Breaking down the numbers behind Kelly’s win
Laura Kelly has been reelected Governor of Kansas.
Kelly, the incumbent Democratic governor, defeated Republican challenger Derek Schmidt.
Schmidt is currently serving at Kansas Attorney General.
Kelly narrowly defeated Schmidt by 2.2%.
Kelly received 49.5% of the vote, and Schmidt received 47.3%.
Independent candidate Dennis Pyle received 2.0%, and Libertarian Seth Cordell received 1.1%.
We’ll examine the role the independent and Libertarian candidates might have played later in this analysis.
All of the numbers in this article come from the official certified vote totals from the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office.
My previous articles analyzing the 2022 Kansas General Election results referenced the final unofficial results, which were slightly different from the completed election count.
I predicted Kelly would win the governor’s race by 2%.
My prediction was spot on.
Although I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about the potentially pivotal role the candidates other than Kelly and Schmidt could play in the outcome of the election.
On the issues
I donated $115 to Kelly’s reelection campaign this year, and I voted for her.
I donated more money to Kelly than I did to any other individual candidate.
I strongly supported Kelly, and I strongly opposed Derek Schmidt.
Kelly was a responsible steward of the Kansas state budget, after the disastrous years of fiscal mismanagement under Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s attempt to phase out state income taxes.
As Attorney General, Schmidt joined a lawsuit that attempted to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race by challenging voting procedures in swing states that Biden won.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led the lawsuit.
The Supreme Court dismissed the case on the basis that Texas lacked standing to bring the legal challenge.
The Texas Bar Association has filed a disciplinary petition against Paxton for professional misconduct for filing the lawsuit.
Schmidt opposed transgender rights as attorney general, and he made banning transgender female athletes from girls’ and women’s sports a central issue of his gubernatorial campaign.
Kelly has supported transgender rights, and LGBT rights more broadly.
Kelly also supports abortion rights. Schmidt does not.
On the issues I care about, Kelly was a great candidate, and Schmidt was a horrible one.
Kelly’s victory means she will be able to continue to provide a meaningful check on the deeply conservative Kansas legislature, will continue her responsible stewardship of the Kansas budget, and will prevent Republicans from enacting abhorrent socially conservative policies.
I am very relieved that Kelly won.
Given the positions of the two candidates, I don’t believe the election deserved to be close.
But this is Kansas, and it turned out to be a very close election.
The impact of the minor candidates
Collectively, the two minor candidates received 3.1% of the total vote.
That’s not much, but it’s larger than Kelly’s margin of victory.
Kelly won by 22,258 votes, or 2.2%.
Which begs the question, would Kelly still have won in a one-on-one race against Schmidt?
Let’s dig into the politics, and the numbers, to find out.
Independent Gubernatorial candidate Dennis Pyle served as a conservative Republican in the Kansas Legislature.
He campaigned for office on the basis that he was the true conservative alternative to both Schmidt and Kelly.
Pyle received 2.0% of the total vote.
It’s safe to assume that if Pyle hadn’t run, or if Kansas had ranked choice voting, the vast majority of his votes would have gone to Schmidt.
If Schmidt had received all of Pyle’s votes, Kelly would have won the election by only 1,806 votes, or 0.2%.
In that scenario, Kelly would have received 49.5% of the vote, and Schmidt would have received 49.4%.
But Pyle wasn’t the only minor candidate in the race.
Libertarian Seth Cordell also ran, and he received 1.1%.
Cordell is a classic libertarian, with some positions that appeal to left-leaning voters and some positions that appeal to right-leaning voters.
If Cordell hadn’t run, or if Kansas had ranked choice voting, I believe his votes would have been close to evenly split between Kelly and Schmidt.
If Cordell’s vote was split completely evenly, then it wouldn’t have an impact on the outcome of the race or the margin of victory.
If all of Pyle's votes went to Schmidt, and Cordell's votes split evenly, Kelly would have received 50.1% of the vote, and Schmidt would have received 49.9%.
Kelly would have won by 1,806 votes, or 0.2%.
If you assume Schmidt would have received all of Pyle’s votes in a two-way race, as I do, the exact breakdown of Cordell’s votes would be decisive.
In this scenario, Schmidt would have needed to receive more than 58.1% of Cordell’s votes to win the race.
If you assume Schmidt would have received all of Pyle’s and Cordell’s votes, which I don’t find particularly likely, Schmidt would have won by 9,300 votes, or 0.9%.
Under that scenario, Schmidt would have received 50.5%, and Kelly would have received 49.5%.
If Schmidt received all of Pyle's votes, and Kelly received all of Cordell's votes, which I also don't find particularly likely, Kelly would have won by 12,912 votes, or 1.3%.
Under that scenario, Kelly would have received 50.6%, and Schmidt would have received 49.4%.
So did Kelly win reelection due to the spoiler effect?
Maybe.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We don’t know for certain how Pyle and Cordell voters would have voted in a two-way race between Kelly and Schmidt.
Without that information, we can’t know if Kelly still would have won.
But I think it’s fair to say that if Pyle and Cordell hadn’t run, or if Kansas had ranked choice voting, this year’s gubernatorial election would have been a much closer race.
Comparisons to other races on the ballot
A total of 1,008,998 people voted in the Kansas Governor’s race.
More people voted in the Governor’s race in Kansas than in any other statewide election in 2022.
Laura Kelly received 499,849 votes. She received more votes than any other statewide Democratic candidate on the general election ballot.
Derek Schmidt received 477,591 votes. He received fewer votes than any other statewide Republican candidate on the ballot.
This once again underscores Republicans’ relative weakness in Kansas Gubernatorial elections, compared to other statewide Kansas races.
Kansas Gubernatorial elections are competitive for Democrats.
With relatively few exceptions, other statewide Kansas elections are not.
Kelly’s first gubernatorial election
The outcome of Laura Kelly’s reelection, and the dynamics of Kansas politics, can be better understood by comparing this year’s race to Kelly’s first election as Kansas Governor.
In 2018, Laura Kelly faced off against Republican Kris Kobach.
That year, Kobach narrowly defeated incumbent Republican Governor Jeff Colyer in the Republican primary.
In the primary, Kobach won by 343 votes, or 0.1%.
Kobach received 40.6% of the vote, and Colyer received 40.5%.
Colyer had been Gov. Sam Brownback’s Lieutenant Governor. Colyer became governor after Brownback accepted the position of Ambassador for Religious Freedom under the Trump administration.
In the general election, Kelly beat Kobach by 5.1%.
Kelly received 48.0% of the vote, and Kobach received 43.0%.
Independent candidate Greg Orman received 6.5%, and Libertarian Jeff Caldwell received 1.9%.
Another independent candidate, Rick Kloos, received 0.6%.
It’s worth noting that Orman was ideologically similar to Kelly.
I believe Kelly would have been the second choice for a large majority of Orman voters.
So if Kansas had ranked choice voting, or if Orman hadn’t run, I believe Kelly’s total would have been substantially higher.
If Kelly had received all of Orman’s votes, she would have received 54.5% of the total vote.
In the 2018 general election, I voted for Kelly.
Orman would have been my second choice.
Comparing 2022 and 2018
More people voted in the 2018 Kansas Governor’s race than in 2022.
Rounding to the nearest thousand, 1,055,000 people voted in 2018, and 1,009,000 voted in 2022.
That means 46,000 fewer people voted in 2022 compared to 2018.
Looked at another way, the number of votes cast in 2022 was 95.7% of the number of votes cast in 2018.
Kelly received 6,660 fewer votes in 2022 than she did in 2018.
Schmidt received 24,561 more votes in 2022 than Kobach did in 2018.
The independent and libertarian candidates collectively received 63,525 fewer votes in 2022 than they received in 2018.
Now let’s compare the two elections based on percentage of the total vote.
Kelly’s percent of the total vote increased by 1.5% in 2022 compared to 2018.
Schmidt’s percent of the total vote increased by 4.4% in 2022 compared to Kobach in 2018.
The independent and libertarian candidates percent of the total vote fell by 5.9% in 2022 compared to 2018.
So what does this tell us?
First of all, Orman did exceedingly well as an independent in a race with two major party candidates on the ballot.
Secondly, Schmidt was a marginally better candidate for the Republicans in 2022 than Kobach was in 2018.
Schmidt received more votes in 2022 than Kobach did in 2018, despite fewer people voting in the 2022 election.
Schmidt also increased his share of the vote in 2022 compared to Kobach in 2018.
Democrats had a relatively good year nationwide in both 2018 and 2022.
Although I do think it’s fair to say that Democrats fared slightly better in 2018 given President Trump’s unpopularity and public disapproval of Republican congressional priorities.
My main takeaway from comparing the 2018 and 2022 Kansas Governor’s races is that even though Schmidt lost, he was a marginally better Gubernatorial candidate for Republicans than Kobach.
But it’s hard to know for certain which factors were most important in determining the slightly different margins in the last two Kansas Gubernatorial elections.
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