A Campaign for Change

A few hours after the ballot counts started to roll in, so did the hate tweets.

“In the next election we will all rmbr ur poor jdgmnt staying in race,” @bucksavage24 said, “U, Jim Barnett, Patrick Kucera, Tyler Ruzich Joseph Tutera r out of touch with reality, sad 2 say u have as good judgment as the candidates that live in their moms basement.”

“I actually live in my mom’s upstairs, thank you very much,” Joe Tutera tweeted back.

The hate messages following the election had a common theme — voters angry at the teenagers who ran in the Kansas Republican Governor Primary. The voters believe the teenagers skewed the primary.

After Jeff Colyer conceded the Kansas Republican primary election on Aug. 14, the media announced this election as the closest primary in Kansas history with Kris Kobach beating Jeff Colyer by only 345 votes.

Many voters attributed the close election results to six Kansas teenagers who took advantage of the loophole in Kansas law — there was no age requirement to run for governor. 17-year-old Rockhurst junior Joe Tutera and his running mate, 17-year-old Shawnee Mission East junior Phillip Clemente were two of these teenagers.

Since the two teens in the Republican party received 3,776 votes combined — Tutera and Clemente receiving 1,535 of those votes — a lot of voters blamed him and the other teenagers for skewing the election, according to Clemente. From Colyer’s campaign ad saying, “a vote for anyone besides a front-runner candidate is a vote for Kobach” to being featured on New York Times, the teens were accused of taking votes from front runner candidates.

But Clemente does not believe this is accurate.

Clemente largely targeted 18-year-olds, people who had recently graduated Pembroke and other local high schools and those who were listed in his iPhone contacts list to text about the campaign.

Clemente feels the younger voters may not have voted otherwise, and he believes he brought more people out to the polls instead of taking away votes from the front-runner candidates.

“I just added votes to the pool,” Clemente said.

But Steve Kraske, a member of the Kansas City Star Editorial Board and host of Up to Date, a public radio program pressing political issues, insists it is impossible to know who actually turned up to vote for these teenagers because votes are anonymous.

“It’s true that younger people don’t vote as much, but I don’t know how any candidate would know who’s going to actually turn up and vote and who’s not,” Kraske said. “I mean, for those guys, I think it was kind of a joke, but a lot of people’s lives hang on who’s governor. It’s serious stuff.”

Clemente believes voters who do not have serious views on any candidate would not vote in the primaries. He believes if people planned to vote for Kobach, they voted for Kobach and vise versa for Colyer, so their voters were not uninformed.

University of Kansas Political Science professor, Burdett Loomis, agrees that primary voters are often those who follow politics closely.

“Primary voters are the high-intensity voters,” Loomis said. “People more interested in politics tend to vote so voter turnout is lower.”

Loomis thinks the teenage candidates likely did not swing the election.

“The question is, were the people he brought to the polls going to vote overwhelmingly one way or another? Or were they even going to vote at all if he didn’t bring them to the polls?” Loomis said.

Additionally, Loomis believes that voters will blame the election results on any abnormality in a close election.

“In a very close election, almost any minor disruption — a big rainstorm in Sedgwick County or a breakdown of voting machines in Wyandotte — you could say ‘well that made a difference,’” Loomis said. “In a close election everything makes a difference and it ends up being unreasonable noise.”

Clemente claims his campaign did not swing the election because he targeted young voters in the area. Despite this, over 800 of their votes were from western Kansas.

“Before Johnson County even started counting votes, at 11 p.m., we had about 800 votes from counties I had never heard of, places I’d never been to,” Tutera said, “And it was really interesting having people reach out to me on Twitter saying, “Hey I live in this town and I just voted for you.’”

Tutera admits he is not sure why so many of his votes came from western Kansas. He believes that they supported his views, such as cutting taxes and enforcing more checks and balances for educational funding.

“They wanted change, and I was there,” Tutera said. “I represented a new form of conservatism — one that has adapted to the 21st century. I believe in gay rights, I’m much more moderate on immigration. So stuff like that is [why] my opponents like Kobach and Colyer are on the opposite side of the spectrum.”

At the beginning of Tutera and Clemente’s campaign, it seemed improbable their campaign and views would reach such a wide audience because the campaign started so small-scale.

Clemente began by speaking to parents at Carriage Club swim meets. Between races, with goggles wrapped around his wrist, moms approached Clemente, intrigued by his campaign. Clemente ended the conversations by sharing his views on Kansas politics, adding that he would appreciate their support and vote.

Through these conversations, Clemente and Tutera quickly learned campaign “etiquette.”

“Don’t pester people too much, just let them know your views and listen to their issues,” Clemente said. “If they don’t want to vote for you just say thank you and be polite. You’re not going to gain voters [by] getting angry when people exercise free speech.”

But once the story of teenagers running for Kansas governor spread across the country, Fox 4, 41 Action News, KMBC News, CNN, New York Times and The Washington Post all asked Tutera for interviews.

This publicity helped spread their name and campaign to more rural towns, despite their budget solely relying on the 25 orders of $15 custom “Tutera for Kansas” mugs and other merchandise sales used to pay for the $2,207 ballot fee.

Tutera also attended many forums and spoke to people across the state. Aside from public speaking, Clemente was exposed to a much wider variety of people and places he had never seen before the campaign.

“I met people from parts of Kansas that I had never been to. I was exposed to a whole different culture and mindset that I never would have been exposed to otherwise,” Tutera said. “So I think I take away that I need to break away out of my bubble a little more because the Mission Hills lifestyle is so small compared to everyone else.”

Despite the duo’s developed views and wide-spread campaign, Kraske still believes teenagers are too young to understand the effects of taxes and the political system.

“I just think high school is too young to understand Medicare and taxes and the costs of higher education,” Kraske said. “By the time you’re 30, maybe you’ve bought a house, you have a sense of what property taxes are, how government can affect your livelihood, and you’ve had a job or two or three and some of that’s been impacted by policies out of Topeka.”

The Kansas State Legislature also believed minors are too young to run for governor.

The legislature proposed a bill requiring any candidate running for Kansas governor to be at least 18-years-old. The bill passed and the law will become active for the 2022 gubernatorial election.

Although it is now illegal for teenagers to run for office, some Twitter users believe that as long as the teenagers are qualified, they can enhance the election. Not every tweet in Tutera’s feed election week was rooted from anger.

“I would vote for literally any of [these] teens over @KrisKobach1787 for Kansas governor,” @MattCalcara said. “Heck, I would donate & knock doors for those kids. Age is no guarantee of wisdom, nor is its absence a guarantee of immaturity.”