ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The Kansas gubernatorial race is shaping up for this year, and one of the candidates up for consideration will be Cindy Holscher.
As Holscher tells it, she is no stranger to Topeka.
“I entered the legislature after first election in 2016 did two terms in the House, then in 2020 crossed over to the Senate,” Holscher said. “It was not my plan to enter into politics, necessarily. I was prompted to run during the height of the Brownback experiment, and my kids were in school at that point, and budgets were being slashed. We were losing teachers, and we didn't have supplies for our classrooms. And one weekend, I went to Target with my daughter, who was about 12 years old at the time, and we saw one of her teachers working on the weekend, and my daughter looked at me and asked 'Why is my teacher working at Target on the weekend after being at school working hard all week?' And I explained to her what the situation was, that our budget was in crisis in Kansas, and she probably hadn't had a raise in a while and was having some trouble paying her bills. And she looked up at me and said, 'You go fix that. That's wrong.' At that time, we were in a huge crisis, and it was going to take reasonable people stepping forward to make a difference and to make necessary change. And at that time, my own representative was leading the charge on defunding our schools, so I decided to run against her. I was told I wouldn't win in that race. It was a red district, and I'm a Democrat, but I decided to run, won every single precinct and defeated a three-term incumbent. So that was how I got my start, and one of the first things that I did was co-found the Women's Bipartisan Caucus, and we're the group that put together the plan to end the Brownback experiment to get us back on track.”
Holscher said there were multiple factors that went into her decision to enter the gubernatorial race.
“We're at a crisis point again. Like I said, I entered the legislature under the height of the Brownback experiment and then helped successfully end that experiment to get us back on track with revenue and to better fund our schools,” Holscher said. “But since that time, extremists have been trying to start over that experiment or put in some type of plan that's just as bad, maybe worse, and there have been continued attacks against our schools in terms of the funding. This agenda we keep seeing from the far right keeps coming back every session now in terms of trying to strip away voting rights, trying to strip away access to reproductive health care, and we keep seeing all of those assaults coming back year after year. And with Laura Kelly's being term limited, she can't run again, and there are many extremists lined up to run, and if one of them wins, all of the bad bills we've been able to stop the past few years make it to the finish line. And that would make Kansas a drastically different place, where potentially we'd lose our schools and lose all of those things in terms of economic viability. We'd probably have a plan worse than the Brownback experiment. So we've got to have a check in place, and that's why I stepped forward. When I started seeing some of the other candidates on the other side lining up, and I've worked with a number of them and I know their strategy and am very familiar with their agendas, and those agendas are horrifying. Additionally, I'm the only Democrat in the race who has won in red districts, which is a tough thing to do. Additionally, I'm the only Democrat in the race who has won in red districts and actually defeated Republican incumbents. Which is the toughest type of race to win in. So I have that skill set that I can bring to the state level to ensure a victory.”
Should she be elected, Holscher said she has multiple goals she would like to accomplish.
“Affordability has always been my focus, ensuring working Kansans can pay their bills. I came from very meager means – I'm the granddaughter of tenant farmers, the poorest of the poor. I rose up out of poverty due to the public education system so for that reason,” Holscher said, “I'm a huge advocate for our schools, going so far as walking twice from Shawnee to Topeka under the Brownback years to draw attention to the underfunding of public education. Also, for so many of us, education is our ticket to upward mobility. I want to focus on funding of our schools, and that includes not just general education, but special education. 90 percent of our kids go to public schools, so we have to ensure we have a strong foundation there. We also have an affordable housing crisis right now, so my focus would be working to ensure I’m partnering with rural communities as well as urban to help cut red tape that drives up those prices. Additionally, health care costs are a huge issue right now – if you take a look at the fact that we have states all around us that have expanded Medicaid, but we haven't here, that's something else we can do in terms of ensuring there's coverage for our people, as well as helping our rural hospitals, which so many of them are kind of on the brink right now.”
That extends to other facets of life, Holscher said.
“I also think about things like how we have issues with access to affordable child care, so we've got to focus on that and invest in child care providers, supporting those early education educators, and protecting the tax credits that families rely on,” Holscher said. “But there are other things too, like targeted tax relief for working families, seniors on fixed incomes and veterans. So like I said, there's really a focus on affordability. I grew up on a farm, so I'm very concerned about what I'm seeing in terms of in our rural areas across the state and across the nation, because we've got to ensure their fair markets there, and actually some of those markets have been erased recently, so we've got to ensure there are markets there for our farmers, and ensure there's that strong infrastructure, and really make sure that there's a state government that has their back.”
So far, Holscher said, the campaign trail has been a good experience.
“I started out back in April, going across the state, doing town halls and showing up in places where often the local elected wouldn't do town halls. I started getting those invites early and started making my way across the state doing some of those events. Initially I had around eight or 10 scheduled, and then all of a sudden, I had 20 and then 30 and then 40 and then it ended up being 60 of them,” Holscher said. “And honestly, I started that even before thinking about running for office, because what I was seeing happening, and because of that incident where Roger Marshall did a town hall and then left early, and people were upset. When I saw that, I remember thinking 'Every Kansan deserves to be heard. They deserve to have their questions answered.' So that's why I started going out there, because again, there are a lot of areas across the state where elected officials don't just don't show up and do the basic minimum of answering their constituents' questions. Reception has been extremely, extremely positive – I've had Democrats, Republicans and Independents showing up, and when I visited Western Kansas, when I talked about the fact that I'm from a farm, then they immediately know we have a shared life experience, and I understand the struggles and challenges, so that has been unexpected, in terms of what exactly that means to people across the state. All across the state, most issues that are on people's minds boil down to affordability and making sure they don't have to choose between paying rent and getting their prescriptions, and that's why my focus is on making Kansas affordable for people. Access to affordable child care is another big topic. And a kind of surprising topic that's been coming up has been water, and I say surprising because we've known for years how we have an impending crisis in terms of the Ogallala Aquifer and its impending depletion. I honestly hadn't heard a whole lot from people compared to before, but now it's coming up a lot more.”
Overall, Holscher said, she is looking forward to the rest of the campaign trail and encouraged constituents to get in touch with her.
“My Web site has different ways for people to reach out and contact me, and that's cindyforkansas.com/. Additionally, they can reach out via email and phone and through my social media pages,” Holscher said. “My campaign is people powered – I'm not tied to insiders or Washington folks, and 93 percent of the donors to my campaign are Kansans. I think it's also really important to know that several of the bills I have worked on very much tied to regular people in Kansas in terms of I worked for four years on statute of limitations reform for victims of sexual violence. That was a bill a lot of people didn't want to tackle because it's a sensitive topic, but our statutes were antiquated and needed to be addressed, so I worked on that issue for four years. That was groundbreaking reform that allows survivors to get justice, but also helps us get more predators off the street. The bills I bring forward tend to be things that are very life-impacting type of bills. I brought the purple alert system to Kansas a couple years ago, so I'm not afraid to tackle the tough issues. I'm not afraid to push back on bad bills. I'm consistently going to fight for the people of Kansas, and you know, that's my whole priority. That's my whole focus.”
