BY RUSSELL ARBEN FOX
Insight Kansas
When Vicki Schmidt, Kansas’s Insurance Commissioner, announced her run for the Republican nomination for governor with a folksy campaign video, some folks giggled at its earnestness.
For my part, I liked it, mostly because, with its emphasis on non-ideological practicality, it reminded me of another competent, accomplished, moderate Republican woman in Kansas politics—Jean Schodorf, whose path Schmidt hasn’t followed, but should probably keep in mind, nonetheless.
Many Kansans may miss that comparison; Schodorf—who served for 12 years in the Kansas Senate, became Majority Whip of the Republican caucus, and later ran unsuccessfully for Kansas Secretary of State as a Democrat—never moved beyond her Wichita base to state-wide office, and hasn’t been in the public eye for nearly a decade.
But besides parallels both generational (Schodorf was born in 1950, Schmidt in 1955) and professional (both had careers in health care-adjacent fields, Schmidt as a pharmacist, Schodorf as a speech pathologist), there is a political one—both were targeted for defeat by their own party leadership, with very different consequences.
In 2012, when Governor Brownback was riding high on his tax-cut ideology (and years before his governorship’s deeply unpopular and embarrassing end was mostly memory-holed by his own party), he aimed to purge moderate Republicans from the Kansas GOP, and orchestrated large donations from Koch Industries and the Kansas Chamber to recruit conservative candidates to challenge multiple leading Republican members of the legislature in primary contests.
Most of those targeted couldn’t compete with the money and partisan momentum against them, Schodorf included. Schmidt, however, was one of the very few that survived that challenge, though only barely (in a primary election with over 11,000 votes cast, she won by 160).
Why were Schodorf and Schmidt both on Brownback’s hit list? Because they were Republicans who weren’t particularly fired up by his fiscally unsustainable ideological crusade, nor by his personality cult as an anti-government crusader.
They were both, in the now mostly-forgotten sense, Bob Dole Republicans—Republicans who, as Schodorf once put it, “think in terms of moderation,” or as Schmidt puts it repeatedly in her announcement video, “use common sense.”
In a podcast with the Kansas Reflector, Schmidt’s reputation was put on the spot, with such hot-button topics as abortion, vaccines, and Donald Trump’s cuts to state programs thrown at her. Without ever using the word “moderation”—a word that is, at least among some members of the Kansas GOP primary electorate, an insult—Schmidt stood her ground, insisting that in Kansas abortion is a “non-issue,” that vaccines “save lives,” that practical alternatives to Medicaid expansion have been needlessly undermined by “political games,” and more.
Fifteen years ago, Schodorf, then one of Schmidt’s colleagues in the Senate, was saying similar things, wanting to see the state align itself with the Affordable Care Act, preserve education funding, and more.
After the 2012 election, Schodorf felt the best way to continue to say the things she believed Kansans needed to hear was to run as a Democrat, a path that didn’t work out for her.
Schmidt, for her part, left the Senate after one more term (she expresses regret to the Reflector over some of her Brownback-era votes there) and ran for Insurance Commissioner, where her unshowy, results-oriented approach has saved Kansans tens of millions of dollars.
Patient, practical political work used to be the hallmark of a certain sort of Kansas conservative. Whether there remains an electoral path to the leadership of the state GOP for a Schodorfian-style, common sense Republican woman is unlikely—but Schmidt may provide a solid test.
Dr. Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.