Some of the most consequential decisions in Kansas politics are made by remarkably few people. Not in November, when close to a million of us vote — but in August, in primaries that draw a fraction of that and are settled by whoever is most organized and most motivated. The gap between how little attention a primary gets and how much it decides is exactly where small groups become powerful. I want to describe how that works, and something I watched up close.
For a while I belonged to a Kansas political group of about 37,000 members. It began in 2024 as a campaign group and, after that election, settled into a standing community for Democratic women. It had rules — women and non-binary members could post, men could comment, candidates could post during their campaigns — and it had a creed, repeated often: everyone is welcome to her own opinion. I believed in it, and I joined for the same reasons most members did.
Then a contested primary arrived, and the group issued an endorsement.
I don't mean the members voted on one. There was no vote, no caucus, no committee, no conversation with the other candidates. An endorsement was announced on behalf of all 37,000 of us by the handful of people who run the group. That is the first thing worth pausing on, entirely apart from who was endorsed: an organization can speak for tens of thousands of people without ever asking them, and most of those people will never know a choice was made in their name.
Why should a private group's internal endorsement matter to anyone outside it? Because of arithmetic that applies to every low-turnout primary.
Kansas has about 2 million registered voters, and only about a quarter of them are Democrats. A contested Democratic primary for statewide office might draw somewhere on the order of 170,000 voters; the general election that follows draws close to a million. A bloc of 37,000 is enormous against the first number and negligible against the second — roughly a fifth of a primary electorate, and a rounding error in a general one. That asymmetry is the whole reason organized primary blocs carry the weight they do: not because they are large in any absolute sense, but because primaries are small. A group that size can shape a nomination. It cannot, on its own, win a general election. And in a state where its party is a distinct minority, the nomination and the election are different contests, decided by very different electorates. A primary's real job is to choose the candidate best positioned to win the second one — a job a minority party cannot afford to treat casually.
None of that depends on knowing who was endorsed, and I am deliberately leaving names out. My concern is not which candidate a group of Kansans prefers; people are free to prefer whomever they like and to campaign hard for them. My concern is the machinery — a decision made for thousands without their say, in a contest whose low turnout makes that decision unusually powerful, by a group answerable to no one but itself.
There was a second problem, closer to home. The group told its members that everyone was welcome to her own opinion, and it had a written rule to match. Members were to "remain objective and thoughtful," with "no infighting or personal attacks allowed"; another rule permitted only posts promoting candidates, "not negative posts about them." Those were the group's own words. In practice, the candidates the group disfavored were disparaged anyway — called names, reduced to their age, their race, and their sex, their character denigrated, comment after comment — and those comments stayed up. When I raised concerns about the tone and asked the group directly whether we were inclusive or not — this was on May 31 — the answer that was allowed to stand was "it depends." Earlier, I had written a post arguing that the group was not living up to its own stated value of inclusion. It was declined; the members never saw it.
More recently, it grew explicit. On a personal thread, an admin said she was comfortable with the group being described as an arm of the candidate it had endorsed. A few hours later, inside the group, I was told that support for the endorsed candidate was not "required YET" — the capital letters were hers. Not long after, I was banned.
Within minutes of banning me, the administrator posted about me to the group. She didn't use my name, but it was clearly about me. She said she had banned a member she'd "asked repeatedly to engage in like manner." But she had never asked me — not once, and never with a warning. She reminded everyone it was "absolutely not fine to attack others"; I hadn't attacked anyone, I had objected to other people being attacked. I couldn't say any of that — I'd been banned. I couldn't see the post or reply to it. She described me to a room I'd been locked out of.
I am writing this as someone who wanted the group to succeed, not to settle a score, and the reason I'm writing it is that the pattern is larger than any one Facebook group. Low-turnout primaries hand real power to whoever is organized enough to claim it, and that power arrives with no built-in accountability — no requirement that a group ask its members before speaking for them, no rule that it honor the values it advertises. When a group narrows the field by loyalty rather than by who can actually win, and cannot tolerate the simple question of whether it means what it says, it isn't only being unfair to its own members. It is making a small election smaller.
Inside the group, I engaged with facts and data, and I was often met with emotion in return. I didn't let that stop me, because the point is simple: math matters. A group this size can have an outsized effect in a primary and almost none in a general. So the real question isn't who any of us prefers. It is this — are we trying to win in November, or only in August? A party that is the minority in its own state cannot afford to answer that with "it depends."
The author is president of Civic Clarity, which empowers citizens with accessible, transparent, and factual information about state legislation, fostering a more engaged and informed electorate across Kansas.
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