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Unaffiliated Voter Numbers Grow More Than Major Parties In Kansas

Stephen Koranda
/
KPR/File photo

The number of Kansas voters not affiliated with the Democratic, Republican or Libertarian parties is growing.

Kansas remains a Republican stronghold: The GOP is the state’s largest party with 44 percent of the registered voters in the state.

The number of unaffiliated voters stands at about 30 percent, higher than the ranks of Democrats.

Credit Nadya Faulx/infogr.am

Secretary of State Kris Kobach said during a press conference Thursday that the number of unaffiliated voters has been growing in recent years, and the presidential race this year has sustained that trend.

"Mr. Trump’s candidacy has pulled in some individuals who have not been involved in politics before, and they don’t have any particular affiliation with a party but they might be attracted to the prospect of voting just by the fact that Trump is involved," he said.

Kobach says the number of unaffiliated voters grew faster this year--up 3.9 percent from four years ago--than the ranks of Republicans or Democrats.

The secretary of state’s office says Kansas has a record 1.81 million registered voters this year, 2.3 percent higher than the 1.77 million voters for the last presidential election, in 2012. Among registered voters, 805,000 are registered with the GOP. The party's numbers grew by 1.9 percent in four years.

Democrats have 449,000 voters, up 0.7 percent from 2012.

Unaffiliated voters in Kansas total 542,000.

Libertarians had the biggest surge among the four parties, with their numbers up 36.2 percent. But with 15,500 voters, they're still less than 1 percent of the total.

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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar.

To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.