Introduction
Michael Capps is an American politician. He is a member of the Kansas House of Representatives for the 85th district.
Career
In 2016, Capps ran for the Kansas House of Representatives for the 95th district against incumbent Democrat Tom Sawyer. Each was unopposed in the primary. Sawyer won with 54.4% against 45.5% of the vote for Capps.
The Sedgwick County Republican Central Committee appointed Capps to fill the remainder of the term for the 85th district after the resignation of Chuck Weber, effective July 14, 2018. Not long after his appointment to the vacant seat, allegations of child abuse surfaced. The Kansas GOP cut ties with Capps after it was revealed that he was found guilty of child abuse in 2017. The party asked him to withdraw from the November election to retain his District 85 seat. "Unfortunately, he has chosen to remain a candidate," the party's letter said. "Mr. Capps has been made aware that his decision to stay in the race is not supported by the Kansas Republican Party." The Kansas Department for Children and Families had found Capps guilty of child abuse but the state had overturned the decision for technical reasons.
2018
In 2018, Capps ran for the seat in House District 85, giving his address as 3103 North Governeour, Wichita, with a mailing address of 6505 E Central Ave #110. He had filed to run for seat 97, but after Weber resigned, he said he lived at the Governeour street address, a home which had been scheduled to be sold at auction on June 27, 2018. Democrats complained it was not Capps' true address, but the state Objections Board, composed of Lieutenant Governor Tracey Mann, Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Secretary of State Kris Kobach, all Republicans, refused to uphold the complaint.
Capps received 54% of the vote to 46% for Democrat Monica Marks.In 2018, Capps was endorsed by the Family Policy Alliance of Kansas, Kansans for Life, and the National Rifle Association.The Kansas Policy Institute gave him a 94% fiscally conservative evaluation in 2019.
2019 Wichita Mayor election
During a hotly contested Wichita mayoral runoff nonpartisan election to be held on November 5, 2019, in an attack on the challenging candidate, a Democrat, a salacious video appeared on-line. The anonymously produced and circulated video made a claim of sexual harassment against the challenger that had in fact been copied, word-for-word from an actual claim, made against an anonymous Republican state senator in a Kansas City Star article two years earlier. Although elaborate covers had been implemented in Wyoming and New Mexico to conceal the identities of the perpetrators of the smear, an investigation by the Wichita Eagle revealed that the producer of the defamation was Capps, the campaign manager for the Republican incumbent mayor. It had been filmed a downtown Wichita office building that Capps shared with another alleged ally of the incumbent mayor, a Wichita City Councilman. After Sedgwick County, Kansas Republican party chair Dalton Glasscock publicly called for Capps to resign, Capps then claimed, less than two days before the election, that Glasscock had actually approved the production of the ad, an allegation which Glasscock denied.
When an Eagle reporter went to the home in the wake of the October 2019 accusations about the fabricated attack video against Brandon Whipple, an unidentified young man living there said he was "house sitting" and hadn't seen Capps, "in a while."