photo by: Peter Hancock

Jeff Glendening, right, state director of the Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, stands with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach during an AFP rally at the Kansas Statehouse on Thursday.

Topeka ? This year’s races for the Kansas Legislature and other state offices will be flooded with campaign spending from third-party organizations that can spend unlimited amounts of money without having to disclose their donor lists.

And although that has been happening for the last several election cycles, the difference this year is that the money will be coming from both the left and the right.

Four former governors, including two Democrats and two Republicans, are throwing their support behind a relatively new group, the Save Kansas Coalition, a network of 11 separate groups dedicated to electing more Democrats and moderate Republicans to the Legislature.

photo by: Peter Hancock

In this 2016 file photo, former Gov. John Carlin speaks about the legislative races that year at the Kansas Association of School Boards. Carlin is one of four former governors, both Democrats and Republicans, who are helping raise money for the Save Kansas Coalition, a group dedicated to electing more Democrats and moderate Republicans to the Legislature.

“We got involved — we, the former governors — by joining in and being supportive of what they were doing. We didn’t put it together,” said former Gov. John Carlin, a Democrat who served from 1978 to 1987. “These groups put it together.”

Those include such groups as the MainStream Coalition, Stand Up Blue Valley, Game On for Kansas Schools, Women for Kansas, and Reroute the Roadmap — groups that were active in both the 2014 and 2016 elections, although some focused only on particular regions of the state.

The other former governors include Republicans Mike Hayden (1987-1991) and Bill Graves (1995-2003), and Democrat Kathleen Sebelius (2003-2009).

During a recent phone interview, Carlin said one of the main purposes of the coalition is to counter the large amounts of third-party money that is already being spent by conservative groups, including the Kansas Chapter of Americans for Prosperity, which has been active in Kansas for many years.

In fact, Carlin said, AFP has been active in the 2018 races since before the first of the year.

“We know how many postcards — big, fancy, four-color postcards — were sent to (voters in) like 40 selected (districts) that they’re going to go after,” Carlin said. “I don’t have the total cost on that figured out, but it took a lot of money to do that, and they’re raring up to spend more.”

Jeff Glendening, the Kansas state director for AFP, confirmed that his organization conducted a postcard campaign shortly after lawmakers overrode then-Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto of a bill reversing course on many of the tax cuts he had championed in 2012.

“Last year, after they passed the largest tax increase in state history, we let their constituents know what they did,” he said in an interview.

Unlimited spending; secret donors

Both the Save Kansas Coalition and AFP are organized as nonprofit, tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations under the federal tax code, section 501(c)4. That means they can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, as long as they don’t spend more than half their funds on political activity.

The other half, however, can be spent on things indirectly related to politics, such as voter education about policy issues, research and analysis, and educating people about civic engagement.

For AFP, Glendening said, it’s a year-round effort.

“To be very honest with you, we educate where (officeholders) are on issues, regardless of whether it’s an election year,” he said. “We don’t say ‘vote for’ or ‘vote against.’ We educate folks on where they are on economic freedom issues.”

Although many third-party organizations have been operating in politics for years, they got a significant boost in 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a controversial case known as the Citizens United ruling, said those groups were exempt from federal campaign finance laws.

For some time, that was a dilemma for center- and left-leaning groups such as the Save Kansas Coalition because many of their members strongly favor campaign finance reform, including overturning Citizens United.

But Aaron Estabrook, executive director of the coalition, said that after a series of electoral losses, those groups have learned to adapt, at least for the time being.

“We were, in some ways, taking a knife to a gun fight for many years,” he said.

Carlin agreed, saying, “I think (the coalition) would say, as soon as you do finance reform, I’ll be the first in line to shutter my 501(c)4 and we’ll play by the rules.”

Potential ‘wave’ election

Carlin said the coalition was born out of frustration over the 2014 election, when a large number of high-profile moderate Republicans had united behind Democrat Paul Davis of Lawrence, hoping to unseat incumbent Gov. Sam Brownback.

Brownback, however, narrowly won that election, with just less than 50 percent of the vote.

Shortly after that election, the various organizations, which had been working separately in 2014, banded together to form the Save Kansas Coalition and enlisted the support of the four former governors.

Under that unified umbrella, they expanded their efforts in 2016 and succeeded in replacing a large number of conservative lawmakers with Democrats and moderate Republicans, shifting the balance of power in the Statehouse, at least on issues of taxes and school funding.

The following year, those lawmakers were able to override Brownback’s veto of a bill reversing course on the controversial tax cuts he had championed in 2012, tax cuts that critics blamed for triggering the state’s long financial crisis that followed.

This year, coalition members are hoping to build on that success. And according to some analysts, they may have an advantage to work with — the potential for another “wave” election, this one at the national level where many Democrat and moderate Republican voters are expressing the same frustration over the 2016 election of President Donald Trump that many Kansas voters felt in 2014 about the re-election of Brownback.

Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political scientist and frequent commentary writer, said there is a distinct possibility that a wave election in congressional races could filter down to state-level elections.

“All you have to do is look at 2010,” he said in a Statehouse interview. “You had city commissioners running against (then-President Barack) Obama.”

“I do think every election is different,” he added. “But my sense is, you look at a bunch of Kansas House races where there might be 300, 400, 500-vote margins, and if you get a big Democratic turnout, particularly in the 2nd and 3rd (Congressional) Districts, yeah, that wave doesn’t have to be much higher in those districts for it to bring in a different crew of legislators.”

Carlin was once the victim of a wave election himself. In 1994, seven years after leaving the governor’s office, he ran unsuccessfully for the 2nd District congressional seat of eastern Kansas, but lost that race to Brownback, who at that time had only served as the state agriculture secretary.

That election became known as the “Gingrich Revolution,” when a large new group of Republicans came into Congress in a backlash against then-President Bill Clinton, won control of the U.S. House and elected Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., as speaker.

“And there wasn’t anything at the state level that changed,” Carlin said, recalling that election. “It was just what was going on in Washington nationally.”

But Glendening, of AFP, said he doesn’t believe any such wave will occur in Kansas, specifically because of the tax policies that Democrats and moderate Republicans pushed through last year.

“I’ll say this. We knock on doors, and we’ve knocked on hundreds of doors already,” he said. “People are upset about the tax increase last year. They’re not happy about it.”