide vote.

* The Kansas caucus is a closed caucus. Only voters that are registered members of the Republican Party are allowed to participate in the GOP caucus. According to Kansas GOP rules, voters had to be registered as members of the party prior to February 17. Voters cannot show up on Caucus Day, switch registrations and participate.

* Caucusing begins at 10 a.m. Central Time. A complete list of caucus locations is available on the state party website.

* Each candidate on the ballot may have one representative speak for no more than ten minutes on issues of interest to Kansas voters. Voters have at least one hour after the conclusion of the presentations to submit their ballot. Results must be reported to the state headquarters by 5pm. This allows time for participants to continue to talk, deliberate and persuade other caucus-goers to vote for their candidate.

* All eight candidates who initially ran for the Republican nomination will appear on the ballot. Only four (Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich) are still actively running.

* No absentee ballots are available or allowed.

* At least one candidate seems to have written Kansas off. Newt Gingrich's campaign announced the candidate was no longer planning to appear in the state, as previously expected. As reported by the Topeka Capital Journal, Gingrich has been scheduled to visit the state party headquarters on Friday.

* Rep. Ron Paul sees Kansas as critical to his campaign. According to WIBW, the candidate will be in Kansas all day Friday, with plans to attend a rally in Topeka, and he may visit a caucus site on Saturday.

* Despite the number of delegates at stake in the caucuses, no polls of Kansas voters' preferences are available as of this writing.

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