by Dish Staff
The big political news from last night:
The race for U.S. Senate in Kansas no longer has a Democrat in it. In a stunning development, candidate Chad Taylor asked Wednesday that his name be removed from the ballot, paving the way for independent candidate Greg Orman to face U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts head-on in November.
Sam Wang, who posts the above chart, calculates that the Democrats’ odds of keeping the Senate have skyrocketed:
Right before Taylor’s announcement yesterday, according to data from the Princeton Election Consortium, the Democrats had a sixty-five per cent chance of retaining control of the Senate. (Polling wonks will notice that this number is significantly different than what has been put out by outlets like theWashington Post’s Monkey Cage, the New York Times’ Upshot, and Nate Silver’sFiveThirtyEight, all of whom give an edge to the Republicans. The Princeton Election Consortium, which I founded, only relies on polling data and does not factor in so-called “fundamentals,” such as campaign finances and incumbency. In the past, our purely poll-based approach has yielded extremely accurate results.) As noted here, with Orman facing off alone against Roberts, the probability of Democratic control shot up to eighty-five per cent.
Silver’s analysis is less favorable to the Democrats. He remarks, that “if Roberts winds up beating Orman by a few percentage points, it wouldn’t be so surprising”:
Another question is which party Orman might caucus with should he win. The default answer would be the Democrats. Orman was formerly a Democrat, he’s mostly taken the political positions of a moderate Democrat, and the Democratic candidate just dropped out of the race. But the more Orman appears to be affiliated with the Democratic Party, the less attractive he might be to Kansas’s red-leaning electorate. … If we do program the model to treat an Orman win as a Democratic pickup, then the Democrats’ chances of retaining the Senate would improve to 38 percent from 35 percent.
Andrew Prokop also wonders who Orman will caucus with:
Orman has said that if he wins, and if one party ends up clearly in the majority, he will “seek to caucus” with that party. But if the Democrats end up with 49 seats to the Republicans’ 50, a victorious Orman would be the vote deciding Senate control, and would be intensely courted by both sides. “Ultimately, I’m going to caucus with the party that’s … most willing to address some of the biggest issues we have,” Orman said Wednesday, according to Politico’s Manu Raju and Kyle Cheney.
Orman describes himself as “someone who is fiscally responsible and socially tolerant,” and has criticized both parties and their leaders. However, he is pro-choice, a critic of the Citizens United decision, and a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. And, as McCaskill’s actions indicate, Democratic support will likely coalesce behind Orman, while Republicans will try very hard to help Roberts keep his seat, which seems like it could have some impact on Orman’s decision about who to caucus with.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball sizes up the race:
Our Kansas sources stressed two things Wednesday evening. First, Republicans are absolutely furious at Roberts for turning in such a clumsy, second-rate primary performance and allowing this contest to linger in a year when every Senate battle could determine control of the chamber. Second, these same sources — when pressed — believed that ultimately Roberts would be able to fight off the challenge with enough outside assistance.
We’ll see whether the latter view turns out to be realistic or optimistic. For the moment, we’ll put a thumb on the scale for “realistic.” However, Orman has gone to great lengths to emphasize his independence by noting his vacillation between the two parties. He obviously hopes that Kansans will be more amenable to voting for him if they don’t think of him as a Democrat. Republicans, inevitably, are going to try to make Orman as much of a Democrat as possible. Conservative journalists on Twitter are already discussing attack ads aimed at Orman with this theme: “The O in Orman stands for Obama.” In fact, Orman considered running as a Democrat in the 2008 Senate race against Roberts before declining to become a candidate.
Before the Kansas news broke, Nate Cohn looked more broadly at the Senate landscape:
Anything, of course, is still possible. Labor Day is traditionally the start of the campaign, not the end. But what may be more likely than a Republican rout is that 2014 ends up somewhere between 2010 and 2012. Not a Republican landslide or a Democratic victory, but a fairly neutral if Republican-tilting year in which the G.O.P. benefits from a large number of competitive races in red and purple states.
John Sides’ model now gives Democrats nearly a 50-50 chance of keeping the Senate:
[It’s] not that races have narrowed, but that the model has begun weighting information differently — mainly by (a) incorporating polling data (where possible) after the relevant primaries, and by (b) increasing the weight that polls have in the forecast. What this suggests is that in several states, Democrats are arguably ‘out-performing’ the fundamentals. This doesn’t always translate into a high chance of the Democrat actually winning (see: Kentucky) but it does help the Democrats’ overall chances of retaining a majority.
The Dish 