ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Kansas representation at the federal level could see a shift, and one of the candidates wanting to help make that happen is Colin McRoberts, who is running to lead the state’s Big First district.
As McRoberts tells it, politics was not exactly in the cards until recently.
“Right now, I teach at the University of Kansas, mostly business law, negotiation and some other business-related classes. I am a lawyer by training,” McRoberts said. “After law school, I worked as a litigator, defending family businesses from fraud, suing some big financial agencies and work like that. I left my law practice when I met my wife – she’s a scientist, and we had to be able to move around her career, so I left my practice and became a consultant and went into the field of negotiation. I spent the next 10 years or so really traveling the world and advising people of how to negotiate better deals. When we moved to Lawrence, I didn’t like doing all the traveling because I wanted to be home with the family more. We had a kid, so I found the job at KU, and I’ve been teaching there ever since. I’ve been in Lawrence for about a decade and teaching at KU for about six years now. I’d never thought about politics, I’d never really been involved in politics and didn’t even register as a Democrat until a few years ago when I wanted to vote in the primary.”
Ultimately, recent events spurred McRoberts to properly put his name forward.
“What got me into this race was little more than a year ago, I went out to Oakley to hear Roger Marshall at his town hall, because I was serious about wanting to hear what he would say about voting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his thoughts on DOGE and all the disasters that were starting to crop up at the time, and he ran away,” McRoberts said. “I happened to be taking video of the meeting on my cell phone at the time and later shared it on my Facebook page, and as everyone might remember, it became quite a viral little story. On the drive back to Lawrence, I was getting calls from the New York Times, CNN and other news outlets wanting permission to use the footage, but also wondering ‘What was it like?’ and ‘Why would a sitting U.S. senator run away from his own town hall like that?’ And I kept telling these outlets ‘Because he’s incredibly weak, and he also thinks he has an incredibly safe election, so from his perspective, if he doesn’t care about the district or the state, why would he answer hard questions? It makes sense for him to run away, because he doesn’t think it’ll affect his job at all.’ It made me so frustrated to see him being so incompetent that I thought about running against him for a bit, but I eventually acknowledged it takes a bigger budget than what I’ve got.”
After some thinking, McRoberts said, the plan then changed.
“I set at my sights on a more realistic race, and that is the Big First district, and it’s going to be a tough race, but it’s a really important one, because Tracey Mann has the same deficits Roger Marshall does – he’s weak, he’s crippled by the idea he has a safe election, which means he just doesn’t show up,” McRoberts said. “He doesn’t show up for the elections, he doesn’t show up in Congress, and he doesn’t get stuff done. It’s disgusting, especially right now as we’re seeing tariffs absolutely wrecking the economy – in Kansas, we’re seeing farm bankruptcies exploding, we’re seeing things actually exploding in Iran, and there’s a complete lack of willingness on the part of our congressional delegation to do anything about it. And that really fires me up to do something. When we were doing our first research, when my wife and I were discussing whether I wanted to run or not, we spent a long time talking about it. We looked at the results of all the former elections, and they’ve been very heavily rigged in Tracey Mann’s way, despite the fact he never campaigns, never justifies himself, never explains votes and rather sneaks his way through the elections. We sat down and started thinking about thinking strategically comparable to the way you would as a business – what are we trying to accomplish in the long run? If we had been running strategic candidates 20 years ago, and every election since then, we’d be a lot further down the road, and everybody in the Big First district would be better off.”
McRoberts said he has multiple goals should he ultimately get elected.
“There are a lot of people who are realizing there have been massive mistakes made, especially with tariffs, because they caused an explosion of farm bankruptcies, which is an absolute disaster for the Kansas economy, so that needs to stop,” McRoberts said. “It’s not a Donald Trump thing – Congress was given the power of tariffs by the U.S. Constitution, meaning those matters should be in Congress’s hands, not the president’s, so we need legislation that retracts the president’s tariff power and put them back in Congress’s hands to help restabilize trade relations. One of the biggest issues in the Big First district is population – we are losing people in the first district so quickly, we might even lose a district in the next census. We’ve got to do something to turn some of those wide spots in the road in Western Kansas into towns again. And there’s a few ways of doing that – one of the options we’re talking about with some housing experts is changing the way federal law benefits housing builders. Right now, builders have a federal benefit they’re using to build new units, so their incentive is to build new houses, which is not super useful for small towns in Western Kansas because they don’t have enough people to put in those houses. What we can do there is change those incentives so their incentive is not to build new units, but to rehabilitate existing units and keep them in good shape.
McRoberts added he is willing to talk to anyone and everyone who wants to have a conversation.
“That is literally the job I’m auditioning for, and it’s literally one of the things that makes Tracey Mann unfit for it. We’re doing as many online events as we can to make it easy for people to talk to me because we know we’re not going to be able to reach every family in every town we visit in person,” McRoberts said. “But anyone who wants to talk to me can send an email to
