TOPEKA — Charlotte O’Hara took the unusual step of publishing a collection of opinion articles to help Kansas voters understand — with her words, without a filter — what kind of leader she would be if elected governor.
Her online declarations, replete with cartoons, offered insight into why a former member of the Johnson County Commission and the Kansas House should win the Kansas Republican Party’s primary election Aug. 4 instead of GOP candidates flashing more substantive pedigrees or wealthy newcomers touting their business acumen.
“If you want a true conservative that’s going to stand and represent you … I’m not going to be someone that’s going to be vacillating. I am who I am,” she said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “I threw my hat in, because the good people of Kansas need to have a choice.”
O’Hara’s argument for a dark horse candidate victory included these broadsides: “RINO Leadership Scuttles Redistricting,” “Fairy Tales: The Chiefs’ Stadium Star Bonds,” “Property Tax Shell Game Exposed,” “Stop the Cheat” and “Invasion of Bitcoin Mining in Rural Kansas.”
O’Hara said she wasn’t a candidate dedicated to the art of hiding her true policy ambitions.
“I think, typically, politicians talk in platitudes and they don’t really talk about specifics,” she said. “They don’t want to really make a commitment as to what they believe, so that they can be like a chameleon. That’s not the way I operate. I have a foundational philosophy.”
O’Hara’s GOP rivals include former Gov. Jeff Colyer, Insurance Commissioner Vicki Schmidt, Senate President Ty Masterson, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, Johnson County businessman Philip Sarnecki and former Wichita School Board member Joy Eakins. In the Democratic Party’s primary, the race is between Johnson County state Sens. Cindy Holscher and Ethan Corson.
Farm discipline
O’Hara, 75, announced her campaign for governor in March 2025. She was on the Johnson County Commission from 2021 to 2025. She was appointed to the Kansas House, and served from 2011 to 2013. After redistricting of legislative districts in 2012, she ran unsuccessfully for the Kansas Senate.
During the 2026 campaign for governor, several candidates accused rivals of being “career politicians.”
“I think the issue is not whether you have served,” O’Hara said, “but if you have become a ‘career politician,’ where your focus is no longer on the people but on the big boys.”
O’Hara said she earned an education degree from the University of Kansas, but “don’t hold that against me.” She had five children and homeschooled her two youngest daughters, “so education is extremely important.” She has lived in Johnson County for decades.
O’Hara worked as a general contractor for 20 years. She has been running a business with her sons that manufactures plastic products, including casino gambling chips.
She said her great-grandfather moved to Kansas after the Civil War. She was raised on a 400-acre Bourbon County farm along the Osage River. She learned at age 8 how to milk cows by hand, “which taught me discipline and hard work.”
“I’m the only candidate that has a rural background,” she said. “I think that that’s really valuable, as most of our state is rural.”
Abortion, taxes
O’Hara said she was opposed to abortion. She said girls under the age of 16 were having abortions in Kansas, and alleged clinics weren’t properly reporting these cases as abuse. She said each should be investigated for possible prosecution.
“When you have a girl under 16 coming in for an abortion, that raises a lot of red flags,” she said. “Is Kansas being complicit in the child sex trafficking? I mean, it’s a great possibility.”
In terms of public education, O’Hara said student reading and math test scores were low enough that a ban should be placed on use of computers in classrooms until the ninth grade. The Legislature is studying a bill to block public school students from using cellphones during school hours.
“Screens are addictive. Everyone agrees with that,” she said. “If we’re going to ban cellphones … we need to take the computers out. Go back to pencil and paper.”
O’Hara said diversity, equity and inclusion as well as other “woke” practices had to be removed from Kansas public education.
“What’s woke? It means that you lean way to the left, especially on LGBTQ,” she said.
She says Kansas gave the Kansas City Chiefs too much in bond financing, which she described as “corporate welfare,” for construction of a new NFL stadium and practice facility.
She said one of the state’s top priorities had to be reduction in property taxes, because “we can no longer be under the tyranny of being taxed out of our homes and business property.”
Election reform
O’Hara said the Legislature had too many “Republicans in name only” and they had succeeded — so far — in blocking imposition of new congressional district boundaries in Kansas. She wants four Republicans, instead of three, to be elected to the U.S. House in November. She recommended House and Senate GOP leadership force votes on a new map this legislative session.
“What about Republicans in Massachusetts where all of the district lines are so gerrymandered? There’s not one Republican,” she said.
She urged Kansans to approve an amendment to the Kansas Constitution that would require statewide elections for members of the Kansas Supreme Court. Currently, applicants go through a merit-based screening process. Governors draw from a list of three finalists when appointing justices.
O’Hara said the 2020 election showed Kansas had to do more to prevent fraud. She said former Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden’s investigation was stalled because he couldn’t gain access to voting machines to determine if votes for one candidate had been given to other candidates.
“It’s a lack of transparency,” said O’Hara, who expressed concern about widespread use of mail-in ballots.
O’Hara said she opposed President Donald Trump’s idea of the federal government taking over election administration, because “I am very much a state’s rights person.”
This story previously appeared in the Kansas Reflector.
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