Royals’ and Chiefs’ ‘vote yes’ tax campaign is headed by former Ron DeSantis strategist

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Royals team mascot Sluggerrr and the Chiefs’ counterpart, K.C. Wolf. were at Union Station over the noon hour Tuesday urging Jackson County voters to support a 40-year stadiums sales tax on the first day of early voting.

The pair also star in a peppy new 30-second video ad, that includes cheerful endorsements of the tax from Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr., Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who ends the spot by saying “let’s keep this rolling.”

And by “this,” he means “the Golden Era of Sports in Kansas City,” another catch phrase often used to endorse a tax that will bring in $2 billion over several decades to support the teams, help renovate Arrowhead Stadium and partially pay for a new Royals ballpark in the Crossroads.

Behind the peppy, often publicly-positive campaign is a political consulting company better known for its negative, hardball tactics, which have shown up now and again throughout the push for the stadiums tax.

Axiom Strategies, the all-purpose political campaign firm owned by consultant Jeff Roe, is managing the campaign for the Royals and Chiefs, The Star has learned.

The Committee to Keep the Chiefs and Royals in Jackson County hasn’t gone out of its way to make that known, referring the news media seeking information to the teams’ spokesmen and a public relations firm. Roe, a conservative Republican, is a divisive figure in a Democratic-leaning town like Kansas City.

So Axiom has chosen so far to remain in the background ahead of next week’s campaign finance report deadline, when the campaign committee is required to disclose how it has spent some of the $2 million that the teams bankrolled it with, according to spot reports filed so far.

Instead, team officials have been the public face of the campaign, along with former Kansas City Mayor Sly James and his former chief of staff, Joni Wickham, who jointly own a consulting firm that was hired to encourage business, neighborhood and community groups to support the tax.

James has also debated former councilwoman Becky Nace, who chairs the opposition Committee Against New Royals Stadium Taxes.

But he and Wickham aren’t running the campaign. That’s Sam Cooper’s job.

“I’m the campaign manager,” Cooper said during the brief, on-the-record part of a phone call Tuesday to discuss the campaign’s progression since it went public six weeks ago.

A former executive director of the Missouri Republican Party, Cooper has been associated with Axiom and Roe, on and off, since he began his career as an intern a dozen years ago while he was a student at William Jewell College in Liberty.

He worked on a number of political campaigns for Republican candidates during and after college, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, which Roe managed and Cooper was regional political director.

After Cruz’ loss in the GOP primary to Donald Trump, Cooper served two stints in his Washington, D.C., office, first as the Texas Republican’s director of strategic initiatives and, after a break to run the Missouri GOP, he was from 2019-2021 Cruz’ deputy chief of staff.

Cooper rejoined Axiom after that and had a key role in U.S. Rep. Mark Alford’s 2022 congressional campaign.

More recently he was national political director for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Roe ran the DeSantis-allied super PAC Never Back Down until December when he resigned amid criticism from officials within the DeSantis campaign over Never Back Down’s direction.

DeSantis suspended his campaign a month later after coming in a distant second in the Iowa caucuses. It was around that same time that the Jackson County Legislature overrode County Executive Frank White Jr.’s veto and put the stadiums tax issue on the April ballot.

The Campaign to Keep the Chiefs and Royals in Jackson County was formed two weeks later, on Feb. 5, with Royals executive Sarah Tourville listed as co-chair.

The committee’s message has been mostly forward-looking and positive, while sowing fear by suggesting that the teams might leave Jackson County, if the tax doesn’t pass. To another county, across the state line to Kansas, another part of the country entirely?

The teams haven’t said. The campaign has also seized on another tried and true political tactic that is one of Roe’s signatures: singling out a villain for someone to vote against.

White sees himself as having been cast in that role, lashing out in a letter to the teams last week after a county legislator made a remark about White on social media that White and others saw as a racist dog whistle.

The campaign pushed back on X, formerly Twitter, saying:

“We are saddened that an unpopular and desperate politician has chosen this regrettable tactic in attempt to distract the voters of Jackson County from the opportunity to continue our 50-year partnership. With approval on April 2, our teams will invest more than $1.3 billion into this project and hundreds of millions of dollars into the Jackson County community.”

The Royals and Chiefs have complained that the ballot campaign was compressed into a shorter time frame than it might have been had White been more willing to negotiate with the teams. White countered that there was no reason to rush to a vote in 2024 when the teams’ leases don’t expire until January 2031.

He said he wanted to get a better deal for taxpayers, while campaign supporters suggest he was opposed to extending the sales tax at all.

Critics and opposing groups have complained that voters have been denied important information with the election only two weeks away. Neither team has signed lease agreements spelling out detailed financial information on their projects, and neither had announced community benefits agreements as of Tuesday.

Jackson County had signed leases in hand before putting the two previous stadiums tax issues on the ballot, in 1990 and 2006.

This time there are several unknowns, such as how much other public funding the teams intend to seek for Kansas City and the state of Missouri for their projects.

But the campaign has made assurances through public statements by team officials and in social media posts that that information will be coming soon, while underscoring the importance of a yes vote.

According to the flyers KC Wolf and Sluggerrr handed out to people outside Union Station, a yes vote means “no new taxes will be implemented, and our teams will stay in Jackson County.”

Technically, the voters would be approving a new 3/8th-cent sales tax lasting until 2064 to replace the current 3/8th-cent tax that expires in 2031.

But the campaign ignores that nuance and instead stresses the economic benefits of passing the tax in the form of what the teams claim will be “more than $993 million in total economic output for the Kansas City region, including more than $572 million in Jackson County alone.”

The campaign has not provided the public with studies to back up those claims.

The campaign flyers also claim that a yes vote will spur small business grown and job creation.

Critics have argued otherwise, but none of them showed up at Union Station Tuesday afternoon, and had they been there, KC Wolf and Sluggerrr were not about to argue with them.

On Tuesday, as on every other day, they were speechless.