photo by: Contributed

Dakota Loomis

Dakota Loomis, a defense attorney and Baldwin City Municipal Court prosecutor, unseated Douglas County’s incumbent DA with a landslide Democratic primary victory on Tuesday night.

As of 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, with 97 of 101 precincts reporting, Loomis had 6,313 votes, or 63.5% of the total, in the three-way race. Another challenger, Tonda Hill, was in second place with 2,691 votes, or 27.06%, and incumbent DA Suzanne Valdez was a distant third with 941 votes, or 9.46%.

Hill conceded the race around 9:20 p.m., but Valdez had not yet done so.

Loomis will now advance to the Nov. 5 general election, where he will face Republican candidate and former federal prosecutor Mike Warner. Warner did not face a primary opponent on Tuesday.

Loomis has been a defense attorney in Douglas County for nearly a decade. He previously told the Journal-World that he entered the race to restore “professionalism and integrity to the District Attorney’s Office” and rebuild what he saw as strained relationships between the office, law enforcement and other community partners.

During the lead-up to the primary election, Loomis amassed more donations than both of his opponents combined; his campaign had raised more than $72,000 as of Aug. 1, while Hill raised $14,015 and Valdez raised $4,450.

The Journal-World has reached out to Loomis for comments about Tuesday’s election results.

The primary election was a sound rejection of Valdez, who won the role of DA in 2020 by unseating a 16-year incumbent, Charles Branson, in that year’s Democratic primary. In that race, she won with 39.98% of the vote; Branson had 26.5%, and a third candidate, Cooper Overstreet, had 33.45%. Valdez did not face a Republican opponent in the 2020 general election.

As the Journal-World has reported, during Valdez’s three-plus years in charge, more than 20 attorneys have left her office, often to be replaced by attorneys with comparatively little experience. A panel for the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys also recommended after a disciplinary hearing in December 2023 that she be censured for “undignified or discourteous conduct” toward Douglas County Chief Judge James McCabria in 2021, shortly after she took office.

At that hearing, multiple Douglas County judges and former employees like longtime prosecutor Eve Kemple and Alice Walker testified against her and painted a picture of an office in disarray and with strained relationships with law enforcement and the court, as the Journal-World reported.

In a more recent incident, Valdez’s former deputy DA, Joshua Seiden, abruptly left the office in June after he was recorded in costume mocking a man whom the DA’s office had prosecuted. Valdez is seen laughing and pointing in the video; she has since denied that she was a party to Seiden’s conduct and said that the incident played a role in Seiden’s departure from the office.

The Journal-World reached out to Valdez for comment about Tuesday’s election results, but she did not respond.

photo by: Douglas County District Attorney’s office

Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez poses outside of the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center.

Another member of the DA’s office was in a primary race of his own on Tuesday in another county. David Greenwald, Douglas County’s current deputy DA, was challenging Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe in that county’s Republican primary. In Tuesday’s unofficial results, Greenwald trailed by more than 10,000 votes, earning 14,626 to Howe’s 26,365.

David Greenwald