FDM starts crit­i­ciz­ing Steve Rose’s col­umn on Den­nis Moore’s mod­er­a­tion by argu­ing about fair­ly mean­ing­less sen­tences.

“Take out Olathe, and Moore won by a com­fort­able major­i­ty in John­son County” 

“In fact, if it weren’t for the heav­i­ly con­ser­v­a­tive votes in Olathe and sur­round­ing rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, one could argue that this is a very mod­er­ate community” 

They dis­pute the first by argu­ing about whether a 52% vic­to­ry is com­fort­able com­pared to 50%.

As for the sec­ond, they cal­cu­late that Moore would win JoCo with 52% exclud­ing Olathe (but not exclud­ing the rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, how­ev­er one selects them), and Bush won JoCo-Olathe by 60%.

If you rank the coun­ties by per­cent of vote for Bush, John­son Coun­ty (includ­ing Olathe) is the 11th worst coun­ty in Kansas for Bush. The fact that only 10 out of 105 coun­ties gave less than 61% of their vote to Bush tells you a lot about Kansas.

Remov­ing Olathe moves that slight­ly more towards Ker­ry, putting JoCo at num­ber 10.

But I think that this is not what Rose meant. It think he meant that, bar­ring Olathe and envi­rons, JoCo elects mod­er­ates to statewide office, and prefers can­di­dates with mod­er­ate positions. 

Let me tell you a sto­ry about a JoCo Repub­li­can. Dave Adkins was a Repub­li­can state sen­a­tor from Lea­wood, in JoCo.

The first time the gay mar­riage amend­ment came up, he killed it. The State Sen­ate only allows a cer­tain num­ber of record­ed votes on an issue. Adkins burned those amend­ments up on small pro­posed amend­ments, and when the record­ed votes were used up, the sen­a­tors could vote their con­science on an amend­ment with­out wor­ry­ing about pub­lic opin­ion. The pro­pos­al failed 16–17 in a cham­ber with 24 Repub­li­cans. By allow­ing the amend­ment through, oppo­nents could vote against it while claim­ing they just want­ed dif­fer­ent language.

The Repub­li­cans vot­ing no on the final con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment came from Lea­wood, Over­land Park(2), Olathe(2), Sali­na, Wichita(2), Lawrence, Towan­da, Wamego, Hanston and Parker.

By my count, most of the “no“s came from JoCo. That sounds pret­ty mod­er­ate, at least for Kansas.

Rose’s point was that Moore’s pol­i­tics are pret­ty close to those of his dis­trict, includ­ing John­son Coun­ty. Argu­ing about what defines “mod­er­a­tion” or a “com­fort­able major­i­ty” hard­ly address­es that argument.