Most of those who watch politics focus on various national and state political contests, and that’s reasonable. Yet how many of us regularly interact with agents of the national or state governments, enforcing those state or national laws? The answer is not many.
For most Kansans, it is agents of one of our 105 county governments — health offi cials, sheriffs, home appraisers, medical practitioners, park custodians and more — that they’ll usually see carrying out those state and national mandates. And yet the political contests that decide who leads all those county agents receive almost no attention from political watchers at all.
Part of this is because Kansas, like the rest of the country, is quite urban, at least if you count where people actually live. For decades, the rural expanses of Kansas have emptied, with people moving to cities and their surrounding suburbs, increasing the focus on — and increasing the partisan competition over — city governments and municipal elections.
But all those cities and suburbs exist within county boundaries, and those county governments are the primary administrative arms of both the state and nation. And with only rare exceptions, those county governments also follow the same partisan election cycles as do Washington, D.C., and Topeka, meaning that the commissioners elected to run those governments are partisan too.
Yet county governments, despite their central role in so much of contemporary American life, often slip out of the focus of even professional politics-watchers. The result is often a dramatic degree of one-party dominance, and thus a lack of oversight or competition.
For example, that there are more registered Republicans than Democrats in Kansas isn’t a surprise, nor that the majority of those elected to state offices are Republican. Kansas’s Statehouse consists of 85 Republicans and 39 Democrats, a 68% GOP majority, and the Senate, with 29 Republicans and 11 Democrats, has a 72% GOP majority. Those numbers aren’t surprising.
But now consider the dominance of Republicans in county commission races in Kansas. Focusing solely on our 20 most populous counties (skipping over Johnson and Wyandotte, both of which have consolidated, non-partisan county structures), one finds a total of 71 elected commissioners, with 61 Republicans, and 10 Democrats (plus one Independent) — a whopping 86% GOP majority. And that’s only because a few counties such as Douglas, Riley, Sedgwick and Shawnee occasionally elect Democratic commissioners, sometimes several; beyond them, as you move west across the state, Republican control of our county governments is near total.
One reason for this is that county districts are often specifically drawn so that the scattered rural (and mostly Republican) population can outweigh the larger urban (and mostly Democratic) one. But also, involvement in country government in states with lots of unincorporated land, such as Kansas, tends to self-select for those deeply invested in issues of property taxes and development potential, concerns which tends to skew towards business-oriented conservatives.
The reverse happens occasionally in highly urbanized counties (the county commission of Jackson County, Missouri, for example, has long been a Democratic stronghold), but that’s unusual for county governments across the U.S., and especially in Kansas. Here, the rare Democrat elected to county government has to straddle an ideological fence, speaking like a Republican to landowners while still maintaining their social connection to urban Democrats, a rare skill.
So while Washington, D.C., and Topeka will continue to hold most political observers’ attention, don’t forget about our county commissioners, many of whom will be elected this November without any partisan challenge. The work they do is essential, and most Kansans seem OK with one party being responsible for nearly all of it.
Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.
