KCFreePress.com

By his own admission, Mike Carter is an unlikely political activist. Until recently, the 30 year old Olathe resident had never been particularly interested in politics. And with a reserved personality, he’s not the type you’d expect to see walking door-to-door chatting up strangers.

But Carter and his wife Lindsay spent their Saturday morning under the flourescent lights of the Johnson County Republican Party's headquarters on Metcalf Avenue taking in a training presentation on how to get out the vote this November. As precinct committee people, they'll be charged with hitting the phones and the streets to drum up support for the Republican slate.

“This is definitely going to be a learning curve for me,” Carter said. “But I think that for a cause you care about, you’ve got to be willing to go out and do something. When you look at where the country seems to be headed, [Lindsay and I] just said, we should find out how we can get involved.”

As Republicans around the nation continue to talk of growing momentum heading into the 2010 elections, the Johnson County Republican Party is counting on people like the Carters to help build unified support for GOP candidates — no matter what faction of the party they come from.

State and county Republican officials have begun to implement a relatively new grassroots strategy in which the party will work to have at least one person actively campaigning in each of the approximately 440 Johnson County voting precincts, with a focus on getting as many advance ballots filed for the Republicans as possible. Their goal, said Johnson County Republican Party Chairman Ronnie Metsker, is to generate 35,000 “extra” votes in Johnson County for the District 3 Congressional race in hopes of counteracting the Democratic advantage in Douglas and Wyandotte counties. Precinct-level campaigners will coordinate with state-level party organizers on which voters they’ll contact in their jurisdictions.

Kansas Republican Party Executive Director Ashley McMillan said the strategy is based on a set of on-the-ground campaign techniques used by Sen. Pat Roberts in his 2008 re-election bid.


“Roberts made a big investment in creating a grassroots system that combines the efforts of a lot of campaigns in order to save time and money,” McMillan said. “So you have one volunteer that’s working on behalf of all of the Republican candidates instead of campaigns each having separate volunteers involved. It’s a time saving thing. And you also have one person who believes in the Republican Party and Republican values who is supporting all the candidates.”

Not surprisingly, that desire to find people interested in “working on behalf of all of the Republican candidates” is echoed strongly by Metsker, who made unifying the Johnson County party a priority when he took over the chairmanship following the 2008 elections. Metsker, who is often charged with appointing the precinct-level campaigners, said he looks to find people who aren’t interested in toeing the party’s old fault lines.

“I have a litmus test that I use before I appoint someone,” Metsker said. “It is: will you work hard to elect every Republican that appears on the ballot in your precinct? Not, ‘Will you work hard to elect the Republican that you agree with or you are passionate about or that’s part or your little circle?’ It’s every Republican on the ballot.”

Thus far, the task of taking the District 3 Congressional seat appears to have been smoothed for the Republicans by the fact that no top shelf Democrats have stepped into the race. Last week, Congressional Quarterly switched its projected outcome for District 3 from “tossup” to “likely Republican.” The switch comes in the wake of Kansas City, Kan., Mayor Joe Reardon’s announcement that he would not become a candidate. Reardon was seen by many as the Democrats’ best hope for retaining the seat that has been occupied by Dennis Moore for six terms.

(As Republican lobbyist Woody Cozar put it on KCPT’s Ruckus last week, “[The Democrats] are apparently arranging it so that even the Republican Party of the 3rd District of Kansas, possibly the most dysfunctional Republican Party in America, cannot blow this one.”)

Even without a strong candidate in the District 3 race, Democratic Party officials say that the new campaigning efforts on the Republican side aren’t particularly likely to have a big impact on the outcome. The new Republican tactics closely mimic those that have been used by the Kansas Democrats for a few election cycles, said Kansas Democratic Party Communications Director Tyler Longpine, and they may not be as well suited toward Republican voters, who tend to come to the polls more reliably than their Democratic counterparts.

“Registered Republicans are going to go out and vote like they always do,” Longpine said. “I don’t know if they have much room to grow in terms of turnout, and these tactics are really aimed at getting low propensity voters to the polls.”

Moreover, Longpine said, the Republican candidates may run into problems if they focus on criticizing the size of the government stimulus plan at the same time they are trying to convince Kansas voters that they can help bring local jobs and stem unemployment in the area — messages that some voters may find at odds with one another.

“It’s all going to be about job creation, for both parties,” Longpine said. “That’s not something that the Republicans own. People don’t rally around the parties. They rally around the candidates. If we have an candidate who can demonstrate a path to local job creation, we can be competitive.”

The Republicans, though, sense that this could very well be the year that they retake the seat lost by Vince Snowbarger to Moore in 1998.

“We are together, and we are mobilizing,” Metsker said. “And we are working our tails off to see the victory.”

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