The campaign to fill Mike Pompeo’s 4th District seat in the U.S. House is in full swing with the outcome to be decided on April 11.
Days after being re-elected in 2016 to a fourth term, Pompeo, R-Wichita, resigned to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Voters in the heavily Republican 17-county district will choose between Republican Ron Estes, state treasurer, and James Thompson, a Democrat.
This week, Thompson portrayed Estes as a “supportive part of Brownback’s administration and his policies.” Estes replied, “… if Thompson wants to run for governor, he could do that next year.”
And so it goes in politics demeaned by gridlock in Congress from day one of President Obama’s administration, and kept on the low side during the Trump-Clinton bout when more mud was slung than can be found in the Mississippi Delta.
Thompson, a civil rights attorney, wants to be the first Democrat to hold the Fourth District seat since Dan Glickman left Congress in 1994 to be Bill Clinton’s secretary of Agriculture.
The special election to fill Pompeo’s seat will be the first with national implications since Trump became president. That Trump won 60 percent of the vote in the Fourth District vote is to Estes’s advantage, as if he needed much in Kansas.
Thompson is pegging his campaign on tying Estes to the governor’s unpopular policies. Estes’s supporters, however, say this characterization is misplaced and that Estes is “conservative but level-headed” and shies away from ultra-conservative principles.
We’ll find out how influential Thompson and his supporters are in less than six weeks.
— Bob Johnson
