After a few [...]]]> On Monday, Tucker Carlson reviewed the state of the Democrat party in light of the several 2020 candidates who recently quit the race. He judged Tom Steyer as a poor dancer, Mayor Pete to be rather robotic and identity politics ending up as a big loser for the party as a whole.

After a few minutes he was joined by Victor Davis Hanson who thought this is “the worst field we’ve seen since Walter Mondale lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan.”

The candidates do seem like the B-team of the D-party, but who else is there? When the leadership of the Democrat party is considered among the serving governors, senators and members of Congress, nobody appealing springs to mind. Over recent years, the whole party seems to have lost track of the major purpose in governing — namely to lead with policies that will help the American people.

Instead the Democrats support bad ideas like open borders, including crazy unaffordable freebies for foreign lawbreakers.

Who can forget the moment in last October’s Democrat debate in which all candidates agreed to support taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens?

When the debate moderator asked Democrat candidates to “Raise your hand if your government plan would provide [medical] coverage for undocumented immigrants,” all responded affirmatively.

How would that policy benefit Americans, many of whom find their own medical coverage to be inadequate? Healthcare polls consistently as a top concern — particularly its high cost — but citizens show no desire to pay for illegal aliens’ medical coverage.

Democrats are united that they want to beat Donald Trump and gain power, but an affirmative message to voters is lacking. For example, over the last two years, House Democrats managed only to impeach the president, with no legislation to advance the well-being of citizens.

Hanson agrees the Democrats have lost track of the big political picture — to win elections, a party has to offer something to voters beyond wokeness and diversity.

Audio version:

TUCKER CARLSON:  So over the next few weeks, all the attention will of course be on Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and maybe Michael Bloomberg. So we want to pause and remember the candidates we lost over the weekend — not permanently, they’re just not in the race.

For all of them, their failure to win the nomination is reason for all of us to feel a little better about ourselves. We’re not as dumb as we thought we were. Tom Steyer disproved that simply because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you’re an oligarch. Steyer spent more than $100 million dollars of his own money. And in the end, did an embarrassing dance on stage and then got nothing.

His sad presidential run ought to be encouraging to every person in America, particularly the slower among us. If that guy can make a billion dollars, you can, too.

Pete Buttigieg’s defeat proves that while Americans may be willing to vote for socialists or plutocrats or adulterers, they are pretty open minded actually. They still want their Presidents to be human. Creepy robots with biographies crafted in a Silicon Valley lab are going to have to wait till the 22nd Century to have their chance. Here’s Buttigieg minutes ago backing Biden.

PETE BUTTIGIEG:  It is an honor to be here with Vice President Biden. You know, when I ran for President, we made it clear that the whole idea was about rallying the country together to defeat Donald Trump and to win the era for the values that we share and that was always a goal that was much bigger than me becoming President.

And it is in the name of that very same goal, that I’m delighted to endorse and support Joe Biden for President.

CARLSON:  I think Barack Obama gave that exact same speech, but I don’t have Google in front of me, but you can check it.

And of course, Amy Klobuchar dropped out as well. Her defeat is good news for anyone who cares about proper comb hygiene. The Democratic race may be smaller tonight, but it’s not more amicable. Why? Because Elizabeth Warren is still running and now she is openly campaigning for a divisive brokered convention next July, which would be really like Christmas day for the rest of us.

Warren’s only reason for staying in the race right now is to sabotage Bernie Sanders, but many Democrats are happy to play along.

The weird neuroses anxieties and just strangers in the Democratic coalition are coming to the surface. It’s like pulling up a rock and all these things crawl away or try to.

We’re learning a lot about what they really care about. So over the weekend, the Boston Globe ran a piece arguing — and this is for real — that it was “disrespectful” for Bernie Sanders to try and win the Massachusetts primary since it would be a “major humiliation” for Elizabeth Warren.

That’s really identity politics taken to its endpoint. It’s the state of the Democratic race right now. If you’re too extreme for the donor class, then it’s sexist to try and win an election.

Victor Davis Hanson, one of the wisest people we know, is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution out in California. He joins us tonight. Professor, you look on at this and what do you make of it?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:  Well, this latest dropout group of Klobuchar and Buttigieg is same thing as the first round of dropouts with Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, Julian Castro and how to sum it all up, Tucker, is after a year of all of this wokeness and diversity and white privilege, what do we end up with?

We ended up with three old white guys that are 77 and 78, with a Marxist — Neo-Marxist — as the presumptive leader, and all of them have a history of insensitive remarks about women or things they’ve written.

So it’s a complete antithesis of the whole premise of the Democratic Party and we don’t have anybody who is a charismatic character other than Bernie Sanders, and his criticisms are sometimes legitimate of American society, but his bromides are frightening.

So they are in a real — and then they’ve got this outside billionaire who is coming into save everybody from Bernie Sanders, on the premise that Biden was fading, but Biden is not quite dead yet — his candidacy, I mean that metaphorically — and now Bloomberg is going to be blamed for you know, dividing the moderate vote and handing the nomination to Sanders.

And then this was supposed to be the transparent new reformist party and they’re going to go back to an old 1950s, 1940s brokered convention with guys and cigars in the back room, horse-trading jobs and employment and entitlements to get delegates. It’s completely — the reality is completely opposite to the rhetoric of the whole progressive movement.

CARLSON:  So they clearly don’t care about the things they say they care about. So if you could just sum up crisply what they do care about, what do you think that is?

HANSON:  What they do care about is they want to control the House and they want to win back the Senate, and they want Supreme Court picks because they’re interested in power. They’re not interested necessarily in diversity or people of color being the new face of the Democratic Party or any of that.

They’re interested in power, and they think they can’t get it with Bernie Sanders, and they’re absolutely right. He’ll be a disaster. This is the worst field we’ve seen since Walter Mondale lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, and if they go the Bernie route, they’re going to lose big and they’re desperate and they’re down to the 11th hour, and the only candidates they have that they think they can save the House and maybe win back to Senate are Bloomberg and Biden and they’re pathetic candidates, and it’s kind of a tragedy to watch this thing unfold.

CARLSON:  You’re right.

HANSON:  It really is.

CARLSON:  Oh, but that there’s been — there’s pleasure in it too, Professor, I would say.

HANSON:  But it’s about power, and they are losing that and they know it.

CARLSON:  Exactly. It’s about power. Great to see you tonight. Thank you so much for that, as always.

The New York Times recently was put in the crosshairs by a leaked memo showing the paper intended to shift its fake [...]]]> The mainstream media and its reporters may think they are the champions of truth, justice and the liberal way, but recent polling shows the public thinks scribblers should be subject to fair criticism.

The New York Times recently was put in the crosshairs by a leaked memo showing the paper intended to shift its fake news Trump reporting from Russia to Racism.

Perhaps reporters should stick to their original job of recounting facts rather than trying to shape public opinion, particularly when public distrust of the media remains at a record high.

61% Welcome Public Scrutiny of Big League Reporters, Rasmussen Reports, August 28, 2019

The New York Times and others are complaining that allies of President Trump are targeting hostile reporters by exposing controversial social media postings from their past. But most voters consider these reporters fair game for public criticism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 61% of Likely U.S. Voters think reporters at major news organizations like CNN, Fox News and the New York Times are public figures who deserve the same level of scrutiny as the people they cover. Just 19% disagree, although just as many (20%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Just over half (51%) say it is appropriate for elected officials to criticize specific reporters and news organizations. Thirty-nine percent (39%), however, view such criticism as a threat to freedom of the press. This compares to 48% and 45% respectively in February 2017 after Trump began criticizing specific news organizations that were targeting him. Ten percent (10%) remain undecided.

Rasmussen Reports bases its surveys on likely voters — those who have a history of voting in recent elections — as opposed to registered voters in general, many of whom historically don’t go to the polls.

A plurality (47%) of voters continues to believe that ideologically speaking the average reporter is more liberal than they are. Just 19% think that reporter is more conservative than they are, while 22% consider them ideologically about the same. Thirteen percent (13%) are not sure. This is consistent with findings in surveys for the past several years. (Continues)

Orange County used to be a Republican stronghold, even [...]]]> Monday’s New York Times has a front-page story that illustrates a basic political principle and how it manifests on the local level: big diverse immigration creates more Democrat voters even in formerly conservative bastions, which is why the party supports open borders above all other values.

Orange County used to be a Republican stronghold, even as the state racked up the largest percentage of foreign born in America (27 percent). But the recent election showed that no region is safe from the Democrat diversity onslaught, fueled by excessive immigration.

As noted by Pew pollsters, hispanic foreigners tend to prefer big government and therefore vote Democrat: they come for America’s economic opportunity provided by free markets but vote to recreate the crapistans they came from. Go figure.

If Republicans in Congress had a brain, they would have voted to reduce legal immigration (in the bill offered by Senators Cotton and Perdue) and worked for restrictionist legislation like E-verify. Instead, Republican leadership pursued their own elite agenda of tax reform and such, about which regular voters have little interest. So many GOP representatives were shown the door in November, particularly in areas which immigration has transformed.

The Times story was reprinted in newsstandhub.com, linked below:

In Orange County, a Republican Fortress Turns Democratic, New York Times, December 31, 2018

WESTMINSTER, Calif. — To appreciate the vast cultural and political upheaval across Orange County over the last 40 years, look no further than Bolsa Avenue. The auto body shop, the tax preparer, a church, a food market, countless restaurants — all are marked by signs written in Vietnamese.

Or head seven miles west to Santa Ana, where Vietnamese makes way for Spanish along Calle Cuatro, a bustling enclave of stores and sidewalk stands serving an overwhelming Latino clientele.

The Democratic capture of four Republican-held congressional seats in Orange County in November — more than half the seven congressional seats Democrats won from Republicans in California — toppled what had long been a fortress of conservative Republicanism. The sweep stunned party leaders, among them Paul D. Ryan, the outgoing House speaker. Even Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor-elect of California, won the county where Richard M. Nixon was born.

But the results reflected what has been a nearly 40-year rise in the number of immigrants, nonwhite residents and college graduates that has transformed this iconic American suburb into a Democratic outpost, highlighted in a Times analysis of demographic data going back to 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president.

The ideological shift signaled by the most recent election results, on the heels of Hillary Clinton beating Donald J. Trump here in 2016, is viewed by leaders in both parties as a warning sign for national Republicans, as suburban communities like this one loom as central battle grounds in the 2020 elections and beyond.

Those new swing suburban counties were one of the central factors behind the 40-seat Democratic gain in the House in November. Many of them have been changed by an increase in educated and affluent voters who have been pushed toward the Democratic column by some of Mr. Trump’s policies. That partly accounts for what is happening here in Orange County, but the political shifts can also be explained by the rapidly changing cultural, political and economic face of the region and are on display in places like Bolsa Avenue, which is known as Little Saigon.

“There are so many of us here and that is what is contributing to these changes,” said Tracy La, 23, who is Vietnamese. Ms. La helped organize a rally in Westminster in mid-December to protest an attempt by the Trump administration to deport thousands of Vietnam War refugees. It drew hundreds of people to the Asian Garden Mall, one of the largest and oldest Vietnamese-operated malls in the nation.

“This is where the future is heading,” said Mark Baldassare, the president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “I don’t see anything that took place in these elections or the demographic trends that are ongoing, to make me think this is a one-time incident.” (Continues)

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Adams has a psychologist-marketer point of view, [...]]]> Author and Dilbert creator Scott Adams has a new book being published about the persuasive tactics of candidate Donald Trump, titled “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” He appeared on Fox News to discuss the book on Tuesday:

Adams has a psychologist-marketer point of view, and he recognizes candidate Trump’s brilliance in not talking in terms of wonky policies, but visually and concretely when possible. As a builder, Trump is particularly adept at pitching “the wall” to block illegal immigration.

As Adams described, “A lot of people don’t know that his pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s all about thinking your way into a better future, kind of the mind leading reality, and you see that in what the president does. He’s always making us think past the sale: we’re not thinking should we build a wall, we’re looking at eight prototypes. We’re thinking, well which one do we pick. He’s continually making us think about the future and imagine it visually.”

Furthermore, the candidate knew how to connect with his audience, observing, “A hypnotist would call it pacing and leading. First you match your audience in whatever ways: it could be physically, it could be the way they speak, and he speaks in a simple, relatable way that you can quote, you can remember it, you could repeat the phrase.”

Candidate Trump also matched his patriotic audience by connecting with them on the immigration issue, understanding its importance immediately. Americans who believed immigration should legal, controlled and reduced were impressed. While many Washington swampers treat immigration enforcement as a borderline racist issue, Trump understood the centrality of law and sovereignty.

In charge of fixing the voter [...]]]> Preventing voter fraud by dead people and illegal aliens in 2018 and beyond is an important project to fight against anti-sovereignty interests. We can be sure that Democrats will turn out every voter they can recruit from cemeteries and foreigner hiring halls to defeat efforts to enforce immigration law.

In charge of fixing the voter mess is the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was set up to examine how many votes are ineligible and what might be done to make elections more honest.

The pushback by some states to hand over public records to the commission has been intense. Democrats have apparently decided on privacy concerns and the claim that no voter fraud has been proven as talking points against the reform measure. Virginia’s D-Governor Terry McAuliffe refused to co-operate, saying, “This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November.”

Voter fraud does happen: the question is how common it is. Last November, Hans Von Spakovsky (co-author of Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk) opined in a Breitbart interview that “We know for a fact, from all kinds of different reports we’ve had and cases, that there are non-citizens registered and voting all over the country.” On June 19, the Washington Times headlined, Study supports Trump: 5.7 million noncitizens may have cast illegal votes.

The vice-chair of the commission, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach reflected on the scope of the problem in his remarks at the opening session on Wednesday:

KRIS KOBACH: I’ve often thought that at the very foundation of our republic are really two bedrock things — the American Constitution and the faith and reality that our elections are conducted fairly. If you take away either of those two things I believe that our republic cannot stand for long.

So for a long time there’s been lingering doubt among many Americans about the integrity and fairness of elections, and it’s not a new issue at all. If you look at the polling data, it goes back decades. Public opinion has been consistent on this, in that there is a substantial number of people who wonder if our elections are fair. A 2014 survey showed that only 40% of voters thought elections were fair to the voters which indicates that 60% either did not think so or were undecided.

We owe it to the American people if you take a hard dispassionate look at the subject. . . .

For example in my state of Kansas we’re engaged in litigation right now defending our proof of citizenship requirements at the time of registration, and we engaged in extensive fact-finding for the federal courts involved and have discovered 128 specific cases of non-citizens who either registered to vote or attempted to register to vote. . . .

You can watch a longer video (1 hour 13 minutes) on C-SPAN where the members of the commission discuss ideas of what they would like to investigate.

The long-standing support for voter IDs shown in polling may reflect the public’s suspicion about voting integrity as well as a basic desire for fairness:

Vice-Chair Kobach wrote on Wednesday about how the commission is moving along through the obstacles placed in front of it.

Kobach: A Victory for Public Information, Breitbart.com, by Kris W. Kobach, July 19, 2017

On Tuesday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida denied temporary restraining orders (TROs) sought by the ACLU, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and others. The plaintiffs were attempting to prevent the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, of which I am Vice-Chair, from having its first meeting on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Fortunately, the federal judges rejected the TRO requests. In a well-reasoned, 24-page opinion, the District of Columbia federal judge explained why the plaintiffs’ claims that the meeting would violate federal law were unlikely to prevail.

On Wednesday, the Commission met and launched its fact-finding mission. President Trump himself addressed the Commission members, highlighting the importance of the Commission’s work.

The Commission is a bipartisan body dedicated to collecting factual information and providing advice to the president about the integrity of the voting process and reporting that information to the American people. But the ACLU and the Lawyers’ Committee don’t want that information-gathering to begin. They, along with groups like Common Cause and the NAACP, have filed a total of seven lawsuits to thwart the Commission’s work.

The ACLU and allied groups on the Left have long used the tactic of litigation to achieve policies that they could not accomplish through the legislative process. But with this latest onslaught of lawsuits they have taken their litigation approach to a whole new level – they are attempting to prevent the president from receiving advice and prevent the American public from gaining information. They are literally trying to stop the Commission from doing its work.

What information are they so determined to keep under wraps?  Facts that show the extent of voter fraud in this country. Among the facts presented at the first meeting was a list of 938 criminal convictions for election crimes, almost all after the year 2000. So much for the claim that voter fraud doesn’t exist.

This tactic of attempting to stop a commission through litigation is unusual. There were 28 presidential advisory commissions established under President Obama and 24 presidential advisory commissions under Bush. None were besieged by a flurry of lawsuits like this. And only a very small number faced any litigation at all.

For example, in 2013 President Obama formed the Presidential Commission on Election Administration to study lines at polling places and other issues. There were no lawsuits from conservative groups to stop the commission from doing its work. Indeed, I was a witness who provided evidence to that commission about how we kept wait times to a minimum in Kansas.

Although a few States like Kansas have done extensive research on voter fraud, most States have not. Never before has there been a nationwide effort to analyze voter fraud and other threats to election integrity. And the ACLU and the Lawyers’ Committee wants to do everything they can to make sure that no such analysis occurs.

(continues)

Graham’s establishment views make him a popular guest for the [...]]]> Senator Lindsey Graham is a regular perpetual motion machine for amnesty. He typifies the Republican Inc. view that maximum outreach is required for hispanic votes, and that includes mega-amnesty aka work permits for millions of foreign lawbreakers to compete with citizens for scarce jobs.

Graham’s establishment views make him a popular guest for the mainstream liberal media, and his Sunday CNN appearance inspired a follow-up by National Journal:

Graham: GOP must tackle immigration to win White House, The Hill, December 28, 2014

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is warning the Republican Party that its chances of winning the White House in 2016 will be “almost nonexistent” if it does not at least take a step toward immigration reform.

Graham, who has floated a presidential run himself, was a supporter of the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate last year.

“If we don’t at least make a down payment on solving the problem and rationally dealing with the 11 million [people in the country illegally], if we become the party of self-deportation in 2015 and 2016, then the chance of winning the White House I think is almost nonexistent,” Graham said on CNN’s “State of the Union” in an interview posted Sunday. . .

Would it be too much to ask our political leaders to occasionally consider in drafting legislation the basics of human psychology, particularly that rewarding a behavior encourages more of same? Also decreasing an unwanted behavior requires punishment or at least negative reinforcement of some sort.

Meanwhile, and less noticed, is how Democrats are similarly fretting about their loss of white working class voters. Republicans are worrying about the opinion of hispanics who may or may not be legal residents while Democrats have lost actual Americans, working people who were once the backbone of the Democrat party.

Perhaps Republicans should pay more attention to blue-collar working people who have been crushed by industry outsourcing employment and excessive immigration to fill jobs that cannot be sent abroad. It also should count for something that traditional Americans tend to prefer more freedom and less government, while hispanics as a culture favor big government, as shown in the accompanying Pew graph.

Charlie Cook described the Democrats’ loss of white voters earlier this month:

Democrats Paved the Way for Their Own Decline, National Journal, December 1, 2014

They have subordinated their traditional focus on helping working-class Americans move up the economic ladder in favor of other priorities.

Much has been said about the long-term demographic challenges facing the Republican Party. Given how dismally Republicans fare with African-American voters—Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans garnered only 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively, in 2012, and this year congressional Republicans got 10 percent—it matters how the GOP does with other minority voters.

In 2012, Romney picked up 27 percent and congressional Republicans received 30 percent of the Latino vote. This year, House Republicans got 36 percent. This doesn’t matter that much in the House, because of natural residential patterns and, to a lesser extent, gerrymandering. But it is a big deal in presidential matters and in some Senate election years more than others (the Latino vote will be much more critical in the 2016 class of Senate seats than it was in the 2014 grouping).

But considerably less is being said about a parallel problem that Democrats are facing. Although the national red-blue maps of the partisan makeup of the House, the governorships, and, somewhat less so, the Senate are misleading in that they equate population with land area, the maps do illustrate where Democrats are strong and where they are not (interesting factoid: Only 14 percent of the land area in the U.S. is represented by a Democrat in the House). Increasingly, Democratic strength is concentrated primarily in urban areas and college towns, among minorities, and in narrow bands along the West Coast (but only the first 50-100 miles from the beaches) and the East Coast (but only from New York City northward). The South and the Border South, as well as small-town and rural America, are rapidly becoming no-fly zones for Democrats. Few Democrats represent small-town and rural areas, and the party is find it increasingly difficult to attract noncollege-educated white voters.

This challenge for Democrats can be sliced and diced a number of ways: by race, by where people live, and—very acutely—by combining race with socioeconomic status. A Nov. 25 report by the Gallup Organization underscored Democrats’ problems with noncollege-educated white voters. According to Gallup Editor Frank Newport, “President Barack Obama’s job-approval rating among white noncollege graduates is at 27 percent so far in 2014, 14 percentage points lower than among white college graduates. This is the largest yearly gap between these two groups since Obama took office. These data underscore the magnitude of the Democratic Party’s problem with working-class whites, among whom Obama lost in the 2012 presidential election, and among whom Democratic House candidates lost in the 2014 U.S. House voting by 30 points.”

There are many reasons for this decline in support for Democrats among certain groups. But an argument can be made that it is because Democrats have subordinated their traditional focus on helping lower- and working-class Americans move up the economic ladder in favor of other noble priorities, such as health care, the environment, and civil rights. Whether these were the right or wrong priorities is totally subjective, but they have come at a cost. Sen. Chuck Schumer recently committed the classic case of a political gaffe, once defined by Michael Kinsley as “when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” The Democratic Left went crazy when Schumer suggested that the early focus on health care reform in 2009 and 2010, when he says Democrats should have been concentrating on economic growth and job creation, had cost them greatly (something that I have written about for over five years).

Governing is about making choices and facing consequences. Implicitly, to focus on certain things is to de-emphasize other things. The modern Democratic Party was effectively born during President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, reacting and dealing with the Great Depression. While books have been filled with the multitude of things that Roosevelt and his New Dealers did, if you boiled it down to its essence, it was helping people get back on their feet after the great stock-market crash of 1929 and the deep depression that resulted. In 2008, we faced the Great Recession, and like other financial meltdowns, it was deep and painful. At the tail end of the George W. Bush administration and in the early Obama years, financial markets were stabilized (the overwhelming majority of the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds have been repaid, with many of the investments yielding profits for Uncle Sam), and the Obama administration should be applauded for rescuing the automobile industry. But while those actions can be legitimately seen as a good start, we then saw a grand pivot to the environment and health care, with grave consequences for the party. At another time and in different fashion, both are important priorities, but the focus on these issues has effectively decimated the Democratic Party in specific areas and among specific voter blocs. The evidence is the difference in the partisan makeup of the Congress that will be sworn in next month, compared with the one from eight years ago.

The present Secretary is no ordinary political suit; he is a one-man brain room [...]]]> With the epic battle for the Senate taking up media space, one might have missed a less publicized victory for the position of Kansas Secretary of State even though liberals brandished their long knives against the incumbent Republican, Kris Kobach (pictured).

The present Secretary is no ordinary political suit; he is a one-man brain room for authoring immigration enforcement legislation and policy strategies like voter ID to combat voter fraud.

The successful pursuit of those two issues has earned Kobach uber-enmity from the far left, since lefties like open borders and frequent voting by ineligible persons. Liberals additionally claim that voter fraud is a non-existent problem (wrong) and therefore should not be prevented.

After being elected Kansas Secretary of State in 2010, he remarked in an anti-Democrat two-fer, “I am going to be using my spare time trying to stop illegal immigration instead of playing golf.”

Because of his concerns about the threat to national sovereignty, Kobach has been attacked by the left with their sharpest poison pens. The New Republic called him “America’s Worst Republican” in September, while the Daily Kos dubbed him merely the “worst secretary of state in the nation”. In 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote, “When Mr. Kobach Comes to Town: Nativist Laws and the Communities They Damage”.

These people really hate law and borders!

Nevertheless, Kobach prevailed, with 59 percent of the vote versus his opponent’s 41.

Kris Kobach fends off challenger Jean Schodorf to win secretary of state race, Wichita Eagle, November 5, 2014

Secretary of State Kris Kobach fended off a tough challenge from Wichita Democrat Jean Schodorf on Tuesday night in a race that served as a referendum on the state’s proof-of-citizenship voting requirement.

With most of the state’s precincts reporting, Kobach held a comfortable lead over Schodorf.

“We’re going to continue to have the toughest security laws in the country to make sure our elections are fair,” Kobach said in his victory speech at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Topeka. “Because you know, at the end of the day if any of these races are close, you’re going to want to know, you’re going to want to have the confidence that every single vote was cast by a legitimate voter. And he we have the confidence in Kansas.”

Kobach, who was joined by his daughters, Lillian and Reagan, thanked his volunteers for donating their time and shoe leather to knock on doors in the tough campaign.

“It’s very satisfying,” Kobach said afterward. “My opponent had some pretty harsh words for me, and in a race like this, it’s emotionally taxing and tiring. And it’s good when you come out on top.”

Schodorf, who watched the results privately, had not shown up at the Democratic Party watch party at Loft 150 over the River City Brewing Co. in Old Town before supporters began trickling out at about 9:45 p.m. She expected a long night, said her political and field representative, Marcus Williamson.

“We still have a lot of precincts that haven’t been officially reported,” he said. “We’re going to be watching those throughout the night.”

Kobach carried Sedgwick County – Schodorf’s home county – with 54 percent of the vote, according to final unofficial results.

In the coming legislative session, Kobach plans to push for prosecutorial power for the secretary of state’s office to enable him to prosecute suspected cases of voter fraud.

A former state Republican chairman and a prominent attorney, he was criticized for requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, a policy that had left more than 21,000 prospective voters in suspended status ahead of Election Day.

Kobach has vigorously defended the policy, arguing that every time a noncitizen votes, it robs citizens of their votes. He also says that those on the suspended list can be removed from it as long as they provide the necessary documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, to their county election office.

“There’s not a single of one of those people that can’t register to vote. The fallacy that the Democratic Party is putting out there is that there’s any barrier,” Kobach said last week.

Schodorf voted for the policy as a member of the Kansas Senate, where she served as a Republican before losing her state Senate primary in 2012, but has criticized Kobach’s implementation and promised to make reducing the number of voters on the suspension list her top priority if elected.

“I want to make it as easy as I can for citizens to vote,” Schodorf said at a forum for black and Latino voters in Wichita last month. “I have plans so that (Kansas) will be number one (in the country) for voter turnout.”

Kobach’s impartiality as the state’s chief election officer has sometimes been questioned. His political action committee, the Prairie Fire PAC, sent out mailers attacking moderate Republicans ahead of the primary, and his controversial decision to keep Democrat Chad Taylor on the ballot for U.S. Senate despite his submission of a withdrawal letter was seen by some observers as an attempt to help U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, who is in a tight race against independent Greg Orman.

Kobach says his PAC spends money in support of candidates who support secure elections and has continued to defend his handling of the Taylor matter even after the Kansas Supreme Court ordered that his name be removed in a ruling that chastised Kobach for overstepping his bounds as secretary of state.

Russell Fox, a political scientist at Friends University, called Kobach a political lightning rod “for people to say, ‘Yeah, it’s this particular kind of conservatism, it’s this particular type of extremism, it’s this particular type of uncompromising purity that is ruining the party.’ ”

However, Kobach has led Schodorf in most polls – albeit by a narrow margin – and Fox expected him to keep his position even if Gov. Sam Brownback and Roberts lose their races. He said that many Republican voters who go for Orman or Democrat Paul Davis in the governor’s race will continue to check Republican boxes further down on the ticket.

“If there’s anyone in this state who should have this biggest target on his back and should be able to be beaten by his own party’s abandonment, you’d think it would be Kobach, and yet it’s not,” said Chapman Rackaway, a professor of political science at Fort Hays State University.

“Now some of that may simply be that the profiles of the other races, the high attention that’s been paid to the governor’s and Senate races, has pushed the secretary of state down in people’s minds,” Rackaway said.