Report: Koch/D.C. connection is a third of Lily Wu’s ‘outsider’ race for Wichita mayor | Opinion

I’m looking at two Lily Wu for mayor campaign flyers on my desk at the moment.

One says: “THE OUTSIDER Ready to make city hall work . . . for you, NOT THE INSIDERS.”

The other says: “Lily will stand up for families and job creators, not cronyism.”

There’s not much difference between the two, unless you read the “paid-for by” statement in the small print.

One says: “Paid for by Lily Wu for Mayor, Bill Pickert, Treasurer.”

The other says: “Paid for by Americans for Prosperity, Robert Jentgens, Treasurer.”

Wu’s street cred as an outsider took a pretty big hit earlier this week when it was revealed she had set the record for fundraising in a mayoral primary, mostly by tapping into a gold vein representing a who’s who of the wealthiest and most influential people in Wichita.

Included on that list are numerous developers and others whose businesses have benefited from a raft of city economic development subsidies.

By my count, her campaign finance report lists 549 donations, 329 of which were for $500, the maximum allowed by city code. That’s about $164,000 of the total $207,000 her campaign has raised.

Many of those donations came from essentially the same people, who get around the $500 limit by giving multiple contributions in the name of their family members and businesses they own.

For a self-proclaimed “outsider,” Wu is sure cleaning up with the insiders.

But that’s not what this column’s really about.

It’s about the other money that’s been poured into the Wu campaign, by Americans for Prosperity, a front group for Koch Industries and its chairman and CEO, Charles Koch.

As of July 20, AFP has invested $66,000 in Wu’s candidacy, pushed through offices in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia.

That’s in addition to the $119,000 Wu’s official campaign had spent through July 20. So basically, a little over one-third of the money spent so far on efforts to get Wu elected mayor has come from that single source.

It’s paid for mailers, phone banking, text messaging and who knows what all else.

Just shy of $25,000 went to People Who Think, a political advertising and marketing shop in Mandeville, Louisiana. The Postal Service got about $10,000; $7,500 went to In Pursuit Of, an Arlington-based marketing firm and another $2,500 went to TalentWave, a staffing firm in Denver.

The form shows that of the $66,000 in AFP funding for the Wu campaign, $24,500 came from a single donor, Richard Varner, the son of the late former president of Koch Industries, Sterling Varner.

It’s kind of amazing that we know this.

AFP’s been pulling strings in Wichita-area elections for years, but their spending has generally been shielded from timely disclosure because it was considered “issue advertising,” instead of “direct advocacy” for a candidate under state law.

You’ve seen those “issue” mailers probably a hundred times. They extol the virtues of a favored candidate, leaving no doubt who they want you to vote for, but they don’t use the words “vote for.”

That’s the route former Sedgwick County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn’s taking with an independent expenditure campaign supporting mayoral candidate Celeste Racette, so we don’t know yet what he’s spent or where he got it.

But this time, AFP has changed course and is directly urging a vote for Wu, meaning they had to disclose their spending at the same time the candidates did.

So where’s AFP get its money? It comes largely from another Koch-founded political group, the “Stand Together Chamber of Commerce,” which shares the same address in Arlington.

According to their most recent IRS nonprofit report, Stand Together funded Americans for Prosperity to the tune of $102 million, out of $113 million total, in 2021.

Stand Together’s website includes a Q&A with Charles Koch and Brian Hooks. Hooks, CEO of Stand Together, co-authored Charles’ book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” and he serves as president of both the Charles Koch Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute.

AFP’s CEO is Emily Seidel, who, according to her bio on the AFP website, was “director of special projects at Koch Companies Public Sector, where she worked on a team to build some of the capabilities that make up the Stand Together community today.”

Jentgens, whose name appears on all those Lily Wu mailers, is also in Arlington and is the Director of Government Finance and CFO of Stand Together and AFP, and several other Koch-created groups.

He was the CFO at the National Republican Congressional Committee, but quit, reportedly in disgust over the Jan. 6 incursion at the Capitol that sought to overturn the 2020 election and reinstall Donald Trump as president.

That dovetails nicely with a report this week in the New York Times that Charles Koch and Stand Together recently gave $50 million to AFP in a push to scuttle Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Does a candidate for Wichita mayor getting a third of their campaign out of Washington groups, that are also spending on presidential level politics, make that candidate an outsider?

I don’t know. I’ll have to contemplate that for a minute.