We covered a debate between the candidates for the state house in the 9th district (which includes Iola). Thanks to j.d., we now see that a Republican county vice-chair has endorsed the Democratic candidate, Bill Shirley.
Both candidates are clearly pretty conservative, but that's to be expected. The last time a Democrat represented the entire area was 1913 (two others have represented part of the district when the lines were drawn differently).
The area is a microcosm of Kansas. As the Iola Register observes:
Republicans outnumber Democrats about two to one in the district. Consequently, for Shirley to unseat the incumbent he has to attract support from Republicans and voters who aren't aligned with a political party. That's the unvarnished truth.Many people "vote for the person not the party," Shirley said, particularly in a local race that pits candidates who are well-known to voters beyond their party mantles.
[The county vice-chair] Dreher isn't the only Republican of public stature who has openly embraced Shirley's candidacy. Tony Immel, long an Iola attorney who served in both the Kansas House and Senate as a Republican, recently wrote a letter to the Register's Forum that encouraged support for Shirley. And Shirley signs have sprouted in Republican yards.
"No political party has a corner on virtue," or any other character trait that voters may seek in a candidate, Shirley said.
I'm told that surveys put the race neck-and-neck. Which says something about how Kansans as a whole are re-evaluating their commitment to Republicans.
These local races are often the places where name recognition and party ID make the most difference. People know who the governor is, and have a sense of who other statewide officers are. But unless a state legislator has been egregiously bad or stunningly good, no one will hear about it, or remember come election day.
Changes in attitude like this take time. It took almost a year for people to move from being unhappy with the current administration and Congress (a shift largely driven by Katrina) to people expressing a willingness to vote for different people. The Foley scandal broke the dam, but Katrina, the ports debacle, mismanagement of Iraq, corruption, torture debates, and the host of other things that have gone wrong all set the stage.
That realignment is trickling down to the local level, but in Kansas it's also being driven by a vicious war between moderates and conservatives, and by the excesses of the conservatives in power. Conservatives succeeded in their goal - driving off the moderates, and are suffering as a result.
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Find out how other Americans feel. Our foreign policy index is an amazing way to gage public opinion about American foreign policy and the current state of affairs, and from the way things look, the public may just be at a tipping point. Read on
Here at Public Agenda, weve created a new tool to track Americans opinions on foreign policy issues, providing a basis for political commentary. Similar to the Consumer Confidence Index, the Foreign Policy Anxiety Indicator provides policy makers, journalists and ordinary citizens with the public's overall comfort level with America's place in the world and current foreign policy.
An essential tool updated twice a year, the Indicator will consistently provide much-needed information on the publics perception of more than two dozen aspects of international relations.
In a world strewn with violence and highly-charged international issues, Americans are broadly uneasy about U.S. foreign policy. The September 2006 shows the Foreign Policy Anxiety Indicator at 130 on a scale of 0 to 200, where 0 is the most confident, 200 the most anxious and 100 neutral.
Eight in 10 Americans feel the world is becoming a more dangerous place for Americans, yet they're also skeptical about most of the possible solutions, such as creating democracies or global development. Only improved intelligence gathering and energy independence have substantial support, with energy firmly established as a national security problem
for the public.
In fact, the public lacks confidence in many of the measures being taken to ensure Americas security. Less than 33% of Americans give the U.S. government an A or a B grade for its execution of the following foreign policy issues: reaching goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, maintaining good relationships with Muslim countries and protecting U.S. borders from illegal immigration. And these are just a few of the findings of the survey.
These are some of the other startling findings:
- 83 percent say they are worried about the way things are going for the United States in world affairs (35 percent worry "a lot", with an additional 48 percent saying they worry "somewhat.")
- 79 percent say the world is becoming more dangerous for the United States and the American people
- 69 percent say the United States is doing a fair or poor job in creating a more peaceful and prosperous world
- 64 percent say the rest of the world sees the United States negatively
- 58 percent say U.S. relations with the rest of the world are on the wrong track
Want to learn more? Go to http://www.publicagenda.org/foreignpolicy/index.cfm to download the report.
Public Agenda is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group devoted to public opinion and public policy. The confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index is developed in cooperation with Foreign Affairs with support from the Hewlett and Ford foundations.