‘No shame in losing a fight’: Mayor Whipple reflects on election loss, crises as mayor

Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple is ready for a break.

Whipple conceded the mayor’s race Wednesday afternoon, stepping away from politics for the first time in more than a decade. He will continue his term until Jan. 9.

“It’s been an interesting ride,” Whipple said, reflecting on his term as mayor. “It’s been one of the greatest honors of my life and also one of the greatest challenges. I think that we persevered as a community through stuff that frankly we’ve never seen before.”

Tuesday’s race was never particularly close, and Whipple said he knew he had lost when the first returns — advance ballots and early voting, where he had expected to over-perform — showed he was behind challenger Lily Wu by 1,000 votes. He left his campaign watch party early after a second set of returns showed Wu’s lead grow. He did not give a concession speech. He said he felt a mix of emotions spanning from anxiety to embarrassment.

2023 local election: Unofficial results from races in Wichita and Sedgwick County

Wu finished the night with 58% of the vote. Whipple credits his loss to Wu’s record-breaking fundraising and an anti-Whipple campaign led by the Fraternal Order of Police, Wichita Regional Chamber PAC and Americans for Prosperity, a Charles Koch founded political organization.

“There’s no shame in losing a fight,” Whipple said in an interview with The Eagle. “The shame is if you choose not to fight when you should, and that’s kind of where I’m at with it.”

Whipple is no stranger to fights. But he said he doesn’t have any immediate plans to step back into the political fray.

“I have no real plans for the next few months,” Whipple said. “My wife and I put money away so we could take a break, so I’m going to do a little sabbatical and reflection. I might write about the experience of navigating Wichita through some of the crises that we’ve had.”

A mayor who ‘crashed the party’

Whipple spent 10 years in elected office, starting in the Kansas Legislature as a Democratic representative in 2013. When he ran for mayor in 2019 against incumbent Jeff Longwell, a Republican, a group of three Republican officeholders — Michael Capps, James Clendenin and Michael O’Donnell — targeted him with a false smear campaign that ultimately backfired, with all three losing their positions by the end of 2020.

Whipple’s reception at City Hall was icy at best, he said. The council was chock-full of Longwell allies who felt attacked by Whipple’s campaign to end the “culture of corruption” at City Hall.

“I crashed the party, and it was obvious they wanted me to go in my office and be quiet, basically,” Whipple said. “I remember making my rounds with council members and one of them was upset with me for even being there. So I asked, ‘What are you working on? What do you want? Like, my agenda is pretty good. What’s yours? Can we work together?’ And they were offended with the idea that I would offer to work with them, like who am I to suggest that I can be of help? It was very combative. . . . It was just constant politics, you know, and you couldn’t get away from it.”

Meanwhile, Whipple’s ambitious list of campaign promises — from adding police officers to setting up an ethics advisory board to keep elected officials in check — had to take a back seat to dealing with crises.

Navigating ‘combined crises’

The first hit Wichita two days before he took the oath of office in January 2020. Spirit AeroSystems, the state’s largest employer, announced massive layoffs because of the Boeing 737 Max grounding, putting the region’s economy in jeopardy.

Months later, Whipple found himself trying to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic as a leader of the city that had handed over powers to deal with a public-health emergency to the Sedgwick County Commission decades ago.

“The combined crises,” Whipple said. “I think we’re a stronger community for it. I know I’m a better person. I know I’m different today than I was when I first got into office, and I’m grateful for the experience.”

City Council meetings were contentious in a way they hadn’t been in the past, with council members at times appearing more interested in obstructing Whipple than helping him adjust to the job of mayor. By the summer of 2020, meetings regularly stretched on for hours as members of the public protested mask mandates and the city’s plans to boost police spending amid calls for police reform in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

“The Republicans made it very clear this is a Republican city, and my goal was to govern from the middle,” Whipple said. “And we did. . . . A lot of what we got done wasn’t Democratic or Republican, it wasn’t really ideological, but because some folks viewed me not as a mayor but as a Democrat. And so you don’t get the benefit of the doubt. You don’t get to explain your side or the reasoning behind something when you come off such a negative when basically my presence would trigger people.”

‘I hope Lily has an easier time’

Whipple said he thinks Wu won’t face those same hurdles.

“I sincerely hope that Lily has an easier time being mayor than I did,” Whipple said. “As far as, you know, the stuff that we had to overcome with COVID, with Black Lives Matter and the discussion around policing and then the scandals with our police and then the water boil orders and the infrastructure challenges we had and trying to save the ballpark while also modernizing our pools — just trying to move everything in the right direction so we could be a world class city. It has just been a lot these last four years, and I sincerely hope that it’s going to be easier for the next mayor because that’s going to make it better for all of us, and I wouldn’t wish some of the stuff we’ve had to get through on anyone.”

Whipple received death threats for his push to require masks in public settings in July 2020. He received more death threats in 2022 when he pushed for police accountability amid a racist text message scandal within the police department.

“You have to weigh out the negativity of being in elected office during a really toxic time in our political history with doing stuff that you believe will actually have real impact on real Wichitans. And that’s what woke me up in the morning and brought me back to work every day, regardless of the other stuff. I’m proud of our work.”

But given the chance to do it all over again, Whipple said there are things he would have changed.

He would have done some things differently

“There are a lot of different things I would have done differently if I could go back and do it again,” Whipple said. “But there was frankly no playbook. Like, during COVID, during the NDO (nondiscrimination ordinance) debates. I wish that my relationship with the police didn’t fall apart. . . . There is stuff that I wish we did better.

“Looking back, I’m not sure if there’s much I could have done, to be honest,” Whipple said. “I wish that, for example, Celeste (Racette) — I enjoyed working with her. And now she hates my guts, and I wish I could have figured out that relationship. But I don’t think, even if I could go back, there’s much I could do to change it.”

Racette, founder of Save Century II who organized a petition drive to force a vote on whether the city could tear down Century II or the former downtown public library, supported Whipple in 2019 but ran against him in the August primary, saying he failed to live up to his campaign promises. Her break from Whipple split the local Democratic Party into competing factions that never fully regrouped after the primary.

Then there was Whipple’s infamous run-in with a Wichita police officer in 2022 at a neighborhood cleanup event where he called City Manager Robert Layton and threatened to file a report against an officer who stopped him after he entered the event using the wrong entrance. The officer thought he was trying to cut the line; Whipple said he would have gladly gone to the back of the line and that he went in the wrong entrance because he thought there was a wreck or some other obstacle blocking traffic to the main entrance. Body camera video of the exchange played prominently in pro-Wu campaign ads.

“And obviously I wish I didn’t have that one bad day with the police officer and the misunderstanding at the cleanup,” Whipple said. “But also that was a humbling experience, and I needed that. I needed it as an opportunity to grow. So that’s the other aspect. In politics, you study the art of war but towards the end I was also trying to get into the art of being humble and showing grace. And I think when you go through what we’ve gone through, you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself and be able to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them.”

Whipple said he’s proud of his list of accomplishments as mayor: An ethics policy that limits gifts to elected officials for the first time in the city’s history; new investments in Century II, a building that was slated for demolition by the Riverfront Legacy Master Plan before his election; decriminalization of minor possession of marijuana and fentanyl test strips; the state’s strongest non-discrimination ordinance; a program to pave hundreds of miles of unpaved streets in low-income neighborhoods; defeating a plan to privatize the city’s golf system; a $30 million increase in police funding; a Jensen Hughes study that calls for systemic changes inside the Wichita Police Department; a grant to Safe Streets Wichita to hand out Narcan to reverse opioid overdoses; and a new contract with the city’s firefighter’s union that gave firefighters their largest raise in decades. He points to this week’s controversial decision to open an emergency winter shelter for homeless people.

“That stuff makes it worth it,” Whipple said. “It shows we have the power to really better the lives of the people we represent, if we do it right.”

Whipple looks ahead

Whipple said he wishes nothing but the best for Wu and said he would be open to meeting with her to help the transition.

“I’m happy to help out,” Whipple said. “I like her personally. This is a real job, and I think she’s in for possibly a surprise on what this is really about. But again I hope she has an easier time than I did. And I hope she’s able to get some positive things done.”

Whipple said political campaigns can make it seem like two opposing candidates are at war. But he said he does not have any ill feelings towards Wu.

“When it’s just Lily and I hanging out, we get along,” Whipple said. “I think her campaign team, her boyfriend, some of the people around her just hate my guts. But they’ve never been around me unless it was during campaigning.”

Whipple recalled that they’ve “served pancakes together at different charity events in the past. I’ve known Lily for like 10 years when she was in my living room interviewing me as a reporter. . . . So now we’re almost full circle.”

Whipple said even though he lost, he will continue to try to find ways to serve the community.

“I got to put a whole decade into public service,” Whipple said. “Not everyone gets to do that. The statehouse and then this — so my last decade was dedicated to serving the community that’s given me so much, so I’ll find other ways to give back.”