In Kansas, data centers and the fiscal pressures posed by the Kansas City Chiefs stadium deal raised voters’ collective blood pressure in the governor’s race between the two candidates, who are both state senators: Democrat Cindy Holscher and MAGA Republican Ty Masterson.
The city of Emporia, southwest of Kansas City, is one of the hotbeds of data center defiance. A summer public session preceding a vote on a zoning proposal for a 1,000-acre hyperscale data center featured angry residents incensed that a deal had percolated for months out of the public eye. City commissioners warned audience members not to react to comments. A local high school physics teacher put his hands together and four policemen promptly lifted him up and carted him out. (He didn’t face charges.)
Despite the protests, the commissioners approved the zoning plan. One of them is now fighting a recall petition. In November, voters will likely have the final word when a ban on “high impact” data centers appears on the ballot. Another hotbed is Barber County in southern Kansas, where a go-ahead for a two-million-square-foot Google data center has generated pushback, despite a deal that includes $320 million in revenues over 20 years, hundreds of permanent jobs, and water replenishment promises in a county hard-hit by drought.
There’s been little public uproar after winning the border war that netted the Kansas City Chiefs’ new $3 billion stadium in Kansas, a few miles from their old home in Kansas City, Missouri. In fact, die-hard Kansas fans have been celebrating getting one over on their KCMO rivals.
Those celebrations may be premature, but fandom is a helluva drug. NFL owners and their tech world brethren could easily finance their respective enterprises without public support.
The stadium deal vacuums up $2.7 billion in public funds, primarily through a financing tool known as STAR bonds, issued in the stadium’s two-county, 300-square-mile development district. Team owner Clark Hunt of the Hunt family of Texas (net worth $25.6 billion) will contribute $1.8 billion and collect 100 percent of all revenues (including the ones from any concerts or other events at the stadium).
“That’s a lot of money for a pretty conservative population to swallow,” says Michael A. Smith, a Kansas state and local government expert at Emporia State University. “Even if they don’t pay it directly, they certainly will pay it indirectly.”
The data center debate is a boost for Holscher, who represents Johnson County in the southwest corner of the Kansas City metro area. Though Masterson, the state Senate president, likes to label her the “most radical, liberal, democratic socialist candidate that ever ran for statewide office in Kansas,” as he did repeatedly during the Kansas State Fair debate, that description bears little semblance to reality and in fact would be a nonstarter for any Kansas Democrat, according to Smith. Holscher is “not so much progressive as populist,” he says. “She’s not running on Medicare for All or anything like that, but she’s running on these sorts of anti-establishment positions that could get some Republican votes.”
Holscher smiled her way through Masterson’s attempted put-downs. “I won’t put data centers across the state to suck up your water,” the state Senate minority whip retorted. “Ty is going to put a data center in every corner and every cornfield.” Masterson has reeled in AI-sector PAC contributions and has touted his own Kansas ratepayer “protection pledge” that includes meeting state standards on water and having tech companies cover power costs and demands. A week later, he declined two scheduled debates sponsored by local media outlets.
Earlier this year, both Holscher and Masterson voted for generous 20-year state and local tax exemptions for data center developers.
Citing her feedback from her conversations with voters in the 80 town halls she’s conducted around the state, Holscher has since called for a statewide moratorium on what her campaign describes as “new giant corporate data centers.” However, she isn’t completely opposed to them provided the community wants the facility. She prefers to see strong guardrails, such as a greater focus on transparency, particularly on water usage and energy, and hiring union labor.
Professional sports stadiums are a different story. The country’s top sports economists have shouted to the rafters about the unmitigated disaster that is the Kansas City Chiefs stadium contract, to no avail. In August, Masterson told the Kansas City, Missouri, ABC affiliate KMBC, “You’ll see … it’s billions in private-sector investment. It’s hundreds of millions in income tax from the NFL alone. It’s thousands of jobs, which we need for our kids. If we want our kids to stay in Kansas, they need opportunity—and that brings opportunity.”
The deal is unlikely to bring in the millions in tax revenues that Masterson insists on trumpeting. Geoffrey Propheter of the University of Colorado Denver has noted that the both the Chiefs and the Washington Commanders have committed to some of the highest public subsidies ever for professional sports teams. Moreover, most stadium jobs are temporary and low-paying.
In January, he explained to NPR affiliate KCUR that “Kansas lawmakers have done every NFL team and every pro-subsidy lawmaker everywhere else in the country a huge favor, because now teams can look at the Kansas deal and say, ‘Hey, what we’re asking for is not nearly as bad or as crazy or stupid as what Kansas is offering.’”
Kennesaw State University’s J.C. Bradbury posted on X: “Reminder to KC taxpayers that local leaders rammed through this reallocation of taxpayer dollars to a billionaire without asking voters. Oh, and it’s not enough to cover the cost. Your taxes will go up or services will go down.”
“Ultimately, I believe billionaires should pay for their own stadiums, not the Kansas taxpayers,” Holscher told the Prospect. “But as of now, of course, the deal’s done, and I’m not going to undo it. But I’m going to work as governor to make sure every promise materializes.”
Holscher says she supported one bill exploring a stadium deal, but opposed a second bill in part, since it did not explicitly specify the use of union labor for the construction or provide for permanent jobs.
Bradbury has lost patience with supporters and opponents of stadium deals. “No one would advocate doing this,” he told me. “If you didn’t know this, shame on you, you should be embarrassed [and] you should just go with it and support it,” he said, adding, “To continue to support it, that’s equally embarrassing. There’s no reasonable policy case for this stadium deal.”
To hammer away at Masterson, Holscher refers frequently to the “failed Brownback experiment,” referring to the tenure of former Gov. Sam Brownback (R). Brownback came into office in 2011 on a wave of conservative Republican anti-tax fervor that swept more-moderate Republicans out of the legislature. Encouraged by the Koch brothers, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, and other forces on the right, he aimed to eliminate the state income tax.
During Brownback’s two terms, Masterson served as the chair of the state Senate’s Ways and Means Committee and was the primary architect of a deficit spending plan that decimated the state’s general fund. He then proceeded to cannibalize other department budgets to fill the holes but came up with hundreds of millions of dollars in deficits. A very dubious shell game ensued to rectify—or at least hide—the situation; it failed miserably. Critical state services crumbled or collapsed, along with Brownback’s popularity in the state.
Brownback left office a year before the end of his term to serve as President Trump’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom. After Republican Jeff Colyer finished Brownback’s term, he was defeated by Democrat Laura Kelly in 2018. She won re-election in 2022.
Masterson was “one of the chief architects” of the Brownback experiment, Holscher explains. “The wounds are deep in terms of what was happening here in Kansas under that experiment. Our schools were hit so hard. We lost teachers. We didn’t have supplies. It was just an absolutely concerning time. It has taken us eight years to really dig out of that hole, but we still have a ways to go.”
That’s because a decade after that sobering chapter, Kansas finds itself at the fiscal precipice again. Over the past five years, Republican state lawmakers have enacted yet more tax cuts. The latest cut, one that state lawmakers overrode Gov. Kelly’s veto to enact last year, was a 4 percent flat personal and corporate tax costing the state more than $1 billion every year. These decisions promise to tip the state into a pool of red ink, just as President Trump’s massive cuts to national social welfare and education programs take hold next year.
Though Kansas is a longtime Republican stronghold, rural areas in Kansas also have a libertarian streak that sometimes staves off those ultraconservative reflexes. The state voted down abortion restrictions by 20 percentage points in 2022, and a referendum on state supreme court judge selection that was tantamount to fostering stricter abortion controls by nearly 25 percentage points in August.
“Basically, the message is: Hands off my land, hands off my guns, hands off my body, just, ‘government, leave me alone,’” says the Emporia political scientist Smith.
Democrats haven’t had much success at the national level in this rock-solid Republican state for decades. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win Kansas was Lyndon Johnson in 1964; the last Democratic Senate candidate triumphed in 1932.
A poll conducted this week by Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media of 750 likely voters found Holscher lagging by six percentage points.
To win, Holscher will have to replicate the playbook served up by Kelly, the outgoing two-term governor, who won by two percentage points in 2018 and by five in 2022. Her formula was fairly simple: win the largest counties by a landslide, along with a smattering of rural ones. Kelly did not support Holscher in the Democratic primary, but endorsed her quickly after her decisive win. With an architect of Brownback’s disastrous tax cuts as an opponent, and Donald Trump’s collapsing poll numbers driving down the Republican Party nationally, Holscher has a strong chance. But it remains to be seen whether she can eke out a victory.
