Seven Theses on Kansas, "Popularism," and Value Them Both

Well, my predictions from yesterday were wrong (mostly; I was still right about Kris Kobach getting the Republican Attorney General nomination). And while the image I used yesterday to reflect the diversity of the No campaign here in Wichita didn't unintentionally predict the final state-wide vote totals (59% voted No, not 75%), the fact is it was a lot closer than I or any other serious political observer here in Kansas that I'm aware of actually believed was possible. So what more is there to say.

Well, a few things, anyway:

1) Let me repeat what I just wrote: nobody I am aware of who as at all seriously engaged in following these campaigns--and I've talked to people at the Kansas Reflector, at Vox, at Newsweek, at ABC News and KAKE News locally, and many more places about all this--was predicting that in an August primary election, in a strongly Republican state, would result in a win for abortion rights by 10 points, much less nearly 20 points. As the very first election to take place anywhere in America after the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ending of a national constitutional guarantee of at least limited access to abortion services, the size of the Value Them Both amendment's defeat is bound to create a lot of political noise.

2) Political noise...but maybe not immediate political changes. Political parties are mighty beasts, and different factions or interest groups that have put in years of work and money and organizational strategy in shaping their platforms, and thereby socializing and contributing to the further self-sorting of voters who look at those parties and platforms, aren't going to want to see them make an about-face after just one election. Here in Kansas, I would expect that Governor Kelly will express gratitude for the results, and then proceed to run her re-election campaign in with the same wonky focus on Medicaid expansion and other nuts-and-bolts issues that she's always preferred; similarly, I bet that Derek Schmidt will prefer to say as little as possible about the failed amendment, and run the same "Governor Kelly serves the radical left in Washington DC" ads that he's team has no doubt long since prepped, only with references to abortion very much cut back.

3) Why? Because Schmidt will know, as will leaders of the GOP's current super-majority in Topeka, that there is simply no honest way to parse these numbers without acknowledging that there were a good number of Republicans--including at least a small-but-nonetheless-meaningful slice of Kobach-supporting, low-propensity, normally-November-voting-only, self-identifying conservative Republicans!--who voted against the amendment. The majority of the Republicans in Topeka come from safe enough seats not to worry about alienating those Republicans who wandered off the anti-abortion reservation this particular election...but there are at least a few who will worry about them, and Schmidt, who needs to hold on to votes in the same urban counties which Kelly won in 2018, will worry about them as well.

4) So I suspect that the short-term consequences of this vote won't be especially visible. It's the medium-term consequences, the post-November 2022 consequences, which could potentially put some real force behind all the chatter which Value Them Both's defeat is generating. I could be wrong, of course; my track record suggests I probably will be. Maybe the Kansas GOP will immediately throw all their efforts behind voting to unseat state supreme court justices in November, and immediately start talking about taking another shot at amending the constitution, this time grudgingly including language about how the Kansas constitution does guarantee that there cannot be a total, no-exceptions-for-rape-or-incest-or-medical-emergency abortion ban. But I doubt it; rather, I think they're going to want to wait to see how this vote is reflected in other votes nationally, and how the overall abortion discourse continues to evolve.

5) After all, in the meantime there is probably going to be a small, perhaps invisible, but almost certainly nonetheless viscous, fracture within the Kansas GOP to deal with, all while the gubernatorial election is going on. Because there will be Republicans--the small-government, business-oriented, libertarian-inclined, individualistic Republicans from rural Kansas, the pragmatic folks that, before Brownback and Trump would have been considered the backbone of the party--that will have serious questions for why their party essentially out-sourced themselves to Kansas Catholic archdioceses for this election, and why they ended up (by driving all the cultural conservatives to the August voting booth) saddling themselves with a three-time loser like Kris Kobach as their attorney general candidate. That fracture doesn't exist in isolation, of course; the divide between the numerous micro-factions that make up the much-declined (but not extinct) moderate bloc of Republican voters and the even more numerous micro-factions that make up the dominant (but not completely unobstructed) conservative, Trumpist bloc of Republicans, has been a feature of Kansas politics for decades, and this internal fight will be folded into it. Will it push the party towards a new balance? Dion Lefler, who has watched Kansas politics as closely as anyone I know, thinks it might; we need to wait and see.

6) As we wait for the medium- and long-term consequences of a strongly Republican state voting in a way that actually reflects the existing polling data here in the state, as opposed to being led by party allegiance to support the much more extreme positions adopted by minority anti-abortion factions in their parties, to play themselves out, one note about "popularism." While there are many ways to make use of this wonky idea which has emerged among Democratic activists over the past couple of years, the basic idea is that Democrats hurt themselves when they allow their party to become associated with liberal or progressive or radical or socialist ideas that don't poll well, even if their purported consequences are ones voters clamor for. The question, as my old friend Damon Linker posed months ago, is whether the insights of popularism--that is, building campaigns around those ideas which poll well with ordinary voters, keeping the question of whether or not they are truly empowering or "populist" insofar as the interests of ordinary people are concerned as a secondary concern ("normie politics," as Freddie deBoer put it)--apply to Republicans as well. Noting the extreme abortion bans popping up through legislative action throughout the country in the wake of Roe's overturning, Damon wondered if Republicans are "governed by the principle that there are and can be no negative electoral consequences from moving too far to the antiliberal right on cultural issues." If so, then the defeat of Value Them Both might be seen as sign that some Republicans had had enough, or at least were content with what they had (abortion is already quite heavily regulated in Kansas), and didn't want to see the status quo disrupted, even if that meant challenging their own party's priorities in this primary election.

7) Finally, if nothing else, let's enjoy a couple of news cycles where people wonder how on earth an anti-abortion referendum could have lost in Kansas. The context is totally different, but I can’t help, as I look at the incredulity around me, but remember an exchange during the debate over the non-discrimination ordinance adopted here in Wichita by the city council last year. City ordinances to explicitly list and defend the rights of LGBTQ citizens had been pushed by many groups throughout Kansas for years, and Mayor Brandon Whipple made supporting such a priority. It passed by a 6-1 vote, but not before much argument on the council, some of it contentious, and two marathon open city council meetings that went on for hours, with dozens of people showing up to elaborate about how an NDO was an attack on religious freedom. At one of those meetings, a woman showed up and looked at the council (which ultimately, after many delays, voted for the ordinance by 6-1), shook her head, and said, in essence, “this isn’t the Kansas way, this isn’t the Wichita way, I don’t know who you people think you’re representing.” When she saw Mayor Whipple roll his eyes, she zeroed in on him, observing that her grandchildren deserved to grow up in a Christian world, "not Brandon Whipple’s world." I’ve never heard the conviction held by that shrinking-but-still powerful segment of Kansas voters that true “Kansas values” can’t possibly include abortion rights, LGBTQ protections, etc., expressed so pithily. Until today, that is.

The Potential of, and the Problems with, Wichita’s (More) Partisan Future

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

 (From left to right: Mayor Brandon Whipple; Mike Hoheisel, councilmember for Wichita District 3; Maggie Ballard, councilmember for Wichita District 6; Brandon Johnson, councilmember for Wichita District 6. Photo credit: Chris Pumpelly)

There’s been a lot of talk about the “new Democratic majority” on the city council that officially took power on Monday night. WSU professor Chase Billingham, in particular, observed last August what the consequences of the November elections might mean should they go the way Mayor Whipple wanted them to (which they did), and in a long Facebook post on Monday, Billingham considered a relatively small-stakes fight during last week’s council agenda review meeting in ways that makes his observations from last year seem pretty prescient: namely, that with three--presumably reliable--Democratic votes on the council, Mayor Whipple appears both capable and willing to pursue agenda items that he previously knew he wouldn’t have the votes to push forward. And he wants the Republicans on the council–who have long enjoyed an unstated and basically uncontested majority on the council but are now in the minority–to know it.

So is the business of the city council, or the way it conducts business, about to radically change, and if so, how should the people of Wichita feel about that? Answering those questions aren’t easy, because it obliges one to figure out just what the business of our, or any, city council, actually is--or ought to be.

Is the business of a city council the sort of thing which even ought to be construed in partisan terms, much less one where talking about having a “Democratic majority” on a council is meaningful? There’s plenty of reason to think “no,” and a lot of those reasons are echoed by the members of this Democratic cohort themselves. In a long article on partisanship in municipal elections published in the Kansas Leadership Center Journal last November, Ballard affirmed “local elections should stay nonpartisan in nature and focused on local issues,” while Johnson claimed that keeping city council elections and candidates “focused on the issues” makes it “harder to simply paint candidates with broad partisan brushes.” These views are reflective of a perspective that is more than a century old: the presumption that partisan groupings, being more national and ideological, have nothing to do with figuring out how to keep potholes filled and otherwise managing the rules and resources necessary for living and working together in a city, and hence that municipal elections shouldn’t involve candidates identifying themselves by a party label, much less running with the support of party organizations. Hoheisel echoed these presumptions in an interview after his election, stating that his “political leanings are irrelevant” to the business of the city council.

One problem with all these assumptions, however, is that they are not actually grounded in complaints over partisan identification or political beliefs. Rather, they really turn on the voting and funding practices which partisanship activity is usually seen as connected to, and the fact that many of those activities are seen as corrupting. To be sure, that’s a legitimate concern. However, there isn’t a lot of evidence that making municipal elections non-partisan actually evades any of those practices or activities (which, of course, shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who remembers the mayoral election of 2019, where the lack of partisan labels certainly didn’t prevent corrupt actions and accusations from dominating the campaign).  In fact, the evidence mostly indicates that Democrats and Republicans elected to municipal positions tend to act—despite the constraints which our system imposes upon city governments–pretty similar to other Democrats and Republicans elected to all other political positions. And voters pick up on that similarity pretty quickly, with Democratic and Republican voters casting their ballots (and making their donations) accordingly.

This doesn’t mean Democratic or Republican voters are any less likely to hold Democratic or Republican officeholders accountable for failing to keep potholes filled, absent other considerations. Nor does it mean that national partisan positions will always be a good predictor of local partisan ones (for example, promoting bike paths, farmers markets, and alternative transportation and environmental sustainability generally are usually seen as liberal or progressive causes in the United States, yet Councilmembers Becky Tuttle and Bryan Frye, both Republicans, have been smart and consistent supporters of both). But it does mean that those “other considerations”—which reflect the wide variety of ways in which most of us identify our interests and respond to public concerns in an electoral way—are always going to be present. Going to extra lengths to prevent cultural or socio-economic or racial or any other considerations from “polluting” municipal elections by connecting them to partisan positions beyond those of pure municipal management is, I think, a fool’s errand (not to mention, given the way our system, for better or worse, strongly supports the freedom of speech and association, potentially unconstitutional). Allowing people to organize and run for office with those considerations—and those partisan connections—explicitly present would make possible a wider (and, I think, a more responsible) engagement with the diverse interests present throughout Wichita’s city council districts. Hence my belief that our city council elections should be partisan, as I’ve argued again and again and again.

But whatever your opinion on bringing partisanship to the forefront or hoping to keep it subdued when it comes to Wichita’s city council, the fact is that in 2019 Wichita elected a mayor who—as he put it in the same article which quoted Ballard and Johnson—has a “different viewpoint” when it comes to partisanship, seeing it as “less scary and dirty” than many may make it out to be. Whipple’s belief that partisanship is a valid—perhaps even unavoidable—tool when it comes to leadership is, I think, correct. That’s not a defense of the many ways in which partisan thinking makes compromise--which the fundamental, ambition-vs-ambition, Madisonian logic of our constitutional system accepts as essential—more difficult. The worries expressed by Lynn Rogers, Kansas’s state treasurer, former lieutenant governor, and a Wichita resident, about the rising partisanship in Wichita’s (and other Kansas) municipal elections, especially when it comes to rules about candidate eligibility, can’t be easily dismissed.

But it is also valid to note that parties and their members—both those who run for office and those who vote for them—don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re shaped by their electoral environment, and those shapings change as the wider environment does. Insofar as the state of Kansas and the city of Wichita are concerned, it is reasonable to see both of them as going through, however slowly, the same demographic and ideological transformations, particularly in regards to both urbanism and liberalism, as the nation as a whole has over the past 30 years. It’s also worth noting that Whipple and all three of the other Democratic members of city council members are young enough (clockwise from top left: Ballard—39; Hoheisel—38; Johnson—35; Whipple--39) to have been shaped by those same transformations.

None of this means, of course, that any of these folks are clones of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other youthful progressive darlings of the moment; they are all their own people, with their own roots and histories here in Wichita, Kansas, which is very much not New York City. (Whipple’s record as a rather moderate Democratic state legislator before he ran for mayor ought to conclusively prove that.) And yet…Wichita nonetheless is an American city, one that is, like other American cities, becoming more diverse than it was before, more progressive than it was before, and thus more Democratic than it was before. (Wichita may not ever be blue, but it went for Biden nonetheless.) And moreover, it’s not like the Kansas Republican party which those who identify as Democrats—like Ballard, Hoheisel, and Johnson--define themselves against hasn’t greatly changed over the same time period. So overall, I think it’s fair to wonder just how much of the angst some feel about Whipple’s willingness to bring partisanship, especially Democratic party partisanship, into Wichita’s municipal elections is a function of either 1) the way it potentially gives effective electoral expression to newly emergent—if hardly dominant--progressive interests in our city, or 2) the way it challenges the (admittedly often successful!) strategies which previous generations of Kansas Democrats developed to deal with Republican dominance, as opposed to solely because it presents a challenge to municipal norms and expectations. If nothing else, it is a question that serious political observers should keep in mind: that Mayor Whipple, by approaching city elections here in Wichita with an unapologetically partisan eye, may have made himself and the city of Wichita into a significant part of the story of party development in the Sunflower State.

I need to emphasize that “may,” however. Successfully building a partisan majority in a nominally non-partisan context will only ever be of interest to political nerds like myself if it isn’t conjoined with partisan direction that can be successfully pursued and will make a difference in the perception of voters; otherwise, that electoral achievement will be remembered by everyone who isn’t a partisan themselves as a lot of conflict which didn’t necessarily change the status quo. Hence, Whipple and the three other Democrats on the council need to be able to show voters that, now that they have a majority, they can do something that wasn’t done before, or do what’s been done before better. Given the heavy policy limitations which city governments operate under, that’s easier said than done. The recent struggle to pass a non-discrimination ordinance in the city, despite the sturm und drang which surrounded its writing and passage, might in retrospect be seen as low-hanging fruit in terms of distinguish votes on the council, at least in comparison to other municipal matters before them.

Among those issues that are most obviously within the legal grasp of the city council—including land use, business subsidies, and law enforcement--it’s not clear that these four Democrats will be sufficiently united as to make their majority position as effective as it might be. For example, Johnson has strongly advocated for expansive (and expensive) redesigns of our downtown core, and pushed against the idea of the council being wholly bound by public referendums on Century II and other historic buildings; Hoheisel, by contrast, has criticized new major downtown projects as inappropriate, spoke fondly of restoring Century II, and defended the idea of conducting a “binding vote” on its fate. Similarly Hoheisel, during his campaign, expressed significant doubts about retaining Robert Layton as Wichita’s city manager; whereas last week, both Whipple and Johnson gave Layton a strong show of support by voting to give him a raise. And while Johnson has long been engaged in efforts to change the Wichita’s overly violent police culture, the police union was crucial to Whipple’s election as mayor, and it is reasonable to presume that he wants to retain their support.

None of these facts suggest policy orientations that might not change or involve a significant rethinking or compromise once people get down to the nitty-gritty, of course—but by the same token they demonstrate, I think, some of the obstacles to declaring some immediately obvious common agenda which this Democratic majority shares. Which leaves this particular electoral accomplishment, at the moment, resting primarily on its members being young and new(ish) and thus, presumably, a breath of fresh air. In politics, where the ability to deal with others from a position of knowledge and influence is often key to getting things done, such freshness can only take you so far. Still, this is their first week, with everyone still getting used to the new arrangements; maybe only now, with these new members officially on the council, will we see some new unifying initiatives emerge that weren’t on anyone’s radar screen before.

Do I happen to have any recommendations for what those unifying initiatives might be? Why yes, I do...

Test Results (the Annoyingly Regular Crow-Eating Post)

So, nearly everything I suggested was likely yesterday was proven wrong by late last night. So the Political Science 101 model failed the test, right?

Yes and no. Clearly, it shows how your basic ground-level politicking--the face-time and the hand-shaking, the knocking of doors and the hanging of literature on door handles--can overcome real disparities in paid advertising, when it comes to low-turnout elections where name recognition is paramount. Both Maggie Ballard--the winner over incumbent Cindy Claycomb in District 6--and Mike Hoheisel--the likely winner over incumbent Jared Cerullo in District 3--outperformed those incumbents in the even lower-turnout primary elections in August, so the evidence of their ground-level game was manifest. I simply assumed--as the model does--that when it came to the general election, absent major new voter activization (which the model, and I, mostly associate with media expenditures, since the one-on-one, doorstop activization of irregular voters is, while obviously effective, also very time consuming and very difficult to scale up), those primary accomplishments would be unlikely to indicate success against the advantages of incumbency. That was wrong, and clearly the people around Ballard and Hoheisel (and Mayor Brandon Whipple, who strongly backed both) knew better than what I took Political Science 101 to be teaching. The Hoheisel win, which isn't certain and will be razor-thin regardless, in a very unengaged district and in the face of an incumbent who was essentially still a newcomer to Wichita city politics, was always going to be more likely, and I said so yesterday. But Ballard's triumph, especially once the major motivator of Claycomb's uneven record on a non-discrimination ordinance was resolved in favor of a vote which many in the fairly progressive District 6 wanted, and especially in the face of Claycomb's major media purchases, really was unexpected--as unexpected, according to Political Science 101, as Mayor Whipple's victory in 2019, in fact. So hey, bad for the model, and bad for us to relied too much upon it.

As for the school board elections, there I will not the fault the model, but rather my own application of it. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that, despite my assumption about the levels of name recognition for all four incumbents (based mainly upon advertising paid for by outside Democratic groups which lumped them all together), in fact only one of the incumbents, Julie Hendrick, had sufficient levels of acknowledgment for herself as candidate to withstand the concerted efforts by the GOP to sweep the incumbents out. I knew one of the incumbents, Mia Turner, quite likely would not have been able to build such supportive local associations since her appointment to the seat, but I failed to note Rosales's contentious record in office (and how much the entrance of Holly Terrill, a progressive friend of the winning city council Democrats, into the race would essentially keep that contention information in voters minds, thus lessening and splitting his support), and I simply didn't take seriously enough the efforts of local Republicans to target Ben Blankley specifically. In the end I was quite surprised, but I'm not sure someone who kept a closer eye on the histories and trajectories of each of these candidates would have applied the model as poorly as I did.

In short, yes, the Political Science 101 model can and, in this case, did fail (partly). But I'm also a bad political scientist. Thank goodness I can use my training as a political theorist as an excuse.

A Local Test

Let us assume that the local elections in Wichita today represent a test of basic Political Science 101. Probably a bad assumption, and one that would therefore lead me to make some bad predictions, but then my record for accurate electoral predictions is mostly abysmal anyway.

So today there three seats on the Wichita City Council and four seats on the Wichita School Board up for grabs. All seven seats are currently occupied by incumbents running for re-election. While there have been positive signs for turn-out, both nation-wide and locally, over the past three elections (2018, 2019, and 2020--very positive for that last one), I don't see any evidence which convinces me that this off-year, non-mayoral, municipal election will see anything better than an extreme small voter turn-out. That means the advantages of incumbency, primarily name recognition, will be paramount. Thus Political Science 101 says that, all things being equal, all seven incumbents will be re-elected.

What are the variables which might challenge that conclusion? When it comes to the school board races in the state of Kansas, as Sharon Iorio has observed, we have seen national PACs, supported by the state and county Republican parties, providing organizational and financial assistance to slates of nominally (but not actually) non-partisan candidates, mostly campaigning on the mostly fictitious threat of critical race theory being taught in the public schools. Has that political and monetary support made a difference--that is, has it activated enough less-engaged Republican voters to boost turn-out in favor of those challenging the incumbents? Especially given that at least one Democratic-leaning PAC in Kansas became alarmed and jumped into the advertising game in support of the incumbents fairly late in the cycle? 

In the absence of polling, it's impossible to give a strict Political Science 101 prediction. But going solely off visible advertising, social media presence, and traditional media coverage, my bet is that, with one exception, it wasn't enough. That one exception would be Mia Turner, who doesn't enjoy the full benefits of incumbency; she was appointed to her position last March to fill the vacancy left after Mike Roadee resigned (partly due to his frustration with USD 259's support of a non-discrimination policy focused on LGBTQ students). Without the name recognition which comes from having won an election, as well as being based in District 5, a fairly conservative part of Wichita with a small non-Caucasian population (Turner is African-American), all means that she may not have the intense local networks which can informally activate voters. Is she likely to benefit from the aforementioned Democratic advertising? Of course. But will it be enough? Another impossible question. I would bet, though, that if any of the incumbent school board members running for re-election lose out to their challengers (Turner's is Kathy Bond), it might be her.

How about the Wichita City Council races? In the case of District 1's Brandon Johnson, given his strong name recognition, his ten-to-one fundraising advantage over his opponent, and the intense networks he has built throughout northeast Wichita since his years as a community activist, I'd say that there is a greater likelihood of Johnson being incinerated by a space laser today than him losing. In the case of District 6's Cindy Claycomb, her challenger, Maggie Ballard, has a genuinely meaningful (at least in the sense of being capable of actually activating voters and changing votes) electoral argument against her, especially in the progressive--and highly motivated--Riverside neighborhood in her district. But with Claycomb's eventual support of the city-wide non-discrimination ordinance (thus undermining one part of the argument against her), with her tremendous fundraising and advertising advantage (see here), and with her long-time connections to established moderates and liberals throughout her district, Political Science 101 says that, however impressive Ballard's door-knocking ground-game may be, Claycomb will still emerge on top.

Will District 3's Jared Cerullo fare any different? Like Mia Turner in the school board races, Cerullo wasn't elected to his position; he was appointed to fill the vacancy left by James Clendenin when he resigned in disgrace, and that appointment came after a long, divisive, party-line process. For that reason, and also due to the fact that Cerullo found himself attacked by both Republicans and Democrats in his district for different reasons during the contentious debate over the non-discrimination ordinance, it's possible that Cerullo has lost potential votes of support from out of his district, and the ensuing party networks and social infrastructure those voters might have brought along with them. Enough to give his challenger, Mike Hoheisel, a shot of ousting the incumbent? Especially given the fact that District 3 has by far the lowest regular voter turnout of any district, meaning that the winner of this race may well do so by dozens of votes, Political Science 101 says that if anyone were to bet on any of the city council challengers, Hoheisel would be the one.

Results will start coming in at 7pm; guess I'll log on to see how wrong I am then. [Crow-eating addendum here.]

On Partisanship and Punishing Politicians

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

It would be wrong to say I know James Clendenin. I've met him a few times at different city events. Once I asked him to come to Friends University (where I work) for a candidate forum, during which he interacted with and answered questions from the students--about parking enforcement, marijuana decriminalization, and more--in a smart and open-minded way, and that impressed me. Another time I had nice things to say about his genuinely admirable--and ultimately successful--work to save the Starlite Drive-In in south Wichita. That's not enough to say I'm friends with the man, but perhaps it gives me a little cover when I say: the fact he still hasn't resigned from the Wichita City Council in shame disappoints me--but perhaps that disappointed is at least as much rooted in the structure of our city council as much as in anything relevant to the character of Clendenin himself.

That I think he needs to resign isn't news; I signed on to an editorial which unambiguously insisted on that point two weeks ago. That there is cause for him to resign also isn't news; his involvement in both the false smear campaign against then mayoral candidate Brandon Whipple in 2019, and the subsequent effort to set up Sedgwick County Republican Party chair Dalton Glasscock when that smear was exposed, is well-documented, with supporting audio recordings, so much so that all sorts of local power players--including the political arm of the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Representative Ron Estes--have called for everyone involved to resign.

Of the three men facing those calls--Clendenin, Michael O'Donnell, and Michael Capps--Clendenin has done the most hunkering down. Capps, a state representative, lost his position in a Republican primary in August; while he ought to formally resign his office before it officially ends in January, he is already persona non grata with most of the local Republican establishment (and the state Republican establishment too; during the primary election, even former governor Jeff Colyer took the time to let his low opinion of Capps be known). O'Donnell initially wanted to tough it out, rebuffing his colleagues on the Sedgwick County Commission when they asked for his resignation. But when Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett announced that he would open ouster proceedings against O'Donnell, he quickly quit, even before it was confirmed that he's lost his re-election bid and that Democrat Sarah Lopez would occupy his seat anyway. Through all this though, despite condemnations from his colleagues on the city council and the members of his own District Advisory Board, Clendenin has remained essentially silent (save for one short statement that only told us what we already basically know).

It is notable that for Clendenin these condemnations of his behavior have been restricted to exactly that: condemnations, not calls for his resignation. Which is curious. Outside of the aforementioned ouster proceedings (which, according to state law, can be brought against any holder of "either state, district, county, township or city office" should they "willfully engage in misconduct while in office") being considered by the district attorney, no one is talking about invoking any kind of official power of expulsion here, so the comments of Councilmembers Claycomb and Tuttle regarding how the city council has "no authority to remove Clendenin from office" and that "the voters are the only ones who are able to change" Clendenin's position as the District 3 representative are off-point. The county commission agreed to formally request that O'Donnell resign in the face of his obviously unethical and possibly criminal actions; why wasn't our city council willing to do the same for Clendenin? (It's not like they don't have grounds, after all; the city of Wichita does have a code which requires councilmembers to "set an example of good ethical conduct," and the state of Kansas does have a statute which emphasizes that city councils can oblige their councilmembers to adhere to such codes.)

There are lots of possible reasons, of course. Clendenin's fellow councilmembers and DAB members, unlike me, actually personally know the man, and can bring actual personal knowledge to the problem. Maybe they see him as an unfortunate patsy, a good guy who was drawn into a scam by the more Machiavellian O'Donnell and Capps, and thus deserves less shame than the others. Maybe they see him as a councilmember who, whatever his irresponsible actions, has done his legislative work well, and thus shouldn't be pushed to step down if the voters in his district aren't trying to recall him. Maybe they see him as an essential part of maintaining whatever fraught coalitions or divides currently exist on the city council, as Mayor Whipple attempt to push Wichita into more aggressive action in terms of controlling the pandemic we all face (a dilemma certain to continue given the state mask mandate ordered Wednesday night), and they don't want to take the risk of replacing him. Or maybe they just want to wait until DA Bennett decides whether or not to pursue ouster proceedings against Clendenin--even though the county commission didn't wait in O'Donnell's case, and the county and state Republican parties didn't wait in Capps's.

Which suggests to me one additional possible reason, one that I do know something about. Maybe it's because the Wichita city council, unlike the county commission or the state legislature, is formally a non-partisan body, and that leaves less internally empowered to make demands on a fellow councilmember's behavior.

The council isn't really nonpartisan, of course; everyone knows the party affiliation of every person on the council, and it's not hard to see the basic party-aligned beliefs and associations held by the different councilmembers reflected in more than a few actions which the city council takes (particularly, in reference to the above, past votes which imposed a mask mandate in Wichita and then later allowed it to expire, though to be fair the latest such vote, on Thursday morning, one made in support of the county's presumed commitment to enforce for Governor Kelly's latest mask order, actually included a slight 5-2 break against party lines, though Clendenin wasn't one of the switchers). But since the official rule of municipal elections and service in Wichita's city government is nonpartisanship, the fiction is maintained--I think with often undemocratic results. I'm a broken record on this point--I really do believe that partisanship is a necessary part of the formula for making our city government both more responsive and more accountable. But let me suggest a different side to this old argument of mine: the different ways which the different elected bodies which Clendenin, Capps, and O'Donnell are (or, in that last case, were) part of responded to their involvement in this scandal reveals the way that partisanship imposes discipline. 

Parties, for all their limitations and problems, are effective institutional tools or organizing the interests of voters around electable candidates. But that statement focuses on the voter side, not the candidate side. On that side of the equation, parties are, or at least can be, an effective way for talented, ambitious people to connect themselves to the shifting preferences of voters...and for other, equally talented and ambitious people, to hold one another in line, thereby helping to impose accountability to those same voters. Sometime this is expressed through various organizational procedures available within the party: the withdrawing of privileges or funding or support, or even outright expulsion. But more often it is expressed through providing the sort of internally generated peer pressure that enables people to do the personally difficult thing of calling out a colleague, and demanding they face the music. It is easy, for me at least, to imagine that in the partisan environments of the state legislature and the county commission, that enabling force was contributing factor, while in our non-partisan (and, not coincidentally, given our council-manager system, structurally weak) city council, it may not have been felt much at all.

I have no evidence that my imagination is correct, of course; this is, again, just a suggestion. But is it really such an implausible one? Look again at the Sedgwick County Commission, and be absolutely clear on the relevant partisan stakes. In 2020, the year when Republicans outperformed the polls all across the country, all across Kansas, and all across Wichita, another Democrat was elected to the county commission, by a grand total of 264 votes out over 32,000 cast in District 2, bringing the Republican majority on the council down to 3-2. Sure, solid Republicans like Pete Meitzner and David Dennis and Jim Howell might not be particularly worried about that shift--but is it really likely that none of them are cognizant of the strong likelihood that if the scandal-plagued O'Donnell had resigned after the story of the false smear had first broke in 2019, or even at any reasonable point in 2020, and almost any other Republican was subsequently appointed in his place, that this November their Republican majority on the commission would still be 4-1? And now that all is said and done, that their recognition of this sad result contributes to their being just be a little tired of the man who tarnished their brand?

Implausible or not, the fact remains that, as of this writing, Mayor Whipple and the rest of the Wichita City Council are going forward conducting business alongside a man who helped raise money for a false smear and then, when that smear was exposed, was fully on board, according to his own recorded words, with framing an innocent person for the deed. Perhaps condemning him for his unrepentant attitude is sufficient, or perhaps waiting to see if the DA will present him with a stark choice is also. But O'Donnell's resignation, and Capp's retreat from the limelight, surely happened at least in part because their colleagues--and in both of their cases, their Republican colleagues--let them know that the party no longer had their back. In an environment where parties are artificially hidden, one of the great benefits of parties--the motivation of members to make costs tangible in the choices made by their fellow elected representatives--is muted. Whether that is actually a part of why O'Donnell and Capps no longer wield any political authority on the part of Wichita voters, but Clendenin still does, is something I don't know, any more than I know all that much about Clendenin himself. But as our city continues to move forward through these difficult times, it's something to think about, all the same.

Glimmers of a Different Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Two weeks ago, the Wichita City Council, by a 4-3 vote--a result which surprised more than a few Wichitans--implemented a mask requirement in the city of Wichita, in the wake of the Sedgwick County Commission's refusal to fully support the mask mandate which Governor Kelly had called for all the state of Kansas to embrace. (To be fair, the commission later decided to support a similar order from Dr. Garold Minns, the county's health officer.) Then earlier this week the Wichita Historical Preservation Board, by a 5-2 vote--a result which, once again, surprised more than a few Wichitans--nominated Century II for state and national historic status, thus supporting the effort to get the iconic building listed by the Kansas State Historic Preservation Office and the National Register of Historic Places. If that happens, it would likely present very serious obstacles to any plan--such as that proposed by the Populous outfit hired by the Riverfront Legacy folks--which involved the destruction of Century II, which is why multiple interested groups sent representatives to the Preservation Board to make their case (in vain, as it turned out).

I found myself wondering yesterday: is there anything these two votes have in common?

The obvious first response--and, in all likelihood, mostly the correct one--would be: "no." Why would there be? One was a vote taken by elected representatives to the city council, the other by appointed members to an advisory board. One was a vote that had immediate, material consequences about life in our city, the other has only the force of a recommendation (though a significant one, all the same). One was a vote that reflected angry divides which have played out across the often-frustrating distribution of state, county, and city authority when it comes to matters of public health; the other reflected not so much ideological or political differences as generational ones, informed by an argument that has been studied and debated at length here in Wichita for years. In short, these were votes taken by different bodies, for different reasons, addressing categorically different types of issues. What possible overlap could their be?

For that matter, it's not hard to imagine a set of relatively clear demographic and, consequentially, partisan differences in the groupings of people who might be deeply invested in the results of either of these votes in fairly predictable ways. Don't we all know that it's all those very-online liberals and Democrats who support wearing masks as a way to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and the anti-government Republicans who don't? And aren't those Democrats all younger and more urban and more racially diverse than those older, more suburban and rural, and more white Republicans? And so isn't it reasonable to assume that all the opposition to the plans to tear down a beloved but certainly-no-longer-cutting-edge building, and instead invest in some wholesale redevelopment of our downtown, would be coming from those grumpy Republicans who also don't wear masks?

I'm using a lot of stereotypes and assumptions in the above paragraph; the number of real-world exceptions to them in both cases would likely be pretty significant. Still, for all the limits in that particular act of imagination, I'm confident that almost every Wichitan who is even remotely politically informed would recognize the basic contours of what I'm talking about. The city council voting for masks? A progressive win! The Historical Preservation Board voting to protect Century II? A victory for tradition! Clearly, these votes are completely separate from each other.

Except, that is, for that fact that they do both partake of a particular perspective. It's hard to name just what that perspective is, but you can see it if you look at these votes, and those invested in them, closely. There are Wichitans out there--maybe not large in number, but not hidden either--who were both strong proponents of the mask mandate, and strong proponents of the decision made by the Historical Preservation Board. It's worth thinking about that small, curious overlap.

Consider, for example, that both of these close decisions faced, directly or indirectly, a certain type of business opposition. Some of the largest and best-funded business development organizations in Wichita lined up to protest the designation of Century II as historically significant, tying the future economic health of the city to a new and expanded convention center, a new and redesigned riverfront, with all sorts of new construction (some already finished, some projected far into the future) in the place of Century II connecting it together. And while a few of the large business interests which contribute to those groups had also spoken out in support of the mask mandate, the broader conversation about masks (both nationally and locally, as was demonstrated as recently as the Sedgwick County Commission's meeting two weeks ago) tended to focus on the sacrosanct right of business owners to open up, send their employees back to work, and allowing them to make whatever decisions they thought best for themselves and their customers. So in this sense, both the mask vote and the Century II vote reflect a prioritization of health and civic interests over those of business profit. So...a populist or civic republican sensibility, perhaps?

Or consider, as another example, that both of these unexpected votes were rooted in local, Wichita-based (small-d) democratic action. In the case of the city's mask mandate, the pressure on Mayor Whipple, who called for the emergency vote, arose directly from the realization that county-level decision-makers were acting on the basis of interests and information that did not reflect what was happening in the cities of Kansas, in the urban hospitals and government offices which provide essential services to the population of the whole state. Suzanne Perez and The Wichita Eagle, to their great credit, kept local data in front of its readers, and gave regular voice to the local doctors and medical authorities who could speak forcefully as to what was happening throughout the city.

In the case of the Century II vote, the grass-roots efforts of Save Century II, led by Celeste Racette, have been tremendously effective, collecting thousands of signatures from Wichitans with a great variety of concerns (economic, fiscal, political, cultural, as well as historical) about the proposed layout for Wichita's downtown, and pulling them together into a movement which has been flexible enough in its arguments--expressing no opposition to the widely accepted need for new performing arts venue somewhere in the downtown, and insisting on no specific limitations about what might be someday accomplished under Century II's dome--as to attract far more supporters than the critics first supposed. So in that sense, both the mask vote and the Century II vote reflect a somewhat radical, bottom-up challenge to larger government bodies and economic expectations. So...a localist, municipalist movement, one might say?

You can't read too much into these speculations, obviously. The very distinct contexts of these votes, and the very distinct political processes they emerged as part of, to say nothing of the brute demographic distinctions characterizing the likely supporters of either side in both efforts, make it all but impossible to hypothesize some kind unity between them. But maybe not entirely impossible. Student of political ideas that I am, I can't help but be intrigued in the glimmer the last two weeks, and these two votes, have provided me of a different Wichita, a more community-oriented and less conventionally business-oriented one. I have no reason to believe that those glimmers will turn into anything more broadly, much less politically, actionable anytime soon--but for someone of my preferences (both pro-mask and pro-Century II, if you haven't guessed), they were nice to see.