Coming up on KTWU is a 2026 IGI Election Special, where I talk with two candidates for Kansas's second congressional district, Democrat Don Coover and Republican Derek Schmidt.

Stay with us.

This program on KTWU is brought to you by the Carol Jory Foundation.

Hello, and welcome to a 2026 IGI Election Special.

I'm your host, Bob Beatty.

It's another big election year for Kansas, and we'll be with you all the way as we talk to the candidates and dive into the important issues that face the state.

All the way up to Election Day on November 3rd.

For this program, I'm talking to two candidates seeking to represent you in the second Congressional District.

The challenger from the Democratic Party, Don Coover, and the incumbent from the Republican Party, Derrick Schmidt.

So let's get to it and meet these two candidates for the second district.

Well, I'm here with Don Coover, the Democratic candidate for the second Congressional District.

Don, thanks so much for taking the time to be here with us.

It is my pleasure and opportunity.

I love it.

Yeah.

So you're obviously a first time candidate for the second Congressional District.

That's right.

I'm a first time candidate for everything.

Everything okay.

So there's going to be a lot of viewers who don't know much about you.

Okay.

Before we get into the issues.

Tell us about yourself, where you grew up and, and how you got where you are now and some of your experiences.

Okay.

I was born in the southeast corner of Kansas.

Grew up in Neosho County, Kansas, outside a little town called, Erie.

Grew up on a farm, dairy farm, small dairy farm.

My dad was a dairy farmer.

My mom my mom was a schoolteacher.

Graduated from Erie High.

Vietnam was rocking back then.

I was had a low draft number, so I was going to obviously be in the service.

I had an opportunity to go to the military academy at West Point, and I did graduated in 1973, spent several years in the Army as an infantry lieutenant for a little while.

Later, I flew helicopters and airplanes for a military intelligence service in the Army.

Spent several years in the Army.

Decided to get out, pursue a career in veterinary medicine, and went to Kansas State University.

Applied to veterinary school.

Was accepted.

Graduated from vet school with home, bought some land, started a ranch, and a veterinary practice.

And for the last 30 some years.

I run a small veterinary clinic.

We do a lot of embryo transfer work.

Fairly well known for that.

Raise cattle.

I'm decided to run for Congress because I am disappointed in the political environment we find ourselves in.

Former Kansas Governor John Carlin grew up on a dairy farm.

I was a dairy farmer.

I don't.

Yes.

You know, Governor Cox, I've met in several times.

Yeah, when I interviewed him.

So that's a fascinating.

Yeah.

Background.

Yeah.

And very long.

Were you in the service?

Ten years, five months and 19 days on active duty.

And then I spent six and a half years or so in the reserves.

I never retired from the military.

I mean, I flew helicopters and airplanes for a long time in the Army, and it was a great, great experience for me.

You were in the infantry and then became a helicopter pilot when I graduated from West Point as a military intelligence officer.

But at the time, they required that you get a combat arms experience.

And so I decided to go to, infantry for my combat arms because I could go to Fort Riley.

And that was close to home or fairly close to home.

So, yeah, I spent a year in the infantry, and then I applied to flight school, went to flight school, learned to fly helicopters and fixed wing reconnaissance aircraft, and I flew reconnaissance airplanes for the military overseas for several years.

Now we'll get into the issues.

But you have me fascinated flying a helicopter.

It looks really difficult.

Little tricky to me, is it?

Yeah.

It's it's it's a maybe a dumb question.

Is it trickier than, you know, just a regular airplane or is it something you really.

Is it the same or different?

It's a real coordination exercise because you're controlling a different portion of the aircraft controls with both feet.

And in both hands.

And and you also in some helicopters have to control the throttle with your hand.

So everything you do with one limb affects the other three.

And so yeah, it's difficult.

And airplanes are much more forgiving than helicopters, much more.

But helicopters are enormously capable, of course.

So what you mentioned it very briefly, but, what was that moment where you said, you know what?

I'm going to run for Congress?

Was there a moment or just a compilation of a number of things?

I would say?

No, but it became like a lot of people very disappointed in January 6th of 2021, very disappointed.

And, The political environment, I think has evolved into something that I'm uncomfortable with.

And I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with.

And I've had several people say, you know, we need to make a significant change here.

I think we need we need to get back to basics, basically.

And so, yeah, I would say over the last couple, 3 or 4 years became alarmed at the way things were developing.

And I would like to be part of the what I think is the solution.

And myself and probably some others by now.

I've seen your television commercial.

So if you're a new candidate, that's probably the first commercial you.

Yes.

You've done, features your dairy background will let viewers, see it.

Yeah.

But in your commercial, you mentioned, Derek Schmidt, the incumbent.

Corruption.

So what?

What are you alluding to there?

Or what is it specifically?

You're you're talking about them?

First, I really I don't have a dairy operation that the beef cattle operation was a full disclosure.

But back to the corruption issue.

I think that if you're making rules and regulations for people, and you tend to make those rules and regulations favor large corporate entities and, companies that are providing support to your reelection campaign, and the decisions you make are self-serving or serve the interests of those, those big corporations.

Then I think that that's corruption.

I think that you owe your obligation to the people who like you to the position you're in, and you should be looking out for their best interests, not some company.

And we before we started filming, we start we were chatting a bit about this and it.

I agree with you.

It does seem like when we there that the we'll just say billionaires, but very sure the wealthy and connected have always had some role in American politics.

But in the last few years, it seems to has increased and both sides.

But for example, I always have, you know, Elon Musk being put in charge of of those government efficiency of a billionaire, cutting edge, cutting jobs, whatever the case, that seems like, that's something new to me anyway.

And you were talking about that as well.

I think that people feel that elected representation should be responding to their needs and issues.

I don't think they feel they should be able to basically sell their efforts, sell their interest to the highest bidder, even if he's worth several hundred million dollars.

People expect to be represented by the people they send there to represent them.

They don't expect to have somebody buy their way to the top and make the decisions that are in their best interest, and not not to let the the voters best interest.

I find it offensive.

So you have a military background.

So obviously a US Congress person, has this is supposed to have a lot of say in foreign policy, with funding and, and those sorts of things.

So let's, let's talk a little bit about foreign policy, the Iran war.

What are your thoughts on that?

We shouldn't have gotten into that.

The way we got into that we should have had.

First off, we should be consulting with our allies.

I had extensive experience in the military working with overseas militaries because of the the nature of the work I did.

And so I worked with a lot of the different armies in NATO, and we didn't run exercises without extensive coordination with everybody else in the area that might be impacted.

And we certainly shouldn't start wars without consulting with allies.

We should certainly start a war having an idea of what we're trying to do, how we're trying to do it, to know when we get it done and then what we'd like to do, with the results, how to get out, what we're trying to accomplish.

I don't see any of that in Iran at all.

We've had all sorts of unintended consequences.

Certainly nobody expected to see this will go to $6.50 a gallon or gasoline over $4.

We couldn't get our fertilizer out of there.

It has obviously been idiosyncratic, run impulsively derived.

It's a mistake all the way around.

The background I have in the military suggest that you don't go ahead and just bomb the hell out of somebody and hope for the best.

That's not a military plan.

Quickly.

On another foreign policy, you talked about NATO.

A lot of America's NATO's NATO allies are very much in support of Ukraine.

Is the current administration supporting Ukraine, or do you believe it should support Ukraine?

I'll just ask you about that situation.

Yes.

I think Ukraine deserves our support.

They're not a member of NATO, but a lot of our NATO allies are very concerned about the war in Europe, the largest war since World War two.

And Russia is obviously the the aggressor there.

And so I think we have an obligation because of our background and our principles to support Ukraine.

And I think we owe it to our allies to be a very large part of that support.

And I think we should be coordinating closely with them because it's in our best interest, it's in the best interests of our allies, it's in the best interests of our relationship around the world.

And certainly Ukraine should have everyone's sympathy and support to the extent that we can.

You sort of alluded to this as an effect from Iran, but this, this, the issue of affordability.

I know Donald Trump has said it's phony at some point, but when I go to Dillon's, I don't think it's phony.

So is there what are your thoughts on affordability?

We seem to have a situation where wages have increased, but prices are are higher than the increase in wages.

And so I almost get a vicious circle here.

Is there something, anything, Congress can do to address some of the problems?

Yes.

Congress not only can, but they have an obligation to address a lot of issues.

The tariffs would be an excellent example.

Okay.

Congress are the people that are supposed to be determining when tariffs are appropriate, how they should be applied, what we're trying to protect, what we're trying to do.

We shouldn't be using tariffs as a club to beat countries up that we have some disagreement with and affordability.

There's oceans of issues.

You know the tariffs are taxes on people for consumers.

The war on Iran has had enormous impact on the farmers and ranchers and and people that are trying to transport supplies and so forth.

Everything moves on diesel in the United States, including trains and so forth.

And so we really need to take a broad spectrum to Congress needs to reassert their authority to make decisions.

That's impacting the, the, the, the economy.

And they've kind of given that responsibility away.

And and the results show that costs are out of control.

Health care is a mess.

They've got Medicare and Medicaid.

Congress, people like my opponent Derek Schmidt, takes enormous amounts of money from pharmaceutical companies and health care insurances, insurance companies.

And and you see that with health care premiums climbing out of sight, we've got to get back to doing business for the people we're supposed to be working for, not letting somebody buy our attention.

Oh, we have about a time goes fast.

We have about a minute and a half.

And because maybe because of your background, I want to ask you, what is a congressperson would you like to do for rural Kansas?

There's big sections of the second district that, of course, are are more rural than the cities.

And you have a background in that.

Of course.

Growing up, what are some of your thoughts on on how to help or make things better for rural Kansans?

I think that we need to ensure that everybody has access to things like broadband, the internet, fiber optics, because it makes you much more capable of interacting with customers near and far around the world.

In fact, I think we need to do that.

I think we need to pay close attention to things like, large multinational corporations that can have an effective, a monopolistic control over certain things, like harvesting, cattle or selling grain and shipping it overseas and that sort of thing.

We need to take a close look at that, because it really impacts people and their ability to make a living.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Time did go fast.

I appreciate you being here.

Thank thank you.

Next up, Republican Derek Schmidt.

I'm here with Congressman Derek Schmidt.

And thank you so much for joining us for this program.

Thanks for having me.

My forward to talking to you.

And you.

This sounds bad, but you are a creature.

That sounds really bad.

But you were a person.

I'll put it that way.

Of the of the state.

Meaning you are a legislator for many years well known in the Kansas legislature and then became attorney general.

So you're is attorney in the legislature.

You've got budgets and you got bills and, you know, you you had positions of leadership.

And then in the attorney general, your Medicare fraud, and you're doing all sorts of things.

It's all a big lead up to say now you're one of and if we include the Senate, 535 members, is that a tough adjustment?

Have you you know, it's a big question.

Have you enjoyed it or is it did you have to say this is going to be a lot different than what I've been doing?

Well, yes, to all the above.

I mean, I have enjoyed it.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to serve here, but it is different.

And I you know, I'm constantly sort of a student of political science as well as a practitioner in the service.

I'm often thinking about the comparisons and the contrast.

I mean, attorney general in any, any role, state or federal.

It's an executive job.

You're making decisions, you're practicing law, you're managing people.

None of which is the case in a representative job.

And so I'm dusting off some of the old skills from the state legislative days and attorney general, literally life and power of life and death.

Individuals, you know, the prosecutions occur or investigations and, not I mean, we no matter why that's the case in the US Congress, but just not the same.

But how about the how does the traffic how do you deal with the traffic?

I mean, I tell people some decisions sometimes say to me, oh, did you do this or that?

And the other go here.

I was like, no, I'm too spoiled.

I drive to the Kansas City airport.

I'm there in less than an hour.

Well, here's the beauty.

We we rented an apartment and it's close enough.

I can walk to work in the morning.

So no traffic concerns day in, day out.

That's how you solve that?

Absolutely.

Do you like DC?

Yeah, I do, I mean it's not Kansas, but it's a I mean, it is the nation's capital not to state the obvious remarkable things have happened there over our history still is the case.

And, you know, there was a sense of all about the place and there should be for every citizen.

You, gave a talk just a few days ago at, Republican event, and you talked about you weren't necessarily pleased with the animus in American politics.

And then a couple days later, you know, I'm reading about a Donald Trump visiting Kansas.

He called Cindy Holscher a radical lunatic as our governor Laura Kelly was a Dumb-o-crat.

And then he said, the Democrats agenda is a plan to extinguish Western civilization.

So is that all a joke?

Though it seems pretty sort of mean spirited.

So is a about are both parties.

They look to me like both parties go too far with some of this animus.

Yeah, this I mean, I've been around the public discussion in a while, and this is about as cantankerous as I remember it.

We have folks in both parties who love to pick a fight and love to maybe exaggerate, to make a point and then some.

I think just this they just go too far sometimes.

I mean, one thing we've done in this race, now in our campaign, we've stayed positive.

You know, we I don't mind having a debate about different ideas.

That's fine.

But we have chosen, not to go negative on television, run ads saying the other side's a scoundrel and a rascal.

I mean, it's just let's just have an exchange of ideas.

So we don't want to contribute to the problem more than.

More than, I suppose, just naturally happens.

I think in the current, right now, we've gone a step too far that we could back it up.

And it's often personal, and that's that's what I it doesn't contribute to the public debate.

I mean, it's one thing if you're debating, you know, candidate A says believes this candidate B says believes this.

They are at odds and each thinks they're correct.

So they're making the case to voters on why they're right.

It's quite another when you have candidate A's and Candidate B whereas funny close and you have candidate B saying candidate A is a crook.

And I say, well, that doesn't contribute to the debate, doesn't doesn't advance the public discourse.

Let's go.

We've heard this term, of course, a lot the term of affordability.

And I read something.

I just want to read it too.

It's very interesting.

The author wrote.

The affordability crisis offers a chance to rethink Partizan assumptions.

Economic populism is reshaping the Democratic and Republican Party's alike.

At its core is the conviction that working people deserve better.

There's nothing Partizan about a belief that working people should be able to afford the necessities.

There should be enough housing to go around that Americans should be able to weather a health care crisis without going deep into debt, or that we shouldn't have to live in fear for the aging relative who lacks adequate care.

So we know prices fluctuate.

There's been inflation.

That's aggravating, annoying.

But this author sort of arguing there's these big problems that hit people hard.

And she you know, I think it was a she she mentioned health care and housing.

We talked before we started taping here.

How do we get at those big ones?

Well, also trying not to just throw money at it, which can cause inflation and then defeat the whole purpose.

It's a big question, but we have it's a huge question.

And it's you know, we live kind of back to the earlier point we were discussing.

You know, we live in a time when our politics are our soundbite based.

They're short, they're crisp, they're often oversimplifying of issues.

And that makes it, I think, harder to deal with things like public policy as it relates to inflation, which is a long term, issue.

I mean, a big part of why we got into this mess is that during the pandemic, the government printed and spent far more money at a faster pace than it ever had before.

And that created a lot of new baseline expectations for support, in public programs.

Very hard to back off of that.

And so the baseline is higher and that money is still in the system chasing.

It's driven up prices.

And as you know, I mean, I'm no economist, but I've, I played on, on TV, use the old expression, I don't even do that.

But you know, you typically don't see deflation in prices, right?

It's unusual to do so.

And that has its own challenges that that associate with it.

So often when things inflate, that's like a ratchet.

And when we had 9% inflation 3 or 4 years ago coming out of the pandemic, even if you'd had zero since then, it hasn't been zero.

But it's been a slower rate of inflation.

But you're still 9% up from where you started.

And that's the problem.

Yeah, I think that's you know, it's a midterm election.

So there's that's going to be part of the frustration of this battle between, fixing something right now.

Hey, how do we get that price down?

Like, oh, let's do something with cattle to get the meat price down.

But the there's actually big time fixes, just for example, like getting drug prices down.

But that's a big project.

And you're working on I assume some of those types of things in the Congress, hopefully in a bipartisan fashion, because that's probably what's going to take it does for the big for the big structural things.

That's absolutely true.

I mean, we, you know, back to the inflation point, but it illustrates the general point.

Part of how we got here was spending way too much money on a very fast basis.

The way you control that has to be over time.

You can't do it immediately.

The populist, the politics of the moment don't allow that.

And if it's going to be sustainable, it really has to be some type of a bipartisan agreement that at least agreeing that that's the direction to go.

You can differ on how to get there and how fast and and where and how much.

But if you don't even agree that the government spends more than that, it can sustain, then, it's very difficult to move us in that direction and fix some of these underlying problems if you are reelected.

To that point, are there a couple, 1 or 2 of those types of things you want to go back and work on in a bipartisan fashion, hopefully to address, this sort of bigger picture?

We have some we have some challenges that have to be done bipartisan.

And if we do nothing, we're we're making a decision as a country.

It's not so much on the spending side, but it's on the sustainability side.

For example, I think the actuaries are not telling us it's 2032, the year 2032, that Social Security Trust fund runs to zero.

I think Medicare is about a year either earlier or later.

I never remember exactly.

I don't serve on the committees of jurisdiction that do the deep dive into the details.

But I'm certainly, you know, one of the folks who believes strongly, we've got to find a way to come together and make sure those programs are sustained.

They're really critically important to people.

You cannot do that on a Partizan basis.

They will not be.

The politics of it are not sustainable unless you come together and say, how are we going to do this?

At least agree on the problem.

We have a few minutes left.

I wanted to get to something else like that.

Yeah, sound bite.

But I think if you are reelected, I think it's going to be a big challenge again that everyone has to get on board on fairly quickly, which is the AI issue.

And there are some who are arguing, well, the this is self-regulation.

There's others arguing it's more like nuclear weapons.

There has to be a government involvement because it's so important, what have you.

What's your thinking on that if you're reelected?

Because we know it's you're going to have to be it's going to have to be addressed.

I think on the whole artificial intelligence piece, it is it may not be a new technology to those that focus on this, but for the vast majority of us in the public, this is this is new territory.

I mean, this is this is something that was, you know, part of sort of the national civil discourse or the public policy discourse, even just a handful of years ago.

And so, it's unsteady ground as people try to figure out what the right public policy move is, what should be regulated, what guardrails should there be?

Should there be some, and my own view is we're we're no, we're close at this point to a consensus on even what the issues are that have to be solved, much less how to solve them.

So I do think we're very much in the in the information gathering stage.

I think Congress, and the administration and the public ought to be more engaged when we have people in the tech sector who, you know, for example, is having just 2 or 3 weeks ago suggested there could be existential threats, to human society.

That ought to get everybody's attention.

And, and we ought to start asking the questions, bring those folks in for hearings, ask them to explain what that means, why they're so alarmed, what their thoughts are.

And then on the flip side of that, though, is what we don't want to do is put a shackle on a remarkable new technology and then wake up in two years, five years, ten years, 20 years, discover that, well, we had a hand tied behind our back.

Our competitors in China or elsewhere didn't, they have now set the international norms for perhaps generations of AI regulation and use, or they've just flat out run us on the defense and military side in terms of AI applications, which are enormous and rapidly evolving.

So it's that difficult balance.

You want to be cautious, but not so cautious that the caution itself becomes reckless and you lose control of perhaps generations of, you know, economic and national security growth.

So it's a tough issue.

You mentioned self-regulation.

My instinct is, I think it's very good that the some of the tech companies, at least, and others have stepped up with self-regulation.

I'm not sure that's a long term fix, but it's something that can happen quickly, and at least that is a stopgap in place.

While we figure out how we get this public policy discussion better informed and, you know, hopefully get some consensus developed.

I think that's a it's a it's an important issue.

Thank you for that.

It's like 45 seconds.

Is there an issue that you're not seeing being talked about at all really.

And that you're going to go if you get reelected, you're going to go back to DC and and work on or that just doesn't get a lot of publicity.

So Kansas especially maybe.

Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, there are a lot of issues we're going to work on, but, I don't know if they I mean, you only have 45 seconds.

Yeah.

Let me try this one.

Because I think, you know, the health care debate is big and it's loud and it's often held at a very high level.

But health care fixes are usually very specific.

You know, this helps this type of hospital in this type of community, but it's irrelevant to that one over there.

But it helps this change, which is different, would help this group of providers.

But it doesn't help these over here.

And I do think there are some very Kansas specific things like encouraging more, enabling more rural emergency hospital conversions if communities want to do it, that we need to be working on and we are.

So it's that type of really rifle shot fix that I think can make a difference.

Yeah.

Well thanks so much for joining us.

It always does.

I'm good to be with you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

You've been watching an IGI 2026 election special.

Keep your eye out for our continued programing on this important election year for Kansas.

The only comments for us.

Please send us an email at issues@ktwu.org.

If you would like to view this program again or any previous episodes of IGI, visit us online at watch.ktwu.org For KTWU I'm Bob Beatty, thanks for watching.

This program on KTWU is brought to you by the Carol Jory Foundation.