Most voters make their decisions for various unreflective reasons; engaging in a prolonged internal struggle over whether or not to support any particular candidate, especially a candidate nominated by a party which the voter identifies with, just isn’t typical behavior.
Donald Trump, though, has never been a typical candidate; he’s always been a contentious one. There is less talk today of “Never Trumpers,” as many of those Republicans who opposed Trump’s rise to dominance within the GOP have left the party. But not all have — even in Kansas, a state that gave Trump 56% of the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, and will likely do so again.
Given that Kansas Republicans have historically divided into moderate and conservative factions, perhaps the fact that there remains a small but persistent number of Republicans who still reject Trump’s control over the GOP isn’t surprising.
Stephanie Sharp, a Republican who served three terms in the Kansas House, is one of the prime movers behind Women 4 U.S., a national organization of self-identifying conservative women working against Trump’s return to the White House.
Steven Howe, current Republican member of the Kansas House, condemned Trump’s “deceit and lies” and plead with his own party to turn away from their support for the former president.
And then there is U.S. Senator Jerry Moran, the only one of the Republicans which Kansans have elected to Congress who has declined to endorse Trump for president. While he’s never directly condemned Trump either, this is a man who, if you’ve paid attention to his speeches over the years, clearly has little respect for the leader of his own party.
I also have to include here a deeply conservative friend of mine, a life-long Republican voter who finds Trump’s dismissive attitude towards both the law and the truth utterly disqualifying, despite mostly agreeing with Trump on matters of policy.
He, like those mentioned above, knows that his opposition won’t significantly affect voting results in Kansas; it’s a given that Kansas’s electoral college votes will go to Donald Trump.
But what will that result have on the longstanding divide within Kansas’s dominant political party? All political parties deal with internal divisions over policy priorities, but a rejection of the person who leads the party itself? The Bernie Sanders faction of the Democratic party, despite its grievances, made its peace with and supported both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and is set to do the same for Kamala Harris, whereas the absence of any Trump-critical Republicans from the current GOP campaign — from Mitt Romney to Lynn Cheney to Mike Pence — suggests a division quite unlike the divides Kansas Republican faced over Governor Brownback, for example.
I think of another friend, a smart and passionate GOP volunteer, who is entirely on board with the MAGA line: that Trump won the election in 2020, and that Trump’s actions to challenge being denied his supposed win were justified, despite the violence involved. Assuming neither of my friends change their minds, how can their party accommodate such a stark division?
Perhaps by just ignoring it? (It’s notable that Rep. Howe has faced no intra-party challenge in his re-election race). Or if Trump loses, maybe find common ground by treating the past decade as just a strange, rough patch in party history, something that historians will have to figure out?
Neither of those options will be available if Trump wins, or just refuses once again to accept his loss. So long a Trump’s presence endures, I would anticipate that a small but persistent fracture will remain in our state Republican politics. Who knows how long it will take for it to heal then?
About the author: Russell Arben Fox teaches political science at Friends University in Wichita.
