photo by: Peter Hancock

Republican Kris Kobach adresses his campaign supporters and staff at about 12:45 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2018. At the time, the race for the GOP nomination for governor between him and incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer was still too close to call, with thousands of votes in Johnson County waiting to be tallied.

They say nothing good happens after midnight. That certainly was true for Gov. Jeff Colyer in the primary election for Kansas governor. But perhaps more important is that nothing good happens after about midday Monday.

That’s when President Donald Trump endorsed Colyer’s main rival, Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

The newly released numbers indicate Johnson County voters took Trump’s endorsement to heart. Johnson County — the largest county in the state and Colyer’s home county — ended up being a key battleground. Here’s a key set of numbers from the unofficial results released by the Johnson County Election Office:

Advance voting tallies strongly favored Colyer. The governor bested Kobach in advance votes by a 47.4 percent to 32.3 percent margin. The vast majority of those votes, presumably, happened before Trump’s endorsement.

When you do the math to figure out the totals just for votes cast on Election Day, the difference is striking. Colyer won just 41 percent of the vote, while Kobach won 38.9 percent. All those votes were cast after Trump made his endorsement of Kobach, who saw a 6.6 percent bump in Johnson County votes after the Trump endorsement.

Is it cause and effect? I don’t know. Is it enough? At the moment, yes.

With the total statewide vote difference between the two candidates at just 191 votes, Kobach needed every edge he could get. Even then, it appeared for the longest while it wasn’t going to be enough.

I was at the Johnson County Republicans watch party Tuesday night in Overland Park, where Colyer stationed himself. Shortly after midnight, when the party shut down, there was still a good reason to believe that Colyer was in the better position, even though he was trailing in the statewide total.

Colyer was behind by 952 votes, but there were still more than 450 precincts in Johnson County yet to report their totals. With Colyer being a longtime Johnson County resident, many thought he had a strong advantage. At that point, the numbers that had been reported by Johnson County looked positive for Colyer. The governor was outpolling Kobach by a 46 percent to 33 percent margin.

But from that point on, the tide would turn. After they turned out the lights at the Colyer party, the rest of the Johnson County results came in at nearly a dead heat — 40.6 percent for Colyer and 39.2 percent for Kobach. Just enough to preserve that 950 vote cushion the rest of the state had given Kobach.

At least for now, it is enough. We’ll see what the coming days show as provisional ballots and late-arriving advance ballots are counted. Regardless, though, the numbers we do have may already tell an important story: Johnson County Republicans still march to President Trump’s tune.