Hijacking the plains

WICHITA, Kan.—Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts has never had to fight as he’s fighting now to win an election in Kansas. The GOP holds the Kansas governorship, both Senate seats, and every congressional district in the state. The seat Roberts holds has belonged to a Republican since 1920.

In 2012, a representative from the Republican National Committee came to Kansas to visit with state party executive Clay Barker. After picking up the bill, the official joked with Barker that the lunch tab was the most money the RNC would have to send to Kansas that year.

“Kansas is usually a state that the Republican National Committee doesn’t need to help,” Barker said. But now, the RNC is sending funds and staff to try to buoy Roberts’ foundering campaign against independent candidate Greg Orman. Depending on the poll, Orman is either behind by five points or leading by 10 against the incumbent Roberts, a three-term senator who has never garnered less than 60 percent of the vote in Kansas.

How did Kansas turn unexpectedly from deep red to watery pink? The nationwide fracture of the Republican Party between the tea party and establishment factions played a role. “I just felt the Republican Party was drifting way too far to the right,” said Jim Yonally, who leads a group of former Kansas elected officials called Traditional Republicans for Common Sense. The group’s more than 70 members are among many in Kansas who think Republican Gov. Sam Brownback went too far in his conservative reforms.

According to a poll released Oct. 1 by Suffolk University and USA Today, President Barack Obama has a higher approval rating among Kansans than Brownback—41 percent favorable for Obama versus Brownback’s 38.4 percent.

Roberts’ similarly low approval rating of 38.8 percent could be due to guilt-by-association with Brownback. While establishment Republicans think the senator drifts too far right, there is not much love between Roberts and the tea party, either. Instead, the conservative wing of the GOP supported Roberts’ primary opponent, Milton Wolf, a physician from Kansas City. Wolf took 40 percent of the primary vote by portraying Roberts as a tired establishmentarian out of touch with Kansans after 47 years in Washington. (Roberts began working there in 1967 on the staff of Kansas Sen. Frank Carlson.)

Just three weeks out from the general election, Wolf had made no move to mend fences between Kansas Republicans by endorsing Roberts. (The national Tea Party Express group stepped in Oct. 13 and endorsed Roberts after having supported Wolf in the primaries.)

Roberts still had a solid lead in Kansas, though, until Sept. 3, when Democrat Chad Taylor, a Kansas City–area district attorney, dropped out of the race, handing the liberal vote to Orman. Between Taylor’s supporters and Republicans who are disgruntled with Roberts, Orman picked up enough support to genuinely threaten the GOP in Kansas.

Barker with the Kansas Republicans said he has no doubt the national Democrats orchestrated Taylor’s withdrawal when they realized Taylor couldn’t win the election, but Orman could. U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., reportedly met with Taylor personally and pushed him to resign. McCaskill confirmed to McClatchy News that the conversation took place, but declined to comment on what she told Taylor.

“Until the day he resigned, he was telling everyone he was in it to the end,” Barker said. Since withdrawing, Taylor has refused to comment on the race or the reason he resigned. He did successfully sue to get his name off the ballot, ensuring the race would be a showdown between Orman and Roberts.

Orman is a wealthy entrepreneur from the Kansas City area who has never held political office. He started up a Senate campaign as a Democrat in 2008, but dropped out before the primaries. He’s campaigning as a Washington outsider who thinks neither party is doing a good job. He says he will likely caucus with whichever party wins the majority in the election, but he also denounced leaders of both parties and said he would vote for either Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., or Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, for majority leader.

Orman has made his fair share of campaign contributions in the past, most of them to Democrats. His beneficiaries include both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during their presidential races, Sen. Al Franken, and one $1,000 contribution to Sen. Harry Reid in 2007, according to The Lawrence Journal-World. He has also contributed to Republicans, including former Missouri congressman Todd Akin, whose comments about “legitimate rape” and pregnancy made him a pariah in the 2012 election.

Republicans have leveraged Orman’s contributions history into the central message of Roberts’ campaign: A vote for Orman is a vote for Democrats. “If the Republican base turns out for Roberts, he’s won,” Barker said. Republicans from all factions of the party have turned up in Kansas to campaign for Roberts, from Mitt Romney and John McCain to Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin. Barker said that though Orman seems to have a wide base of supporters, they are not 100 percent committed to him.

“The people that are leaning for Orman are very soft support, they don’t really know much about him,” Barker said. Roberts campaign staffers, who knock on about 1,000 doors a day in Kansas, are finding that out firsthand. Orman supporters “can usually be convinced at the door to change their vote if they’re willing to just talk for a few minutes.”

A lot is riding on those minutes in the doorways of Kansas homes in the next few weeks. A victory for Orman would mean more than just a political coup in Kansas; it could ensure control of the Senate stays in the hands of Harry Reid and the Democrats.