Republicans Score Big Win In Congress
American Action News
Ron Estes, the Republican state treasurer handily won the seat, which was vacated when Mike Pompeo was nominated by Trump to be CIA Director. Kansas’s 4th District is considered one of the most heavily Republican districts in the county.
Estes won 53 percent of the vote, while Democrat James Thompson, a civil rights attorney backed by former associates of Sen. Bernie Sanders, won 46 percent.
Despite their loss, Democrats are taking solace in the fact that Estes’s margin of victory was far below the big numbers Trump and Pompeo posted back in November—and are hoping that a continued swell of liberal turnout in response to President Trump will help them on their uphill battle to win back Congress in 2018.
However, Republicans are quick to note that special elections rarely follow a pattern—and that Estes allegedly ran a lackluster campaign that needed to be bailed out by national Republicans in the final weeks. They also noted that Estes is deeply tied to unpopular Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, suggesting that anti-Brownback sentiment was a much larger drag on Estes’s poll numbers than Trump, who remains popular in Kansas.
Kansas’s 4th District was the first contest in out of five special elections to replace members of Congress who have been promoted to cabinet positions by President Trump. The next races include former Republican seats in Georgia, Montana, and South Carolina, and a former Democratic seat in California.
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