State Sen. Barbara Bollier, a former moderate Republican who switched parties last year, announced Wednesday that she’d join the August Democratic primary for Kansas’ open U.S. Senate seat. Former U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom and Manhattan Mayor Pro Tem Usha Reddi were already competing for the nod.
Bollier was appointed to a state House seat in Johnson County in the Kansas City suburbs as a Republican back in 2010, and she was elected to a full term that year. In 2016, Bollier won an open state Senate seat 54-46 even as Hillary Clinton was winning her district 57-36, which was Team Red's only victory in a Clinton Senate seat.
However, Bollier was hardly an ardent conservative during her near-decade in the GOP’s legislative caucus. She was a prominent opponent of then-Gov. Sam Brownback's tax cuts, which ended up devastating schools in Johnson County, and she stood out as a rare Republican who backed abortion and LGBTQ rights. In 2018, Bollier also backed Democrat Sharice Davids over local GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder, and she supported Democrat Laura Kelly in the race for governor.
In December, a month after strong performances in Johnson County helped carry both Davids and Kelly to victory, Bollier announced that she was switching parties. Bollier declared, "When the party adopted an anti-transgender piece to their platform, that really, as a physician, set me over the edge, because we have more than XX and XY, and gender is a very complicated and important thing."
Bollier also hit her old party for opposing Medicaid expansion and gun safety legislation and added, "My moral compass is saying, 'I can't do this anymore,' and you throw that in with Donald Trump, and just from a moral position, I can't be complicit anymore." Two more Republican state legislators soon followed Bollier into the Democratic fold.
Bollier told the Kansas City Star this week that she’d spoken to both Kelly and former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius before she decided to enter the race. However, when the paper asked if Kelly had encouraged her to run, Bollier simply responded, “no.” Bollier also said that, while she’d called Sebelius “just to understand what’s at stake, as far as what you have to do,” she had been “talking to everybody” before she announced.
So far, though, prominent state and national Democrats haven’t taken sides in the primary. Grissom entered the race in July and raised $467,000 during his first quarter and ended September with $366,000 on-hand. Reddi launched her campaign at the end of August and raised just $61,000 and had $54,000 to spend. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in Kansas since 1932, though both parties believe that this race could be competitive if former state Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who Kelly beat last year, wins the GOP nod.
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