Republicans have a Kobach problem and, like Trump, it's not going away soon.

President Donald Trump has many imitators, but they do not include his voter fraud and immigration adviser Kris Kobach. He’s more the president’s predecessor than his clone.

Trump flipped off his party’s poobahs to endorse Kobach in the Kansas gubernatorial primary. On Tuesday night, a week after the contest, Kobach finally became the Republican nominee.

It's no wonder the president’s affinity for Kobach got the better of him. The Kansas secretary of state is a regular John the Baptist of flim-flam. He’s the original Javert of voter fraud and such a forerunner on feeding animus against immigrants that he was down on them them before it was cool.

While Trump was still a Democrat in 2004, Kobach ran for Congress on cracking down on immigrants. Kansans, who weren’t sure they should worry too much about that issue, chose the far more moderate Democratic incumbent, Dennis Moore. Two years later, Kobach started helping officials in Maricopa County and the state of Arizona draft the controversial laws that were the first in the nation to make being undocumented a state and local crime.

Conflicts of interest, claims of vote fraud

Stylistically, Kobach also mirrors the Trumpism he presaged. So loose on the stage he debates like he’s doing a lounge act, and so fond of stunts he parades around with a big fake machine gun, he’s certainly as polarizing as his ally in the White House.

And he’s just as cavalier about potential conflicts. At first, he said there was no reason he couldn’t oversee the possible recount that was expected right up to Gov. Jeff Colyer's concession Tuesday night. Then, while still insisting that “it really doesn’t make any difference” if he supervised his own recount, he passed on that responsibility to his deputy, solving nothing.

Early on Election Day, some brand new voting machines in the moderate Kansas City suburbs in Johnson County didn’t work. Some people waited so long to cast a ballot that they finally gave up and left without voting. And it took the county all night to report results.

In response to the news that the secretary of state’s office had recorded vote totals from some counties incorrectly, Kobach suggested out of nowhere but his own rucksack that non-citizens might have voted in the primary.

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Colyer then accused Kobach of further sowing chaos by misinforming counties that they should ignore mail-in ballots with smudged postmarks. “It has come to my attention,” Colyer said in a letter, “that your office is giving advice to county election officials ... and you are making public statements on national television which are inconsistent with Kansas law and may serve to suppress the vote in the ongoing primary election process.” For mild-mannered Colyer, this amounted to a cursing spree.

And if you thought maybe you heard laughter wafting across the plains, that was the sound of bipartisan Kansan howling after Kobach accused his far more by-the-book competitor of making the state look bad with all of his inflammatory talk.

Yes, that reminds you of someone.

But in a state where voters overwhelmingly preferred Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz to Trump, it’s still not clear that Kobach’s natural Trumpitude is a plus.

Failures and chicanery exposed

In the closest gubernatorial primary in Kansas history, Kobach barely beat Colyer, who had to split the "Please, God, not Kobach" vote with two other Republicans. Colyer had his own baggage — he served as lieutenant governor when Sam Brownback was governor, and was tainted by the disaster of the Brownback tax cuts. Yet it’s Kobach who was considered the weaker opponent for Democratic nominee Laura Kelly. 

His national voter fraud commission has been debunked and decommissioned. Key provisions of his Kansas voter ID law have been found unconstitutional by a judge who literally sent the former constitutional law professor back to school for a continuing ed law course.

His history of chicanery is out now, too. A recent exposé by my colleagues at the Kansas City Star and ProPublica shows he enriched himself by convincing small towns across the country to let him help them draft and defend anti-immigrant ordinances. Only, these laws didn’t hold up in court and cost the cities millions to defend.

In solid red Kansas, Kobach’s antics and bad lawyering have worn thin even among Republicans. If Colyer had ended his political career, it would have been a real public service — not just for Kansas but for America. Still, for obvious reasons, Kansas Democrats were pulling for Kobach to win the primary.

There's always a risk in getting what you wish for, and in this case that risk is Greg Orman — an independent candidate who could draw votes away from Kelly. But for now Democrats' only regret is that the vote count took just a week, since every day it dragged on was another day’s head start.

Melinda Henneberger, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is an editorial writer and a columnist for The Kansas City Star. Follow her on Twitter: @MelindaKCMO.