By james art 
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republicans were eyeing a political comeback for a former Kansas attorney general in Tuesday’s election to keep a vacant U.S. House seat in GOP hands as the party faced a tougher challenge in the to expel the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.
Republican Derek Schmidt sought the No. 2 congressional seat held by retiring two-term Republican Jake LaTurner. Schmidt, who served three terms as attorney general, emerged from a narrow loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race to face Nancy Boyda, making his own comeback bid as the last Democrat to hold the seat.
In the Kansas City-area 3rd District, Democrat Charisse Davids faced Republican Prasanth Reddy, a physician and former vice president of two medical research companies. Most of the voters in the district are in the suburbs, which are friendly to Davids.
In two other state districts, Republicans Tracy Mann and Ron Estes were expected to win re-election comfortably.
Democrats have held the 2nd District seat before, but not since Boyda served one two-year term and lost his re-election bid in 2008. LaTurner won both of his terms by about 15 percentage points and would likely cruise to victory again , but announced in April that she wants to spend more time with her children.
Schmidt is often affable in public and early in his career worked for two moderate Republicans, U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker and Gov. Bill Graves, before serving in the state Senate and being elected attorney general in 2010. That created a lasting mistrust among hard-right Republicans.
But Schmidt easily won this year’s five-person primary — in part because former President Donald Trump declared in an endorsement post on social media that Schmidt is “America’s First Patriot” and “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
In the 3rd District, Davids gained national attention when she unseated a Republican incumbent in 2018 as a Native American woman, a lesbian and a former mixed martial artist. Republicans still rank her with the most liberal members of Congress. Her vocal support for abortion rights helps her district, but she also positions herself as business-friendly and a pragmatic centrist.
The key to winning the 3rd District is suburban Johnson County, the state’s most populous county. Trump’s support there has declined since his victory in the 2016 presidential race, hurting Republicans, while Davids’ margins of victory have widened.
The first district Mann represents includes the liberal northeast Kansas enclave of Lawrence, home to the main campus of the University of Kansas, but his influence cannot overcome GOP strength in the rest of the district, which covers the western third of the state and much of central kansas . Mann is a former lieutenant governor of Kansas who had no trouble winning his previous two terms.
His Democratic opponent was Paul Buskirk, an academic advisor and student-athlete advisor at the University of Kansas.
South-central Kansas’ 4th District is centered in Estes’ hometown of Wichita, and he is a former two-term state treasurer. He has held the seat since winning a special election in 2017 to replace Mike Pompeo, who was appointed by Trump as CIA director and later US secretary of state.
His Democratic opponent is Esau Freeman, an artist and labor leader who is best known for advocating for the legalization of marijuana.
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