Kansas Is Key

Earlier this week, Andrew Prokop observed that “Kansas independent Senate candidate Greg Orman is the sole candidate who’s actually risen in the estimate of his state’s voters in recent weeks”:

Sean Trende calls Orman’s opponent, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, “the most vulnerable Republican incumbent”:

Orman does have real problems as a candidate, which, over the course of a full campaign, would probably drag him down. In particular, refusing to declare which party you will caucus with eventually invites people to fill in the blanks in their own minds as they focus in on the race. Given that most things in Orman’s past point toward him at least sympathizing with Democrats, it seems unlikely that people would conclude that he is a Republican. But in a short campaign, anything can happen.

Nate Cohn explains why the race is so important:

If Mr. Orman wins, it could deal a big blow to the G.O.P.’s overall chances.

Think about it this way: Well into August, most assumed that the Republicans had a 100 percent chance of winning Kansas. If the state were secure for the G.O.P., Leo, The Upshot’s Senate model, would give the Republicans a 78 percent chance of retaking the chamber. (Leo currently gives the Republicans a 61 percent chance of winning the Senate.)

Without Kansas, the Republicans would probably need to win both Alaska and Iowa. That’s certainly possible because the Republicans appear to lead in both states. Leo gives the Republicans only a 54 percent chance of taking the Senate if they lose Kansas, not much better than a coin flip.

But Harry Enten warns that Kansas voters are still making up their minds:

With Orman’s lead, why doesn’t the FiveThirtyEight model give him an even better chance of winning? The electorate in Kansas is unusually fluid for such a competitive race. We’re only a month into this campaign, and the race is still developing. We can see this by looking at the Marist poll. Only 43 percent of Kansas voters strongly supported their preferred candidate in Kansas. In Kansas’s gubernatorial race, it’s 55 percent. In Iowa’s Senate race, which Marist polled at the same time as the Kansas election, 57 percent of voters strongly supported their choice. In North Carolina’s Senate race, it’s 50 percent of voters.

The FiveThirtyEight model shows something similar. There are more voters unattached to major candidates in Kansas than in the average competitive race.

Cassidy provides some background on Orman:

Orman, a private-equity investor with a net worth of somewhere between twenty million and eighty-six million dollars, according to campaign disclosures, looks, in some ways, like a moderate Republican along the lines of Bob Dole, the longtime senior senator from Kansas. Orman is a deficit hawk, he wants tax reform, and he’s very pro-business. In other ways, though, he tilts towards the Democrats. He supports campaign-finance reform, abortion rights, (somewhat) stricter gun laws, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented aliens. In 2008, he briefly entered the Kansas senate race as a Democrat, withdrawing before the party primary. “Let’s be honest—he’s a Democrat,” Senator John McCain said last month. “He walks like a duck and he quacks like a duck and he is a duck.”

Whether that’s true or not, Harry Reid and his colleagues would much prefer to deal with Orman rather than have McConnell running things.