Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been coy when asked, as he frequently is, whether he might be considering running for Senate in his home state of Kansas, but President Trump said Tuesday that he might need Pompeo to give up his current job to make sure the seat stays in Republican hands.
The Kansas Senate seat is up for grabs in 2020 because Republican Sen. Pat Roberts is not seeking a fifth term, and some GOP leaders are worried Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state whose hard-line positions have alienated some in the party, may not be a strong enough candidate to defeat the Democrats.
Kobach lost last year’s governor’s race to Democrat Laura Kelly, and Republicans fear his nomination could give the Democrats their best chance to win their first Kansas Senate seat since 1932.
Speaking to reporters at the NATO summit in London, Trump said if it looks as though the seat might flip, he would have a heart-to-heart with Pompeo about running.
“He’s a tremendous guy doing a tremendous job,” Trump said. “You can never find anybody that can do a better job as secretary of state, but if we thought we were going to lose that, I would have a talk with Mike.”
Speculation has been running rampant for months that Pompeo is eyeing the seat, which Trump says he could win in a heartbeat.
“If you look at polling, Mike would walk away with that seat. If I thought there was a risk of losing that seat, I would say that I would sit down very seriously and talk to Mike and find out how he feels about it,” Trump said.
When asked in September by John Roberts on Fox News Sunday about whether he was ruling out a run, Pompeo gave a version of his standard response.
“I’ve said the same thing, John, for a long time. As long as President Trump is going to have me as secretary of state, which I hope is a long time, that’s what I’m going to continue to do,” he said.
Trump has been predicting that Republicans will take back the House of Representatives in the next election and hold on to the Senate and White House.
A loss in Kansas would be a setback.
“We shouldn’t lose that seat,” Trump said. “It’s a great state. It’s a state that I won overwhelmingly, as you know, we shouldn’t lose that state.”
