Primary Polls Open Until 7:00pm

Polls for Tuesdays primary election will remain open until 7:00pm. All locally contested races will be decided in the Primary election. For the 125th House of Representative seat, incumbent Carl Holmes faces challenger Reid Petty. For County Commission District 1 it�??s incumbent CJ Wettstein versus challenger Larry Phillips, and in District 5 of the Seward County Commission incumbent Jim Rice is being challenged by Gary Andrews.

Republican primary voters could reshape the Kansas Legislature as conservatives try to oust moderate GOP incumbents from the state Senate.

Tuesday’s party primaries feature contested races in a majority of the 40 Senate and 125 House districts. Both chambers have Republican majorities.

The hottest contests were in a dozen Senate districts in which moderate Republican incumbents faced more conservative challengers. They targeted moderates included Senate President Steve Morris, of Hugoton.

Republican moderates were getting help from the state’s largest teacher’s union and other labor groups. The conservative push to remake the Senate was backed by the powerful Kansas Chamber of Commerce and the anti-tax, small-government group Americans for Prosperity.

Secretary of State Kris Kobach has predicted that only 18 percent of the state’s 1.7 million registered voters would cast ballots.