WICHITA, Kan. — About 250 Republican insiders and activists gathered in a stately barn in the suburbs of Wichita to see former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
The event raised $150,000 for Sen. Pat Roberts. The haul was hardly chump change for an afternoon luncheon in Kansas, a relatively small state situated far from the national GOP fundraising circuit.
And, it was important to the incumbent senator’s bid accumulate enough resources to hold off multimillionaire challenger Greg Orman, who has the capacity to self-fund his campaign.
Republicans describe Orman as the de facto Democratic nominee — actual Democratic nominee Chad Taylor removed his name from the Nov. 4 ballot at the urging of Washington Democrats.
The independent has run strong in the polls, threatening Roberts’ re-election and the GOP’s prospects for winning control of the Senate along with it. Republicans need to win a net of six seats on Election Day to take control of the Senate.
Speaking to reporters after Bush departed the fundraiser, Roberts acknowledged that his biggest challenge is getting the word out to Kansas’ mostly Republican electorate about Orman’s liberal positions and ties to national Democrats. State Republicans have been divided lately, and Orman is hoping to capitalize on that and a strong anti-incumbent sentiment running through the state.
“We just have to get the message across that my opponent isn’t who he says, and that also that we’re going to focus a lot more on the things that we have accomplished,” Roberts said.
Bush, who has left the door open to running for president in 2016, was part of a cavalcade of high profile Republican surrogates who have parachuted into Kansas in recent days to stump for Roberts. Sarah Palin, the Tea Party stalwart, joined Roberts on the stump recently, and Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky are headed here in October.
Receiving the support of big time conservatives is a crucial part of Roberts’ attempt to make amends with Kansas Tea Party activists who backed his GOP challenger, Milton Wolf, in the August Senate primary.
But as conservative as Kansas is, it has a strong and at times influential contingent of moderate GOP voters. That’s why Roberts also has invited Republicans like Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and Bush, to stump for him.
If elected, Orman has vowed to caucus with whichever party holds a firm majority of the Senate. But Republicans are predictably suspicious, and a key plank of Roberts’ campaign here is that voting for him is the only way to guarantee that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is replaced.
“We have a lot of people that have been involved in the Tea Party, that are conservative, that I’ve reached out to, who understand the issue again; that this issue is so terribly important, regardless of the person running on the Republican side, or what they think about them,” Roberts said. “That’s the issue; we have to take back the Senate, end the gridlock and not have a Senate run by Harry Reid and [run] on behalf of [President] Barack Obama.”
