Calvin Hayden, the sheriff of Johnson County, Kansas, who for years promoted a Trumpian investigation of the county’s election system, was defeated in a Republican primary Tuesday night by Doug Bedford, his former second in command.
Hayden took a keen interest in the election system after Donald Trump lost Johnson County in the 2020 White House race, despite later acknowledging that he initially hadn’t known “anything about elections.” His office claimed to have received hundreds of “tips alleging fraud in our local elections” and launched a secretive, multiyear investigation.
Though he often refused to discuss the probe publicly — even as the years dragged on without any charges being filed or evidence shared — Hayden frequently told attendees of conservative events about “shenanigans” in the “rigged” election system, and about “foreign entities … manipulating the vote how they want to.”
Public frustration with the probe peaked earlier this year, when Hayden said he had a “warrant in hand” to review ballots from the 2020 election — a claim that turned out to be false.
“Everything indicates that he was untruthful,” Bedford, Hayden’s Republican challenger in the race for sheriff, told HuffPost in May.
Hayden’s pursuit of election conspiracy theories was notable because of Johnson County’s size — he represented what was easily the largest jurisdiction at a far-right sheriffs event in Las Vegas in 2022 — and because the county has over the years shifted from Republican-leaning to swing-voting.
The county, largely made up of suburbs of Kansas City, is the most populous in Kansas, and in recent years has become home to a large number of transplants from Democratic-tilting states — who were “bringing some of their politics from the crummy place they live to my county,” Hayden once griped.
Trump hasn’t helped Republicans in Johnson County, underperforming previous GOP presidential nominees there in both of his election cycles. Though Trump was able to carry the county in 2016, 2020 marked the first time a Republican presidential candidate had not won Johnson County in a century. Rep. Sharice Davids (D) represents the area in Congress, having unseated a Republican incumbent in 2018 to become one of the first two Native American congresswomen.
Bedford will run in November’s general election against Byron Roberson, the police chief of Prairie Village, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for sheriff.