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Robert Klingenberg
Robert Klingenberg (Democratic Party) ran for election to the U.S. Senate to represent Kansas. He lost in the Democratic primary on August 2, 2022.
Klingenberg completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Robert Klingenberg's career experience includes working as a truck driver.[1]
Elections
2022
See also: United States Senate election in Kansas, 2022
General election
General election for U.S. Senate Kansas
Incumbent Jerry Moran defeated Mark R. Holland and David Graham in the general election for U.S. Senate Kansas on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Jerry Moran (R) | 60.0 | 602,976 |
 | Mark R. Holland (D)  | 37.0 | 372,214 | |
 | David Graham (L) | 3.0 | 29,766 | |
| Total votes: 1,004,956 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for U.S. Senate Kansas
The following candidates ran in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate Kansas on August 2, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Mark R. Holland | 38.1 | 101,429 |
 | Paul Buskirk | 20.2 | 53,750 | |
 | Patrick Wiesner | 17.6 | 47,034 | |
| Mike Andra | 12.6 | 33,464 | ||
 | Robert Klingenberg | 8.0 | 21,413 | |
 | Michael Soetaert | 3.6 | 9,464 | |
| Total votes: 266,554 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for U.S. Senate Kansas
Incumbent Jerry Moran defeated Joan Farr in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate Kansas on August 2, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jerry Moran | 80.5 | 383,332 |
 | Joan Farr | 19.5 | 93,016 | |
| Total votes: 476,348 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Libertarian convention
Libertarian convention for U.S. Senate Kansas
David Graham advanced from the Libertarian convention for U.S. Senate Kansas on April 23, 2022.
Candidate | ||
| ✔ | | David Graham (L) |
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Endorsements
To view Klingenberg's endorsements in the 2022 election, please click here.
Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Robert Klingenberg completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Klingenberg's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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- Labor Rights - I believe that many of our societies problems are due to lack of a real labor rights package.
- Universal Rights - I believe in a set of universal rights that I believe all people are entitled to. This includes things like healthcare, housing, and debt relief.
- Opposition - I believe our current set of senators, except one, are two sides of the same coin. It is time the people had a real opposition figure in the Senate.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Campaign website
Klingenberg's campaign website stated the following:
| “ |
Universal Rights I believe in a set of universal rights. These are rights that every American in the United States should be entitled to. I firmly believe there should be a universal healthcare system that should cover all varieties of healthcare and should not be cost-prohibitive to the lowest earners and the destitute. I believe in universal housing that should be implemented in a variety of ways using multiple policies. We need to give the People relief from being crushed by the current housing industry. We are being bombarded by rising rent costs, higher mortgage rates, and other outrageous costs associated with buying housing. Speculators are scooping up properties across the nation leaving nothing behind for the People. The goal SHOULD be to provide a home for every family. This might include temporary housing for certain situations, such as when abuse victims need a refuge from their abusers or other unforeseen circumstances. I believe in some form of universal income. A universal income could be instrumental in increasing the money in the pockets of the People. This, combined with a system of higher wages, would decrease people’s dependence on other social services like food stamps and state-funded cash assistance. Employers would be required to pay higher wages, and the smaller businesses that can’t afford to pay those wages could be subsidized by government funds. I would like to also implement a system that would subsidize smaller farms so farm workers can also be paid fairly. We should totally have a universal debt relief reformation in our country. Most of our working class citizens have been under assault from various forms of debt. I believe we should provide the largest stimulus in the history of the world to our working class citizens in this country. This giant debt relief would encompass student debt, medical debt, and many other forms of debt. It’s high time we alleviate the lower classes and start building them up so they can enter middle class. The debt systems in the United States are horrible! They need to be completely reformed. Tear it down and start from scratch! I believe in universal voter registration at 18. Combining this with the elimination of the Electoral College and implementation of Ranked Choice Voting, a true democracy could develop in the United States. Gerrymandering is a blight on our history and should be relegated to history as a huge mistake. Political division cannot continue to be sown by allowing bad actors to draw maps that are unfair to the People who live there.
The working class should absolutely be in control of the Government. The working class has been exploited for decades at every level. With rising costs of living, it is important to both make sure workers are being compensated fairly, and tacle corporate greed (the main driver of inflation). This can be accomplished by increasing the minimum wage to a thriving wage. This thriving wage should at least match the purchasing power of what the dollar was during the height of the American working class. To help address the exploitation factor, there should also be a guaranteed slate of benefits to all People, and granted access to, and availability of, more fulfilling jobs. We should be able to work in a constructive labor force. We should be able to work in a labor force that is innovative and restorative in our communities. This kind of jobs program is very possible in the United States. I believe there are two major hurdles to this achievement, though: 1)Right To Work and 2) At Will Employment. These two things are consistently used to take power out of OUR hands and to place that power in the hands of multi-million-dollar corporations. I support Unions which protect what remains of the middle class. We can increase the floor from where they negotiate to improve their ABILITY to negotiate. By propping up Unions, we can give some much-needed, immediate relief to the working class who are tired, broken, and on the brink of destitution due to circumstances they have no control over.
Rural areas of the country are left behind in the national discourse and I find that horrific and distasteful and want to put a stop to it. Our country needs to see major rural investment from the perspective of public ownership. The People who live in an area with rural food processing plants should be the owners of those plants. By granting ownership of those plants to the People, financial opportunities can spring up for those underserved communities. We can also diminish, and possibly eliminate, food deserts in Kansas, and the rest of the country, in the same way. I believe in the Family Farm. They are under constant assault by policies designed to make sure large corporations can easily eliminate them. I will pursue policies that invest in and support small farms to make sure they get a fair shake. I also want to create and fund public cooperatives for food transportation. We live in the richest country in the world. Food scarcity must be eliminated. We can take back our farms from speculators and investors, and feed the American People.
We must absolutely protect the right to bear arms. We have seen a massive spike in right- wing terrorism over the past 4 years. I have always been a Second Amendment supporter, but the last four years have really opened my eyes to the importance of it. We have seen major war between two major nations and have seen the effectiveness in having the ability to resist. This doesn’t necessarily happen to us, but we must understand there are groups operating in the US who absolutely support violence against marginalized people. Those groups train every day while awaiting their green light from whomever they believe is in charge. Armed incursions into land owned by trans people, plots to kidnap democratic politicians, plots from extremists to assassinate left-wing activists...this is the unfortunate reality we live in every day. Violence is rooted in socio-economics. Gun violence is a nationwide problem, but we will never solve the problem if we do not understand that by not solving the root problems, gun violence in the US will never be fixed. We need to invest in housing and economic opportunity can help to address these inequalities, and then we can discuss other measures. This would entail creating new jobs that pay a living wage. This would entail housing citizens in houses of THEIR OWN. This would entail providing comprehensive mental health care. This would entail confronting extremism at the sources. This would entail fully funding early education and schools nationwide. I will not support any further restrictions on firearm ownership. The best things to do now in legislature would be to expand background checks and close the gun store loophole. All control is inherently a class-based issue. We cannot increase the barrier of entry to a constitutionally-given right. I believe that the disenfranchised groups have the same access as the affluent. We must work to make gun ownership an apolitical issue. This isn’t a left-right issue. We can no longer afford to hurt themselves politically just to have an issue to campaign on. This is a right granted to all Americans. We must treat it as such. By improving background checks and closing gun show loopholes, which will not impair the ability to own firearms, we should be able to keep more weapons out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them. (I added the background checks, and gun show loophole after the heinous shooting in Texas. I do not believe these impair the ability to own firearms, but should help to keep weapons out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them)
We must start taking on the industries that are destroying the planet. A handful of companies are responsible for the vast majority of the pollution. A new set of jobs focused on cleaning up our country needs to be created. We could create a materials-reclamation program. Coupled with a trucking cooperative (something I have advocated for in the past), materials can be hauled away as landfills are cleaned up. Another idea is to collect our organic waste and create a national composting initiative to put a significant amount of the waste in our landfills to good use growing trees and food. I fully support the Green New Deal with some amendments. I do not believe the private industry will ever take the actions necessary to effectively address environmental concerns. We must begin transitioning to publicly-owned energy cooperatives. We should utilize federal power to fund green energy initiatives. We also cannot ignore nuclear power. It is safe and produces a minimal amount of waste. We an also reduce the everyday cost of living for the average consumer because they would only be required to maintain the grid. We must work together with the international community to reduce the carbon emissions in the whole world. We CAN save our planet. We need to understand that the Earth will continue on without us. What we should be doing is figuring out a way to make FUTURE generations of humans not suffer because of our negligence TODAY.
I fully support federally codifying women’s right to choose what to do with their bodies. There are no questions, and no apologies. The right to choose is a human right, and does not need to be justified. Any attempts to do so is only an attempt to control our population of women.
It is time for us to completely rethink our approach to education. I believe it is time t fully fund what I call “life-long learning opportunities.” At any time, should any of us wish to resume or begin our tech school, college, or university education, we should have that ability, and the resources necessary, to do that with no cost to us. Student debt should be eliminated for all of us.[2] |
” |
| —Robert Klingenberg's campaign website (2022)[3] | ||
See also
2022 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on June 25, 2022
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Robert for U.S. Senate, “Issues,” accessed July 27, 2022
