Property taxes, housing and education were our readers’ most asked-about topics for candidates running in the Aug. 4 primary.
Later this month, the Johnson County Post will publish candidates’ answers to our five-item questionnaires, which we put together based on reader input.
Early in each election cycle, we ask readers to tell us what issues they want candidates to talk about ahead of Election Day. It’s our way of getting a pulse of what truly matters to readers, not what we think will drive click-baity coverage.
This is part of the Post’s long-standing commitment to a “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering campaigns, a philosophy of local election coverage used by media outlets across the U.S. that seeks to center the interests of everyday voters, not politicians.
After putting out a call to readers for this summer’s primary, we got 130 responses from readers asking questions of candidates running for everything from Congress to county commission chair.
For the sake of transparency, we are publishing the full list of questions we got from readers. It’s a way to show our homework.
Over the years of doing this, there has been the perception among some readers that the Post somehow doctors our candidate questionnaires to favor certain candidates or political parties or that we may emphasize certain issues that may not actually be readers’ preferred points of emphasis.
Hopefully, publishing the list of questions we received from readers will help answer those concerns.
The list of questions
Below you’ll find a Google Sheet, created with the help of Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence chatbot, laying out all the questions we received from readers.
This is the full list of reader questions we received, which helped me write questions around the issues that are of most importance to the most number of readers.
I will also note that a handful of readers have continued sending in questions this week, but I had already constructed this sheet at the end of last week, so it does not include those most recent questions received.
The readers’ names and email addresses are not included in the document. You’ll also note that many readers asked multiple questions.
The most asked-about issues
There was a clear issue that came out on top as representing the biggest reader concern: property taxes and cost of living.
There were 49 questions related to this theme of taxes and how much it costs to live in Johnson County.
The next most-asked about issues, in order, were:
- Housing and Development (23 questions)
- Education (19 questions)
- Elections (18 questions)
- Immigration (16 questions)
- Civility, Partisanship and Accountability (15 questions)
- Growth and Land Use (15 questions)
- Health care, Medicaid and Social Security (13 questions)
These were the issues clearly driving reader interest and the ones I prioritized in crafting the questions that were ultimately sent to candidates running for federal, state and county offices in the Aug. 4 primary.
Partisan races, but few partisan-directed questions
Most of the races on the Aug. 4 ballot are partisan, meaning voters must be registered with one of the two major parties to cast ballots for that party’s candidates for offices like U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governor, secretary of state, state board of education and Kansas House.
The lone nonpartisan race is the county commission chair, meaning all registered Johnson County voters will see that race on their ballot.
Only a handful of questions we received from readers directed their questions at specific parties. Nearly all the questions we got from readers, instead, asked questions of all candidates.
That means nearly all the questions we asked candidates are being asked of both parties.
There is one exception: a question about bipartisanship for governor candidates that didn’t make sense unless it was tailored to either party.
