Inflation’s so high, $90,000 can’t buy even one Sedgwick County election these days | Opinion

Talk about inflation: It seems $90,000 of out-of-state political money just doesn’t buy what it used to in Sedgwick County elections.

Stephanie Wise didn’t just beat former Wichita City Council member Greg Ferris in Tuesday’s Republican primary for County Commission District 3.

She also beat the pants off two shady political action committees that spent more money trying to get Ferris elected than Ferris raised on his own.

There may be hope for local democracy after all.

Ferris raised about $37,000 for his campaign. Wise raised about $60,000.

That might seem like an advantage to Wise, but Ferris was also the beneficiary of an extra $90,000 in spending by two PACs — including about $65,000 from the R.E.D. PAC.

The R.E.D. stands for “Rural Economic Development.”

Perhaps they didn’t know that Wichita, where three-fourths of Sedgwick County residents live, is about as rural as Austin, Texas, the city where the R.E.D. PAC lives.

Why R.E.D. would jump over two states and get involved in an obscure county Republican primary is not exactly clear. But there are clues if you read the tea leaves.

R.E.D. PAC has raised more than $1.1 million in the past 18 months, all of it from an outfit called Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future, a front group for unnamed donors that pushes for tax breaks and subsidies for large-scale wind and solar energy projects.

Sedgwick County just happens to have a moratorium on large-scale wind and solar power, which is about to come up for review.

That seems an interesting coincidence.

Perhaps whomever is behind Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future and R.E.D. PAC thought they’d have a better chance to get the moratorium gone with Ferris in office instead of Wise.

The other outside interest shadow-backing the Ferris campaign was a recently created group called the “Sedgwick County Conservatives PAC.”

With a name like that, you might think the group is made up of Sedgwick County conservatives.

It’s not.

It’s based in Wisconsin and its purse strings are controlled by a guy named Thomas Datwyler.

Datwyler used to be the treasurer for disgraced ex-U.S. Rep. George Santos, a New York Republican who was expelled from Congress and is facing a long list of criminal charges for campaign fraud.

The committee raised $25,000 for Ferris.

Five thousand of that came from a familiar source, Wichita developer Jay Russell, who now says he gave to the group in error.

The other $20,000 came from a shadowy Washington D.C. “charity” called the Great America Coalition.

The coalition has little public profile, a vague and meaningless mission statement, and no one can say where it gets its money.

Here, the money was used for anti-Wise attack ads, a stupid trick that almost certainly backfired.

Example: One of the group’s ads featured a composite photo of Wise, President Joe Biden and Gov. Laura Kelly, with a caption starting out “Liberals want to push their woke agenda in Sedgwick County and they know a gal.”

To understand just how ridiculous that is, one need only look at Wise’s endorsement list: Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, Culture Shield, Kansans for Life, Kansas Family Voice.

It really doesn’t get any more un-woke than that.

So score one for Sedgwick County Republican voters who saw through the smokescreen and picked the candidate they want to carry their banner in November.

I can’t say for sure why these out-of-state PACs got so interested in a race for a seat on a Kansas county commission, which is pretty low-profile in the grand scheme of things.

What I can say for sure is that they wasted their money. Wise beat Ferris by more than 1,000 votes.

Maybe that will keep the PACs from coming back — and good riddance.