OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — It’s hard to overstate how worried national Republican operatives have been about the Senate race here in Kansas. “I think Pat Roberts is in real trouble,” a GOP strategist who is deeply involved in the midterm effort said of the Republican incumbent Tuesday morning. “If the election were today, he would clearly lose.”
That was then. Now, just 48 hours later, two new polls suggest the Roberts campaign has life in it, after all, and that Roberts’ opponent, the former Democrat and self-styled Independent businessman Greg Orman, may no longer be leading the race.
One of the new surveys, by CNN, has Roberts leading Orman by a single point, 49 percent to 48 percent. That’s the barest of margins, but still striking in light of several polls before it, by NBC/Marist, CBS/New York Times, and USA Today, which all had Orman leading Roberts by five to 10 points. Another new poll, by Fox News, has Roberts ahead of Orman by five — in contrast to the last Fox survey, in mid-September, which showed Orman up by six.
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The Roberts campaign believes the new polls reflect a growing enthusiasm they have sensed during the senator’s recent campaign appearances. Maybe that’s real, and maybe it’s not; the polls could be outliers or somehow non-representative. Still, for strategists on both sides of the race, the results suggest something is happening to shake up the Kansas race.
The new numbers came just a few hours after Roberts and Orman met Wednesday afternoon in a debate in this Kansas City suburb. The session covered the economy, energy, transportation, taxes, entitlements, and a number of other topics. But Orman made news by outlining an almost fantastical, removed-from-reality vision of how he hopes the United States Senate might work, were he elected to it.
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Throughout the debate, Roberts charged repeatedly that Orman’s claim to be an Independent is phony. Orman’s positions on hot-button issues like the Keystone XL pipeline, immigration, and Obamacare, Roberts said, “prove beyond any reasonable measure that he is a liberal Democrat, by word, by deed, and by campaign donation.” A vote for Orman, Roberts charged, would ultimately be a vote for President Obama and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Orman hit back by repeatedly asserting his independence. “I need to make it clear once again that, as I’ve said, I believe that Obama and Reid are part of the problem, but senator, I think you’re part of the problem too,” Orman told Roberts. “And ultimately I’ve said that if I win, I am not going to support either Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell for majority leader, because I believe they’ve been far too partisan for far too long.”
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Orman’s declaration left more than a few people scratching their heads. The Senate is structured to run with a majority leader. In the next Senate that will almost certainly be either Reid or McConnell (provided McConnell wins re-election in Kentucky). Was Orman saying he wouldn’t vote for anyone for majority leader, or that he would vote for someone else? And would both scenarios make Orman’s preference entirely irrelevant?
Roberts seemed aghast. “Who will he vote for to lead the Senate?” Roberts asked. “Will he vote for anybody? Just hold up a little sign and say, ‘I’m present, I’m here’? Who will he caucus with? What committees will he serve on? He’s just one independent who’s going to go look for people who have good ideas? That’s rather ridiculous.”
After the debate, Orman did something he has almost never done: he talked to a group of reporters. (Orman’s campaign says he does indeed speak to Kansas journalists, but doesn’t want to spend time with national reporters at this stage of the race.) Asked about the majority leader issue, Orman repeated earlier statements that if he is elected, and one party holds the majority in the Senate, he will caucus with the majority. But if neither party holds the majority, then Orman will take a different approach.
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“If I get elected, and neither party is in the majority, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to sit down with both sides, propose a pro-problem-solving agenda, and ask both sides whether or not they’re willing to support that agenda,” Orman explained. “And we’re going to be likely to support the party that is likely to embrace a pro-problem-solving agenda.”
I asked Orman if, in the case of a Senate deadlock, he would set up, in effect, an auction to award his support to the highest bidder. “What I’ve said is we will go ahead and put forward a pro-problem-solving agenda, and we will ask both parties whether or not they’re willing to embrace that agenda,” Orman said.
Okay. But what about majority leader? Orman stated emphatically that he would not support Reid or McConnell. “I think both parties would be well served by looking at someone who has worked in a bipartisan way,” Orman said. “And what I’ve pointed out in the past is that I think the people in the Women’s Caucus in the Senate — Lisa Murkowski, Heidi Heitkamp — have done great jobs of demonstrating a willingness to work in a bipartisan way, and that’s who we would work with.”
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Seeking clarity, a reporter asked straight-out: Does that mean Orman will vote for Murkowski or Heitkamp as majority leader? The answer was yes.
Orman appears to believe that will make him the Senate’s kingmaker, but experts say it just doesn’t work that way. Each party in the Senate elects its own leader, and the leader of the party that holds the majority is the majority leader. Orman could only vote if he chooses to join one party or the other. “He has to pick a team before he can vote for team captain,” says one Senate GOP aide. If Orman chose to stand outside that process, insisting on Murkowski or Heitkamp, that would mean whichever party has 50 votes becomes the majority, with the other having 49. Orman will have simply made his vote immaterial. “His entire premise is bulls–t,” says one Senate GOP aide.
It’s hard to say what effect, if any, Orman’s novel ideas on the Senate are having on the race. Maybe it’s all inside baseball, something voters just don’t care about. Certainly Obamacare, the economy, the Keystone pipeline, and other issues are a big part of the mix. And then there is the question of Orman’s largely unvetted past; Republicans, surprised by his rise, are only now airing ads exploring his many and varied business dealings.
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Whatever the case, the polls seem to be shifting away from Orman and toward Roberts. They could always change again, but if the latest surveys indicate a new trend, it could mean that Orman’s rise in the polls was based on a relatively brief moment during which he presented himself in well-produced television ads as a fresh-faced problem solver — a view unchallenged (until recently) by negative ads from the other side. At the same time, Roberts emerged badly damaged from a hard-fought GOP primary, appearing old and out of touch with his home state. So Orman pulled ahead. For a while.
The bottom line is this is still Kansas, which has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since the 1930s. If the polls are indeed tipping back to Republicans, no one should really be surprised.
