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Yep, pretty terrible. Now latest polls have given us a sobering reminder that this is still a tight race and Brownback could still eek out a victory against. Rep. Paul Davis (D. KS):When he was elected in 2010, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback began to slash core government services and privatize the rest. His austerity politics resulted in the state being downgraded by S&P in August 2014, and his privatization initiatives have also drawn criticism, causing one leading Republican to state, "I had hoped that it wouldn't be as extreme as it's been ... what we didn't know was that Sam would use this state as crash test dummies for his own fiscal experiments."Kids receiving child support payments from absent parents would be among Brownback's first "crash test dummies."
While Kansas partially outsourced the enforcement of child support to private corporations and law firms in 1997, the private players were only awarded around 20 percent of the contracts; the rest went to public state agencies. In March 2013, however, the Kansas Department of Children and Families (DCF) announced that all child support services would be outsourced, and a request for proposal was issued. Not limited to enforcement, the contracts would include services connected to court petitioning, locating parents, and establishing paternity, which had never been in private hands before.
"Collection is a function that can be carried out more efficiently and more cost-effectively by private companies," DCF secretary Phyllis Gilmore said at a press conference. Similar blanket statements, seldom backed by empirical evidence, are often echoed by privatization proponents, regardless of which public services they want to outsource. In this particular case, there is little evidence to support Gilmore's sound bite. A 2013 report on the privatization of child support services commissioned by the Mississippi Legislature, for example, concluded that "the significant additional cost of privatization would outweigh the potential additional benefits."
Child support is indispensible for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Kansans, mostly single women and children. Nationally child support "represents 40 percent of family income for poor families who receive it, and reduces the poverty rate for children in these families by nearly 25 percent," say experts.
The outsourcing of social services involving vulnerable population is backed by influencial groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has developed a raft of model bills to privatize state services and has had model bills to privatize child support services and foster care services since the late 1990s.
According to research group In the Public Interest, a comprehensive resource center on privatization and responsible contracting, "many children and adults rely on government-provided health and human services. The ability of these programs to deliver services efficiently and appropriately can be a matter of life and death. Numerous state and local governmental entities are finding that turning over these programs to private contractors not only fails to achieve projected cost savings but also decreases access to these important services, hurting many vulnerable families. In many cases, the service quality declines dramatically and many sick or at-risk people are left with substandard care." - Huffington Post, 10/19/14
It's certainly still possible unfortunately but Brownback is still clearly worried about voters punishing him over his tax cut experiment:If Brownback prevails, it will likely be thanks to the phenomenon my colleague Thomas Frank described in What’s the Matter with Kansas? Even as his policies wreak havoc on the state, Brownback is counting on cultural populism to propel him to victory, voters’ economic interests be damned.Take Brownback’s defense of his supply-side agenda. Last week, the governor assured CBN’s David Brody that his tax cuts really would start working soon, but he complained that pointy-headed liberal elites and the mainstream media are so down on his rock-ribbed state that they’re committed to pushing the narrative that his economic experiment has failed.
“I think they so desperately want what’s happening in this state to fail that they’re shopping for a factual setting to back that up because it’s working,” Brownback said. The governor went on to charge that people on the left “want this model to fail so bad that they can’t wait for it to and they just want to get me electorally before we get on through this and prove that this is working.”
Who are you going to believe — your good and godly governor, or those egghead elitists sneering down at Kansas hayseeds?
Meanwhile, while the social issues that conservative Kansas Republicans have typically seized upon to win over downscale voters haven’t been central to the race, Brownback isn’t letting voters forget that he’s a socially conservative scold. His campaign pounced on a recent report that 16 years ago, Davis was present at a strip club where he received a lap dance. The Kansas GOP responded to the report by asking whether Davis is “fit to govern.” And Brownback, who as a U.S. senator co-sponsored a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, has also reinserted himself into the national marriage equality debate. When the Supreme Court recently let stand a series of lower court rulings in favor of marriage equality, Brownback vowed to continue defending Kansas’ anti-marriage amendment, no matter what the cultural and legal elite might think. While Davis boasts a pro-LGBT state House record and has been endorsed by Equality Kansas, he has skirted the marriage equality issue during his campaign. - Salon, 10/16/14
But there are a few fators and certain constituency that could decide this race:Residents visiting the Kansas Department of Revenue website for personal tax information will find links to forms, online payments and refund programs. They will also find a link to a document calling Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax policy a shot of adrenaline into the state’s economy.The link, which appears at the top of the department’s page for personal tax information, is titled “The Brownback Pro-Growth Plan.” Clicking it opens up a document called “Three Years of Pro-Growth Tax Reform: A Shot of Adrenaline into the Kansas Economy.”
The two-page unsigned and undated document contains numerous statistics about the state’s tax rates and tax deductions.
“Since January 2011, Gov. Sam Brownback and the Kansas Legislature have been teaming up to make the state’s code fairer, flatter, and simpler for families and small businesses. This approach broadens the base and lowers tax rates for the benefit of the maximum number of Kansans,” the document says. “The result has been three years of historic and innovative tax relief — focused on providing a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.”
Department of Revenue spokesperson Jeannine Koranda said the document is more than a year old and the data in it doesn’t reflect any changes made to the tax code during the 2013 legislative session. - The Topeka Capitol-Journal, 10/17/14
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And Davis recently scored a major newspaper endorsement:As governor, Brownback has promoted a “real, life experiment,” implementing just about every idea from the conservative agenda. He rejected the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, drastically cut taxes, state programs, and eliminated some 2,000 state jobs. Critics called it “radical Republicanism.” The New Republic said the governor “tried to create a conservative utopia. He created a conservative hell instead.”None of this made Brownback popular. Throughout the summer he trailed Democrat Paul Davis (who was recently endorsed by many Republican elected officials holding city and state offices).
The race has now tightened, it’s essentially a tie in the polls.
The other high profile race is in the Senate. Senator Roberts was cruising to an easy reelection until September when the Democrat suddenly dropped out of the race in favor of independent Greg Orman. That changed everything. As the Kansas City Star noted in its endorsement editorial, “Orman’s pledge to be an independent voice for Kansans and the country is refreshing. … Kansans must send to Washington an elected official who’s ready to solve problems, not allow them to fester.”
Roberts was one of eight senators who tried to block the Violence Against Women Act from even getting a vote.
The Senate race, too, is close. The average of all polls collected by Real Clear Politics shows both candidates with 42.5 percent support. Tied.
If this election is the rise of independents, what about the role of the ultimate independents, American Indians? It’s a small population, a little more than one percent of the state’s population. There are four reservations, an urban population, and a community of students at Haskell. Last week, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation held a registration drive that included a taco dinner to door prizes at a powwow.
In a state as close as Kansas that small community could provide a potent answer to “what’s with Kansas?” - Indian Country Today Media Network, 10/17/14
In contrast to the unproven theories and magical thinking promoted by Brownback and his lieutenant governor, Jeff Colyer, Davis and running mate Jill Docking propose a pragmatic course that builds upon the assets Kansans have always valued. They are the right team.Lets kick some GOP ass in Kansas. Click here to get involved and donate to Davis, Greg Orman (I. KS) and Jean Schodorf's (D. KS) campaigns:Davis would be a strong candidate even if Brownback had not inflicted such damage. A lawyer who specializes in estate planning, Davis was elected to the Kansas House from Lawrence in 2003. His colleagues chose him as minority leader in 2008, and he is respected as someone who can work with members of the other party and craft bipartisan solutions.
Davis understands Kansas and its issues very well. And that’s good because Brownback and the radical conservatives who control the Legislature have created huge problems.
Two years in a row they sharply cut income taxes for upper-bracket earners and exempted the owners of certain types of businesses from paying any income taxes whatsoever. - The Kansas City Star, 10/18/14
