Anti-immigration hardliner, voter fraud alarmist and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach finally broke his losing streak on Tuesday night, winning the Republican primary for Kansas attorney general.
Kobach defeated Kansas state Sen. Kellie Warren (R), his top rival, by a little over four points.
“I’m truly grateful to the Republican voters of Kansas for putting their trust in me,” Kobach said in a statement after the race was called. “While I was not the choice of the political establishment, I will be an attorney general for all Kansans.”
He will be facing off against Democratic nominee and ex-prosecutor Chris Mann in the November general election.
Kobach’s victory follows a string of failed bids for Kansas governor in 2018 and U.S. Senate in 2020, when he lost to now-Gov. Laura Kelly (D) and now-Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), respectively.
As a secretary of state obsessed with non-existent “voter fraud,” Kobach spearheaded a war on voting rights in Kansas, which included his notorious proof of citizenship law forcing residents to submit documents confirming they were U.S. citizens before they could register to vote.
However, the law was struck down by the courts, and the Supreme Court rejected Kobach’s bid to resurrect it.
Kobach is also a devout follower of ex-President Donald Trump, who came close to tapping him as immigration czar.
Although that didn’t end up happening, Kobach stayed in close contact with the Trump administration in 2019 and 2020 as the general counsel of “We Build The Wall,” a group dedicated to raising private funds to build a wall along the southern border (Kobach’s collaboration with the administration came to a screeching halt when several members of We Build The Wall, including ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon, were indicted on fraud and money laundering charges in connection to the group’s fundraising efforts).
Kobach was also involved in Trumpland’s doomed attempt to get the Supreme Court to overturn the election results.
Ironically, Kobach will have less authority to advance his anti-voter agenda if he wins the general election than he did as secretary of state thanks to a law he’d successfully pushed allowing secretaries of state to bypass the attorney general to independently open the kind of bogus voter fraud investigations that Kobach pursued relentlessly while in office.
