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TOPEKA – This year’s race for governor features contested races in both political parties, something that hasn’t happened in Kansas since 1994.

On the Democratic side, three major candidates are vying for the nomination — Sen. Laura Kelly, of Topeka; former Rep. and former Agriculture Secretary Joshua Svaty, of Topeka; and former Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer.

But there are two other candidates in that race, Olathe physician Arden Andersen and Wichita high school student Jack Bergeson, who could peel votes away from any of the major candidates.

Meanwhile on the Republican side, incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer, who inherited the job in January from former Gov. Sam Brownback, is running for a full term of his own against a crowded field of candidates that includes Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Topeka physician Jim Barnett and Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer.

But that race also features some dark horse candidates, including “entrepreneurial evangelist” Patrick Kucera, of Overland Park, Prairie Village high school student Tyler Ruzich, and Mission Hills high school student Joseph Tutera Jr.

Those two races will be decided Tuesday, Aug. 7, and the winners will advance to a general election that will also feature independent candidates Greg Orman and Rick Kloos and Libertarian candidate Jeff Caldwell.

Democratic primary

Kelly is widely seen as the front-runner in the race. Although she did not enter the race until December, months after the other candidates had already begun campaigning, she has already raised more than $700,000, more than three times as much as her nearest competitor, Svaty.

Sen. Laura Kelly

In recent weeks, the race has been marked by charges and counter-charges between Kelly and Svaty over the issues of gun rights and abortion, while Brewer has generally stayed out of the fray.

Both Kelly and Svaty were elected to the Legislature from relatively conservative districts.

Kelly, 68, was first elected in 2004 in a Senate district that includes heavily Democratic central Topeka. But it also reaches into much more Republican territories in northern Shawnee County and portions of Pottawatomie and Wabaunsee counties.

Svaty, 38, served in the Kansas House from 2003 to 2009, representing a Republican-leaning district in Ellsworth County.

Joshua Svaty

When former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius resigned in 2009 to become Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration, her lieutenant governor, Mark Parkinson, became governor and appointed Svaty to become Kansas Secretary of Agriculture.

Both Kelly and Svaty came into the Legislature by defeating incumbent Republicans, and throughout their careers, both have taken some conservative positions, reflecting their districts.

Kelly was a co-sponsor of a 2015 law known as “constitutional carry,” which allows people over age 21 to legally carry concealed firearms without a permit and without having to undergo training.

Svaty has frequently criticized Kelly for that position, and Kelly herself has said she believes it went too far, and she has supported bills that would put back some of the earlier permitting requirements.

Svaty was also a supporter of the state’s first concealed carry law in 2006. But he also supported restrictions on abortion rights. He voted four times to override former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ vetoes of abortion bills.

Kelly, who has the endorsement of EMILY’s List, a national political action committee that backs female Democrats who support abortion rights, has frequently criticized Svaty over those votes. Svaty, in turn, has said that if he’s elected, he would not sign any further restrictions on abortion.

Brewer, 61, is a former mayor, a former Kansas Army National Guard officer and a former aviation industry manager. As such, he does not have a voting record on either issue, but he has said he strongly supports abortion rights, as well as controls on the right to carry concealed firearms.

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Carl Brewer

Brewer served two terms as mayor of Wichita, from 2007 to 2015, during which time he helped steer the city through the Great Recession. He was the first African-American elected on a citywide ballot in Wichita, and he was re-elected in 2011 with 69 percent of the vote.

Andersen, 60, is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, and his medical practice mainly focuses on soldiers at the Ft. Leavenworth military base. He has also said he supports abortion rights and restrictions on concealed firearms.

Bergeson, 17, will not be old enough to vote in either the primary or general election. He is one of several teenagers who got into the race for governor by taking advantage of Kansas law at the time, which required no minimum age or other qualifications to run for governor.

The Kansas Legislature changed that this year with a new law requiring candidates to be at least 25 years of age when they file, but that law does not take effect until Jan. 1, 2019.

Republican primary

When candidates began planning their campaigns for governor in 2016 and 2017, most assumed it would be an open race. Brownback, a Republican, was term-limited, and most high-ranking Republican officeholders were eyeing the race.

The race became even more wide open in January 2017 when U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, of Topeka, who was widely believed to be considering the race, surprised political observers by announcing she would be stepping away from politics this year.

Later in the year, President Donald Trump nominated Brownback to be U.S. ambassador at-large for international religious freedom. He was confirmed in January and resigned the governor’s office, handing the reins, and the advantage of incumbency, over to his lieutenant governor, Colyer.

By that time, however, several other candidates had already committed to running, including Kobach, Selzer and Barnett. They had all formed their exploratory committees the previous summer.

Colyer, 58, a Johnson County plastic surgeon, had served one term in the Kansas House from 2007 to 2009 and was in the middle of his first term in the Kansas Senate when Brownback tapped him to be his running mate in the 2010 elections.

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Gov. Jeff Colyer

As lieutenant governor, he was largely responsible for transforming the Kansas Medicaid program into KanCare, a privatized system of managed care that has been the source of significant controversy.

Colyer claims that by paying private insurance companies a flat, per-person rate to manage the care of the state’s 400,000 Medicaid patients, KanCare has saved the state nearly $2 billion. But the Legislature’s audit division has said there is not enough data in the system to verify that, or any other claims about KanCare savings.

Meanwhile, health care advocates have said any savings have come through reduced payments to providers, delaying claims payments and delaying enrollment for new beneficiaries.

As governor, one of Colyer’s most significant actions was signing a bill this year that phases in more than $500 million a year in school funding over the next five years.

Colyer said he supported the bill largely because it did not require a tax increase. But the funding was only made possible after the 2017 Legislature overrode Brownback’s veto of a bill reversing course on the tax cuts he had championed five years earlier, a move that Colyer opposed at the time.

Colyer has been the most prolific fundraiser on the Republican side so far. But Kobach, his main rival, has been running a largely self-funded campaign with money from his running mate, Wichita businessman Willis “Wink” Hartman, who had been a candidate himself until bowing out in April and joining the Kobach ticket.

Kobach, 52, of Lecompton, is a former law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a nationally known advocate for tough laws against illegal immigration.

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Kris Kobach

He was elected secretary of state in 2010 after vowing to crack down on noncitizens voting in Kansas elections — something that he has claimed is widespread but which data has never shown to be a significant issue in Kansas.

In 2011, he championed passage of laws requiring people to show photo ID in order to vote, and for new voters to show documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote. The latter was recently struck down by a federal district court, but the state of Kansas is appealing that decision.

In his campaign for governor, Kobach has vowed to continue pushing for tough laws against illegal immigration, including calling for repeal of a Kansas law that allows students who have grown up in Kansas and graduated from Kansas high schools to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, regardless of their citizenship status.

In addition, he has vowed to shrink the size of state government by cutting taxes and reducing state agencies’ staffing through attrition as workers retire.

At a campaign event in Topeka on Thursday, Kobach praised the tax cuts that Brownback had championed in 2012, but which the Legislature essentially repealed in 2017, and said he wants Kansas to return to that kind of tax environment.

“The failure of the Brownback-Colyer administration was, they did sign the tax cut, which was a good tax cut in 2012, but they didn’t cut spending. And if you’re going to cut taxes, you have to cut spending,” Kobach said.

Kobach has also criticized Colyer for signing the 2018 school finance bill.

Barnett, 64, is running as the only moderate Republican in a crowded field of conservatives, and most polls have shown him in a distant third place behind Kobach and Colyer.

Jim Barnett

Barnett served in the Kansas Senate from 2001 to 2010, at the time representing a district in Emporia. He was the Republican Party’s nominee for governor in 2006 when he ran unsuccessfully against Sebelius, getting 40 percent of the vote.

He also tried unsuccessfully in 2010 to unseat former U.S. Rep. Tim Huelskamp in a six-person primary in the 1st District. That race also featured Colyer’s new lieutenant governor, Tracey Mann. Barnett finished second in that race with 25 percent of the vote, while Mann received 21 percent.

Barnett has since relocated to Topeka, where he practices medicine at Stormont Vail Health. He also recently remarried and, in a surprise political move, named his wife, Rosie Hansen, a retired career foreign service officer, to be his lieutenant governor running mate.

Barnett is the only candidate in the GOP field who supports expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. He also supports reinstating workplace protections for LGBT state employees, something Gov. Sebelius had done during her administration but which Gov. Brownback repealed in 2015.

Selzer, 65, of Overland Park, was elected insurance commissioner in 2014 after edging through a five-person Republican primary, and then going on to win the general election with more than 61 percent of the vote.

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Ken Selzer

Before entering politics, he spent 30 years in the insurance industry. His last position was as executive managing director of a worldwide brokerage and insurance services firm.

Selzer describes himself as a fiscal conservative who will make state government operate more efficiently. He also says he is “rock solid” in his anti-abortion views and a “champion” of the Second Amendment.

His campaign, however, has struggled to raise money, although Selzer himself has loaned his campaign $285,700 of his own money.

Kucera, 50, of Overland Park, describes himself as an “entrepreneurial evangelist.” He is the author of an upcoming book, “Revival of Revenue,” but has so far been unspecific about what he wants to accomplish as governor.

Ruzich and Tutera both attend high schools in Johnson County. Like Bergeson in the Democratic primary, they got on the ballot by taking advantage of the lack of a minimum age for gubernatorial candidates at the time.