A bitter and sometimes ugly feud among Johnson County Republicans combined with a string of widely covered and controversial incidents has left some formerly active GOP members troubled and disengaged as the August primary approaches.
Though county GOP chair Maria Holiday characterizes the differences in the party as “a good thing” and predicts a good year for fundraising, other local Republicans — including former leaders and candidates — are not so sure.
They point to the negative national attention the party received when attendees at a fundraising dinner venue kicked and punched an effigy of President Joe Biden in March and the controversy over Sheriff Calvin Hayden’s claims to have had a search warrant for his election crimes investigation. (He later admitted the paperwork was not signed by a judge, and that the search warrant he claimed to have had wasn’t “valid.”)
On top of that, the party is still smarting from major losses in the 2023 local elections, and critics say vitriol from state chairman Mike Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner, hasn’t helped either.
“He has driven away donors,” Marisel Walston, former county party chair, said of Brown. “It’s distracting for someone electing Republicans. And I honestly don’t know how we’re going to do in this election because of that.”
“Rats in a jar” and “miserable souls”
Much of the friction appears to have its roots in state-level party politics dating back to 2022.
That was the year Kansas Republicans chose new state party leadership, and Johnson Countians were at the center of it.
Hayden nominated Brown — an Olathe contractor who ran unsuccessfully for Kansas Secretary of State — for state GOP chair, where he faced former national committeewoman Helen Van Etten.
Brown was opposed by outgoing chairman Mike Kuckelman, an Overland Park attorney, but ultimately prevailed, winning election to the position by two votes in one of the closest outcomes ever for the state chairmanship.
The feud between Brown and Kuckelman appeared deeply personal. It continued through various back-and-forths over how the party was run and also over a lawsuit involving GOP mailers from a 2020 race for a Kansas Senate seat in Shawnee between Democrat Lindsay Constance and Republican incumbent Mike Thompson.
At one point, Brown suggested that his wife was uncomfortable encountering Kuckelman at public events and asked Kuckelman to avoid them.
Scars from Brown’s election as state chair two years ago still haven’t healed, Walston said.
“Obviously there was a big divide in the party and since then, instead of trying to unify the party, (Brown) has just continued to be divisive,” she said.
Brown has called for unity since, but it hasn’t always landed well.
In an email from the Kansas GOP under the title “Conservatively Speaking,” Brown took some party members to task after nonpartisan elections for local offices last fall did not go well for Johnson County Republicans.
“It is time for all Kansas Republicans to call out any other Republican being divisive, intentionally trying to damage the [Kansas GOP] and deliberately trying to drive the party apart. We MUST all be pulling in the same direction or these people own a part of the losses this year and will own the impending losses,” Brown’s post read.
It continued with an apparent reference to Kuckelman.
“The old guard and their shenanigans are juvenile, destructive, and desperate. They are intentionally trying to foment Kansas GOP’s failure — because they simply accomplished nothing when they had control. If a former Chairman would have put 1/10 as much effort into actually doing his job back then, he would be a raging success today,” Brown’s post read.
“But sadly, he did not focus or succeed, and as such he is a bitter, childish failure. Our party has suffered from that failed leadership. And his behavior, and that of a few others, is exactly the same as Democrats. They are no different than rats in a jar, meaning when someone else is successful they spend all of their efforts trying to tear them down to their miserable self-loathing level vs. following a successful leader and being successful as a group.”
It ended with all caps.
“DO NOT LET THESE MISERABLE SOULS RUIN YOUR KANSAS REPUBLICAN PARTY.”
For this story, the Post reached out to Brown through the state party office and by email through his Facebook page and his place of business. He has not responded.
Maria Holiday, the county chair, responded by email to initial questions. She was contacted again to respond to specific quotes but had not answered at the time of publication.
“I’m not part of that group”
Last fall’s elections for local offices, including those for multiple school boards and city councils, as well as for the governing boards for Johnson County Community College and WaterOne, were widely acknowledged as disappointing for Republicans.
Although party identifiers do not appear on the ballots in those elections, both parties published lists of candidates who are registered as Republicans or Democrats and who agreed to be listed.
With the exception of city council races in Prairie Village, Democrats fared well in contests across the county for school boards, city councils and the WaterOne and JCCC boards.
By March, after the Biden effigy bashing made national news, some prominent Republicans had begun to call on social media for the resignations of Brown and Holiday.
“I won’t mince my words: It’s a mess,” Kuckelman said of the repercussions to the local party. “We have a chair that’s made a lot of mistakes. She will be replaced no doubt at the end of the year and then, there are a lot of us that are going to have to pick up the slack for lack of proper leadership within the official Johnson County party.”
The infighting at the top has since worked its way down the ladder to county politics, with some formerly active members saying they have separated themselves from the party.
County Commissioner Shirley Allenbrand, who is running for reelection this year, told an audience at a candidate forum hosted by the Johnson County Post that she changed her voter registration to Democratic after incidents of “adult bullying” aimed at her.
Allenbrand said after a recent community celebration, she was approached in her car with her grandchildren in the back by people who accused her of being a Nazi and stealing taxpayer money.
She was also taken aback by a critical political cartoon of her and current county commission Chairman Mike Kelly, she said.
Allenbrand, along with Kelly and Commissioners Janeé Hanzlick and Jeff Meyers, have been frequent subjects of unflattering political cartoons often shared on the county GOP’s Facebook page.
In one such drawing, she and Kelly are sitting atop a money bag.
County commission seats are elected without party identifiers.
Allenbrand said, “I was so appalled at that leadership and what they are saying and what they are doing. That’s not what I was raised on. That’s not the Republicans I know. I am not part of that group. That’s why I changed parties.”
A former city councilmember’s growing disaffection
Brandon Kenig, a former Shawnee City councilmember, said he became involved in Republican Party politics just out of college and did some work for U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran’s local office. But he hasn’t been involved since the 2016 election.
“I feel like my philosophy hasn’t changed, but I just don’t feel connected to the current Republican Party,” Kenig said.
The local party, he said, is what has changed.
“It’s just incredible to me that the people who were the mainstream conservatives not very long ago are now shut out,” he said.
Even as far back as 2015, Kenig said, he was dismayed as he campaigned door-to-door for Shawnee City Council only to be asked whether he stood with President Donald Trump.
“Which has nothing to do with local governance, you know? And I thought I was hopeful that maybe that was just an aberration and we would get beyond that. And it’s only worsened,” he said.
As a result, Kenig said he’s watched as formerly active people “have started to tune out and just wait out the current leadership.”
Walston has also been concerned by what she sees as a tendency to shut out disagreement and use labels to shut down criticism. In the past, Republicans considered themselves conservative or moderate, she said.
“Now you have conservative, moderate and ultra-conservatives. And the ultra-conservatives think that people like me — I consider myself a conservative — I’m a RINO [Republican in Name Only] because I don’t believe 100% of what they believe in,” she said.
The party of “free-thinkers”
Kenig and Jeff Vaught, another former Shawnee councilmember, say they have largely dropped out of party politics, although they still participate in different ways.
Kenig said he now works to keep partisanship out of nonpartisan races like city council and school board. Vaught said he changed to unaffiliated registration after he couldn’t shake the feeling of not being accepted because he was willing to vote for economic development incentives that he said have been successful.
“I think the conservative party evolved,” Vaught said. “It’s referred to as the MAGA party and it really is.”
Vaught voted for Trump in 2016, he said, but “within a year, two years of that I realized it was a mistake,” he said.
Now Vaught is an outspoken opponent of Trump, a stance that has created enemies out of former friends, he said.
Kuckelman also has found a new role outside of county organizing.
“I have completely distanced myself from the Johnson County Republican Party itself, but not from Republicans. I have distanced myself from the party leadership because they are doing more harm than good to Republicans,” he said.
“I have become involved in making certain that we see [Sheriff] Cal Hayden leaves office in August,” he said, citing Hayden’s so far fruitless election integrity investigation and his assertion that he had a search warrant ready to go for county election ballots when in fact it had not been signed by a judge and was not valid.
The disagreements are not necessarily damaging, county Chair Maria Holiday said in an emailed response.
“Republicans believe in individualism and are generally free thinkers,” she wrote. “The party does not and could not dictate to its members the way Democrats can. This is a good thing.”
She added that the party is not taking sides in the current primary races, which include intraparty contests for sheriff and district attorney.
Potential impact at the ballot box?
Some former party insiders have expressed concern about what the discord will do to donations and volunteering.
Walston said some people’s feelings about Brown ripple out toward local candidates and voters opt out. When people are upset, “they just don’t participate. They don’t come out to vote. They don’t help the party, they don’t help the candidates,” she said.
It’s still too early to know how this has played out for this year. But the most recent financial statements available seem to bear that out.
Disclosures on file with the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission for 2023 were the most currently available. They show a significant difference between the county party organizations. The next report isn’t due until July 29.
For last year, the Johnson County Republican Central Committee raised $75,745 in regular donations and $5,994 in-kind contributions, closing out the year with $3,076 on hand.
County Democrats, on the other hand, raised $240,692 and closed with $76,349 in cash on hand.
Holiday said this has been a good year so far for fundraising.
“The Johnson County Republican Party has exceeded prior leadership in fundraising while also reducing overhead,” she wrote. “We are excited to report we are on track for another great year and look forward to filing our finance report.”
Voter registration also showed Democrats have been gaining ground over time.
Republicans still have the most registered voters in Johnson County, with 188,349 to Democrats’ 148,332 by June of this year.
But since December of 2020, registration of Democrats has increased by 9,736 while Republicans have seen a decrease of 6,007 during the same period.
The number of people unaffiliated with either party increased during that time by 5,605.
“Cleansing” primaries this year
Kuckelman acknowledged that primaries can be damaging, but they are not always bad, he said. And he doesn’t envision disaffected Republicans ever joining forces with Democrats in Johnson County.
“Primaries can also be cleansing. It’s an opportunity for the Republican Party in this case to demonstrate to voters in Johnson County the party does cleanse itself of some of these bad actors. And that will happen,” he said.
This August’s contests include much-watched challenges to two long-serving stalwarts of the local GOP and the top law enforcement officials in the county: Sheriff Hayden and District Attorney Steve Howe.
“I think by far you will see the majority of Republicans coalesce around Republicans that they want to get elected. And those other people who engaged in actions like beating the effigy of Biden, those people will eventually get in line but they will not be in leadership anymore. Their time has come and gone,” Kuckelman said. (No party leaders were captured on video striking the Biden effigy.)
Holiday also said she did not doubt that Republicans would unite after the primaries: “Republicans in Johnson County always have more primaries as a result of people being passionate about our platform and the party not dictating who can run for what seat. We are a representative republic and primaries are a prime example of that. In the end, the Republican who was a second choice is always better than the Democrat.”
