Brownback Leads Kansas in Sharp Right Turn
John Eligon www.nytimes.com john-eligon
Sam Brownback, the Republican governor of Kansas who this year faces an election challenge, has pursued a bullishly conservative agenda while working to oust moderates.
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TOPEKA, Kan. — Sam Brownback took office as Kansas’ chief executive more than three years ago, promising a conservative revolution. By all accounts he has kept his promise.

Mr. Brownback, 57, has overseen the largest income tax cuts in state history, an expansion of gun rights, restrictions on abortion, sharply reduced welfare rolls, increased voter-registration scrutiny and a paring of state government bureaucracy. To accomplish his goals, he helped push the Republican-majority Legislature further to the right by working to oust moderate Republicans, deepening a longstanding rift within the state’s G.O.P.

“We believe this is a strategy that builds a strong state in the future on the red state model,” Mr. Brownback said in an interview in his Capitol office here. “I think we are doing this aggressively and I think you’re going to see some very good things moving forward. It’s not as if we haven’t tried the blue state model, because we have.”

But revolutions come with risks, not least because change comes so fast. Single-party control got things done here, but it also ignited an intraparty struggle, as the governor learned last year when some of his allies resisted the higher sales tax rate he requested to balance the state’s books. And while many Kansans remain in Mr. Brownback’s corner, moderate Republicans and Democrats are loudly expressing their anger. With Mr. Brownback facing re-election, voters will be assessing a mixed scorecard of achievement.

The Kansas economy is growing, but like the nation’s, it remains sluggish. Elementary school students are testing well, yet the achievement level of black pupils is slipping. And while income taxes have been slashed, the poorest Kansans have seen their tax burdens increase with the elimination of tax credits. As a result, this year’s campaign for governor is shaping up to be more competitive than the one in 2010, when Mr. Brownback was swept into office with 63 percent of the vote.

Paul Davis, a Democrat and the House minority leader, who is challenging Mr. Brownback, is hoping to ride a wave of discontent by focusing on education. Mr. Brownback has been heavily criticized for enacting huge tax cuts at a time when schools are not funded at the constitutionally mandated level. Advocates of increased school funding have sued, and the case is now before the state Supreme Court. But the governor and the Legislature have vowed to ignore any ruling that requires them to increase spending to a specific amount, asserting that elected lawmakers, not judges, should make those decisions.