KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Republican Ron Estes will be the next congressman from the state of Kansas, but his victory Tuesday night did not come as easily as many expected in the deep-red state.
GOP strategists warned in recent days that Democrat James Thompson, a civil rights attorney, was in striking distance against Estes, a Wichita Republican and the state treasurer, in the special election to replace Mike Pompeo.
Estes trailed Thompson early in the night, but began to pull ahead around 9 p.m. with a lead of 52 percent to 47 percent after 519 of 620 precincts reported. Libertarian candidate Chris Rockhold also drew about 2 percent of the vote.
Republicans outnumber Democrats in the district nearly 2-to-1 and the fact that Thompson made the race competitive will likely have reverberations both nationally and in Kansas as the state moves into 2018 with the governor's office up for grabs.
Pompeo, a Republican who won by 31 percentage points in November, gave up his seat in the 4th Congressional District in January to serve as President Donald Trump's director of the CIA.
The last time a Democrat won the 4th Congressional District was in 1992, but strategists on both sides of the political divide correctly predicted a single-digit race heading into Tuesday. Thompson won the densely populated city of Wichita, but Estes dominated in the surrounding rural areas.
The results suggest Democrats can't be counted out, even in Kansas _ a solid Republican state _ and can mount challenges that have realistic chances of producing a win.
The outcome also indicates Gov. Sam Brownback remains a political liability. The second-term governor is deeply unpopular across the political spectrum, and the Thompson campaign likely succeeded in binding Estes, a stranger to controversy, to Brownback, one of the most divisive figures in the state.
"Democrats are fired up and they're mobilizing," said Chapman Rackaway, a political science professor at Fort Hays State University.
Some Democrats are smelling blood in the water, Rackaway said. Estes' narrow win could be a bad omen for U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder, an Overland Park Republican who is up for re-election in 2018 in a district that Democrat Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 presidential race.
Estes' victory came after the president and vice president recorded robocalls to urge GOP voters to the polls, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas flew into Wichita for a rally and the National Republican Congressional Committee flooded Wichita television with abortion-themed attack ads against Thompson.
"Ron Estes is running TODAY for Congress in the Great State of Kansas," Trump tweeted early Tuesday as voters went to the polls. "A wonderful guy, I need his help on Healthcare & Tax Cuts (Reform)."
Estes' campaign manager, Rodger Woods, struck a confident tone in an email an hour before polls officially closed in the state at 7 p.m.
"We are very optimistic that our voters saw the choices before them and will select the pro-life, constitutional conservative who holds the values of the 4th district to be their next representative in Congress," he said.
Thompson's campaign manager, Colin Curtis, said that Republicans' overconfidence enabled Democrats to make the race more competitive than most analysts initially expected.
"I think the key was that Republicans took this for granted," Curtis said. "They saw this seat as one that was safe for them. They just had to put their name on the ballot, and Ron Estes was going to be a congressman in a few months."
Curtis also pointed to the campaign's strategy of tying Estes to Brownback, who has struggled with low approval ratings for the last two years.
Kansas House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat, said that Brownback and Trump's early stumbles in the president both hurt Estes' campaign.
"People are already unhappy with Sam Brownback and they're seeing a lot of the same trends from Donald Trump," Ward said. "I think the two of them together it motivates Democrats, but it also gives pause to a lot of Republicans."
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who served on Trump's transition team, pushed back on the idea that the vote would be a reflection of Trump's first few months as president.
"Regardless of what the result is, I don't think you take it either way as a ringing endorsement or an indictment" of Trump, Kobach said at Estes' watch party in Wichita.
Brownback's associates also dismissed the idea that the governor was a drag on Estes.
"I believe that after tonight, the KS Republican Party will be 32-0 in federal and statewide elections since nominating Sam Brownback for Governor," Brownback's former chief of staff, David Kensinger, said in an email. "Good headline, no?"
Missteps by the Estes campaign also helped fuel Thompson's rise, Curtis said. A television ad in which Estes stood in a swamp as an echo to one of Trump's campaign slogans became the base image for a Kansas Democratic Party mailer, which also featured Brownback's head digitally imposed onto the body of an alligator.
"He gave us great imagery to use against him. For a politician to climb into a swamp and look as uncomfortable as possible was a gift for us to be able to use it on mail," he said.
Former state Rep. Mark Hutton, a Wichita Republican, said that Estes' decision to skip events early in the campaign probably hurt him more than Democrats' efforts to tie him to Brownback.
"I think there's quite of few of us who would like to have seen Ron get out there a little earlier than he did. ... He had some debates that he missed, and I don't think that helped his image," Hutton said.
"I think there was a little bit of a 'where's Ron?' kind of deal, and of course the news media loved it," Hutton continued.
Jaci Bell, a Wichita teacher, said she didn't want to see Estes promote the "Brownback economic plan" on the national level. She voted for Thompson.
"I felt he cared more. He showed up to the debates," she said.
Carolyn Harris, who cast her vote for Estes, said she's a Trump supporter and wants to see more Republicans in Congress.
"Trump needs all the support he can get," Harris said outside the Machinists Union hall in Wichita.
