photo by: Peter Hancock

Paul Davis, the Lawrence Democrat running for the 2nd District congressional seat in eastern Kansas, speaks to reporters Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, after receiving endorsements from unions representing police officers and firefighters.

TOPEKA — Lawrence Democrat Paul Davis, who is running for the 2nd District congressional seat in eastern Kansas, expressed skepticism Friday about President Donald Trump and some of his policies, but steered clear of launching any direct attacks against the president.

During a news conference in Topeka, where he picked up endorsements from statewide labor unions representing police officers and firefighters, Davis carefully avoided the subject of impeachment — something that his Republican opponent Steve Watkins said during the primary campaign would happen if Democrats win control of Congress this year.

“Paul Davis has accepted over a quarter million dollars in blood money from radical swamp PACs — if he’s elected, that’s clearly his price to impeach President Trump,” Watkins stated in a news release in July.

In recent days, talk of impeachment has grown stronger since Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes while giving a statement implicating Trump in a cover-up to silence women who said they’d had sexual relations with him.

Davis, however, declined to discuss that possibility.

“We need to let Bob Mueller do his job,” Davis said Friday of the special prosecutor. “He has a very big job and I think he’s somebody who’s very well respected across the aisle, and we need to see what his investigation is going to come up with. And I don’t think it’s responsible for anybody to prejudge that at this point in time.”

Davis, 46, is one of several Democrats running for Congress this year in Republican-leaning districts, where being overly critical of Trump could alienate many voters.

Davis carried the 2nd District in his unsuccessful bid for governor in 2014, but Trump carried it by a much wider margin in his presidential race in 2016.

And in the four years since Davis last ran, according to the most recent voter registration numbers, Democrats have lost more than 5,600 registered voters in the 25 counties that make up the district; Republicans have gained nearly 4,000.

Still, a number of nonpartisan political handicappers are rating the race a toss-up. That’s due in part to the fact that Davis faces Watkins, 41, a political newcomer who won the GOP primary on Aug. 7 with just 27 percent of the vote in a seven-way race.

Throughout this year, Davis has been highly critical of the Republican-backed tax cuts that Trump had pushed for last year and Congress passed in December, likening them to the tax cuts that former Gov. Sam Brownback championed in Kansas in 2012, which lawmakers effectively reversed five years later.

But Davis said he thinks it’s unlikely Congress would reverse course on the federal tax cuts anytime soon, even if Democrats do win back control of the House.

“I don’t think that that is likely to happen,” he said. “I think once things are put into law, tax-wise, I think we want to sort of give them some time. I’m sure periodically tax laws are revisited.”