Christie makes 3rd trip to stump for Brownback

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, came to Kansas Monday to raise money for Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. Recent polls have shown the race between Brownback and Democrat Paul Davis narrowing.

? New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who chairs the Republican Governors Association, made his third trip to Kansas on Monday to raise money and stump for Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who finds himself locked in a surprisingly close race.

“If you had asked me a year or two ago, I wouldn’t have thought that,” Christie said after greeting campaign volunteers at the Kansas Republican Party headquarters in Topeka. “But it became very clear to me this year that this was a place that was going to be a hotly contested race. That’s also influenced by a hotly contested Senate race as well.”

The RGA has spent heavily in Kansas airing ads on behalf of Brownback attacking Democratic challenger Paul Davis, referring to him as a liberal and comparing him to President Barack Obama.

The most recent ad, which the Davis campaign condemned, reminded voters of a 1998 incident in which Davis was present at a southeast Kansas strip club during a drug raid.

Polls have shown Davis, the Kansas House minority leader from Lawrence, leading throughout most of the campaign, but a few recent polls have shown Brownback either closing the gap or taking the lead.

A Fox News survey in early October showed Brownback leading by 6 percentage points.

Another survey in mid-October by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling showed Davis and Brownback tied at 42 percent each, with Libertarian Keen Umbehr at 6 percent.

The most recent poll, released Monday by Monmouth University in New Jersey, showed Davis leading, 50-45 percent.

All of the polls have shown that a large percentage of voters disapprove of the job Brownback has done as governor.

During his first term, Brownback’s most notable policies have been sweeping cuts in state income taxes, reductions in base state funding for public schools and the privatization of the state’s Medicaid program, now known as KanCare.

Brownback has been trying to refute the claim that he cut education spending, arguing that total spending for education — including capital expenses and contributions to school employee pension funds — is at an all-time high. And Christie picked up on that point during his Topeka appearance.

“We push back against the lies that are being spouted about Gov. Brownback, this ridiculous notion that he cut funding to education when in fact there’s more state money going into education today than when he became governor,” Christie told reporters.

During Brownback’s first term, the base per-pupil funding formula for K-12 education — the money that makes up each district’s general fund budget — has declined, from $4,012 in 2011 when he took office to $3,856 this year.

But the total amount of money spent for base and supplemental aid, the state’s portion of each district’s local option budget, has gone up, from $2.4 billion in 2011 to $2.5 billion this year. That’s due mainly to enrollment growth and a Kansas Supreme Court ruling last year that said the funding system was unconstitutional and ordering the state to increase its share of LOB funding.

A lawsuit challenging the overall adequacy of state funding for public schools is still pending before a three-judge panel in Shawnee County District Court.