And the Award for Most Detested Governor in the Nation Goes to...
You would think that maybe the dubious distinction of Most Hated Governor would go to the guy that allowed an entire city in his state to suffer from lead poisoning in the water, like Gov. Rick Snyder of Wisconsin. Or perhaps you might think Rick Scott, Governor of Florida, would win out with his state-wide War on the Poor (you wouldn't be alone given Scott's recent tongue -lashing from a woman in a Florida coffee-house).
But in both cases, at least according to a new survey released Monday by Morning Consult , you would be mistaken. With a whopping 26% approval rating, Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, with his uber-conservative quasi-religious based style of state governing has won the prize. Gov. Brownback stands as the least popular chief executive in the nation, racking up an approval rating twice as weak as governors in neighboring states and below Michigan's Rick Snyder, who is consumed by the Flint lead-water scandal.
Brownback won a very narrow 2014 re-election bid by 2.68%, not even outside the margin of error and surprising considering how deeply red Kansas is in the political spectrum. A statistician at Wichita State University, who wanted to look at the paper receipts from the voting machines after discovering inconsistencies in the 2014 election results, has been repeatedly denied access to the voting machine receipts by Kansas Sec/State Kris Kobach. Kobach is a staunch ally of Gov. Brownback and is heavily rumored to be interested in occupying the Governor's Mansion after Brownback leaves office. A conservative republican judge ruled against the release of the voting machine receipts in a lawsuit seeking access to them in Feb. 2016.
Brownback, in the middle of a second term after winning a skin-of-his-teeth re-election bid in 2014, has taken a beating in the deep-red state as budget deficits inspired by a supply-side income tax cut led to the largest sales tax increase in Kansas state history last year. Nearly continual monthly shortfalls in state revenue and multiple rounds of to-the-bone spending cuts have weakened the Kansas educational system to the point of near collapse. Kansas has cut a massive $1.3 billion in funding to public education, public health, the state highway system, and K'PERS ( the state employees pension fund, which has had $198 million in payments "delayed" in the last two months). With the state of Kansas still facing a projected deficit of $1.7 billion by the end of fiscal 2017 (even after these drastic cuts), the GOP governor is expected to order another round of budget reductions within the next week.
Kansas is facing the economic results of a self-inflicted financial wound. Under Gov. Sam Brownback's watch, Kansas has slipped to 43rd in economic growth, 45th in wage growth, and 46th in job growth. The state has also seen it's credit worthiness downgraded not once, not twice, but three times in the last two and a half years. Moody's recently downgraded Kansas' credit worthiness to a negative rating for the first time ever. Kansas has seen several school districts close due to lack of state funding and at least one rural hospital. Independence, Kansas now has NO hospital due to Gov. Brownback's refusal of expanded federal Medicaid funding ( the S.E. Kansas town is now also tied with Chanute, KS. for paying the highest sales taxes on groceries in the nation...). Gov. Brownback also faced an investigation by the F.B.I. for awarding the contracts for privatizing the state's Medicaid system to which-ever corporation "donated" the most to Brownback's 2014 re-election campaign...
Kansas Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley (D-Topeka), said that Brownback's bottom-of-the-barrel approval numbers, "...come as no surprise. Most people now realize Sam Brownback is out of touch with their mainstream values. His tax and budget policy choices have been the ‘Midas Touch’ in reverse,” Hensley continued. “While he [ Brownback] downplays whether his unpopularity will impact down-ballot races, the 2016 elections [in Kansas ] should be a referendum on Sam Brownback and on those legislators who have rubber-stamped his disastrous political agenda.”
Some economists estimate that the state of Kansas, even if they reversed all of Gov. Brownback's policies tomorrow, would take over 30 years to undo the fiscal and economic damage done by the uber-conservative budget and tax policies of the Brownback administration. It's no wonder that Sam Brownback of Kansas is the most detested governor in the United States.
