Senator Dinah Sykes Contact information

Dinah Sykes, born on April 10, 1977, is an American politician who has been serving in the Kansas Senate from the 21st district since 2017. She has been the Minority Leader of the Kansas Senate since 2021.

Sykes was born in Tennessee, U.S. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Trevecca Nazarene University. Before entering politics, she was a stay-at-home mom and a personal chef. She also served as a PTA president.

Sykes was first elected to the Kansas Senate as a Republican in November 2016. In December 2018, Sykes switched to the Democratic Party along with three other female Kansas legislators—Senator Barbara Bollier, Representative Joy Koesten, and Representative Stephanie Clayton.

In December 2020, Sykes was elected by the Senate Democratic Caucus to be Minority Leader of the Kansas Senate. She is the first woman in Kansas history to hold this position.

On her personal website, she shares that the first time someone asked her to run for office, she didn’t take it seriously. She was the President of the PTA for her boys’ school and had walked to the State Capitol to support public education, but she didn’t think that qualified her to be a legislator.

However, as she listened to the conversation happening in Topeka, she only heard the voices of far-right extremists, who cared more about economic experiments than their community. The next time someone asked her to run, she felt called to stand up for regular people – for soccer moms and neighbors that had told her they were fed up with the direction of their state.

In her first term, she learned that the voice of a frustrated parent is just as effective on legislators as it is on her own children. Through bipartisan legislation, they repealed the Brownback tax experiment, returned to constitutional levels of funding for public education, and made important investments in early childhood programs.

She is running for a second term because she believes Kansas should be a state where everyone has access to affordable health care, a world-class public education system, and a legislature that solves problems instead of creating them. Through smarter, more efficient governing, she believes they can save time and money while achieving better outcomes for people’s everyday problems.

She holds many titles. She’s a State Senator, an advocate for children, a fierce supporter of public education, a wife, and a mother, but she prefers to be called Dinah.