Senate 2014: Roberts Slips in Kansas — and What’s Up in South Dakota?
Come January, Americans may witness something that, up to now, only 6% of the country’s population has ever seen: a senator from Kansas who is not a member of the Republican Party. That’s just one reason why the Sunflower State’s Senate race is the most interesting in the country with a month to go. Kansas last elected a Democratic senator in 1932, George McGill, who was defeated for reelection in 1938 (President Roosevelt’s “sixth-year itch” midterm, when Democrats lost 71 seats in the House and six in the Senate). So only Americans who are 75 and over — a little more than 1/20th of the nation’s population — have been alive to see a non-Republican senator in one of the nation’s consistently bedrock Republican states. Kansas won’t be electing a Democrat to the Senate this year, because there is no Democrat on the ballot. Rather, independent businessman Greg Orman is challenging — and leading — unpopular incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts (R). Roberts won a weak victory over his controversial primary opponent, physician Milton Wolf, in early August. Instead of pushing aggressively ahead in his general election fight, it’s now clear that Roberts expected to coast to victory against Orman and