Democrats have successfully pulled off this kind of primary gambit before, most memorably in Missouri in 2012, when Senator Claire McCaskill ran ads aimed at lifting the conservative Todd Akin in the primary before she defeated him that November (with help from an outrageous Akin comment about abortion that summer). And on the Republican side, Senator John Cornyn ran ads apparently designed to help a Democratic state legislator defeat the Air Force veteran M. J. Hegar in the party primary; the intervention didn’t work, as Cornyn is now facing Hegar.
What worries Democrats this time, however, is that the 54-year-old Kobach is no Akin, a relatively generic religious conservative who seemed destined, at the age of 67, for a seat on the Senate’s back bench. “He is way, way out there,” Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on immigration, told me. “I don’t think there’d be anyone to the right of him in the Senate.”
Others I spoke with said plainly that Kobach is a racist. “He is today’s incarnation of David Duke,” Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told me.
The assumption is that the ambitious, Harvard- and Yale-educated Kobach would be more than another Republican vote—he’d undoubtedly try to use his perch to enact national versions of the hard-line laws he wrote at the state level. “He knows how to pull the levers of power in terms of making policy,” Noorani said. “Kris Kobach is not just some loose cannon,” he added. “He would not just be sending out press releases.”
Castro, noting Kobach’s elite education and his easygoing manner in television appearances, said he “represents a kind of intellectualized racism.” “He’s a tactician and a strategist when it comes to writing bigotry into the law and giving it a nicer name,” Castro said. “So whereas you may have other people who are generally bigoted, he applies his racism strategically into the law.”
A spokesperson for Kobach’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
In 2012, McCaskill’s boasting about her efforts to pick her Republican opponent made the maneuver seem edgy—not quite a dirty trick but a perfectly legal bit of political gamesmanship. But Trump’s election four years later, after some Democrats gleefully cheered his victory in the GOP primary, was a searing lesson to be careful what you wish for. “I think politics has changed,” Noorani said. “Strategies like this could end up too cute by half.”
In Kansas, advocates like Sharry see an opportunity to end Kobach’s political career, to do to him what voters in Iowa and Alabama did in rejecting the immigration foes Steve King and Jeff Sessions, respectively, over the past couple of months. And if that defeat comes in a Republican primary and not to the benefit of a Democrat in November, so be it. “We want Kobach out of politics,” Sharry told me. “We want him discredited and disgraced for all that he’s done to hurt millions of people over the years of his political career.”
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is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.
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