After looking like he was in deep trouble two months ago, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) completed his political comeback Tuesday with a victory over independent candidate Greg Orman, according to projections from Fox News and CBS News.
The story seems to be simple: Roberts’s capmaign — with some help from national Republicans — was revitalized after the Democratic candidate Chad Taylor dropped out on Sept. 3 and polling showed Orman with a sizable lead.
Roberts got top operatives, big money from outside groups and a message: Orman was a closet Democrat. In the end, state political observers said, that dissatisfaction with the GOP brand that the polls were registering simply failed to materialize at the polls.
“It’s a combination of two things: the anti-incumbency sentiment was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. In effect, voters were bluffing,” Chadman Rackaway, a political scientist at Fort Hays State University, told TPM. “He was also effective at making people question the true independent bonafides of Mr. Orman.”
Part of the problem, Rackaway said, is that Orman never found an effective counter to the ‘secret Democrat’ charge that Roberts relentlessly tossed at him. He was notoriously coy with reporters on questions of policy, even though most of his public statements seemed to align with Democratic priorities.
Roberts developed a catch-phrase — that Orman was a Democrat by “word, deed and donation” — and TV ads aired on his behalf went so far as to merge the famous Obama ‘O’ with the ‘O’ in Orman. It was a nasty campaign — one political source told TPM that voters would never look at Roberts the same — but it worked.
“What he really hasn’t done to much is squarely respond to Roberts’ allegations that he’s a democratic stalking horse,” Rackaway said.
