There is a thread on it GQ, but it’s not intended to be an elections thread.
It led me to this post by Nate Silver at 538: Upheaval In The Kansas Senate Race Is Making Our Chart Kinky
So the Republican is leading, the Democrat has dropped out and an independent is challenging the Republican with a chance of winning?
Any of our Kansan Dopers care to explain what the heck is happening?
Not a Kansan but my understanding is Roberts assumed he was a sure thing and was running a minimal campaign. Taylor was running as a token Democrat but wasn’t expected to win. But then Orman entered the race as an independent. He was the only candidate who appeared enthused about running and he got a lot of support (plus he’s a wealthy man who was able to kickstart his campaign with his own money).
The Democrat dropped out of the race but the Republican state Secretary of State refused to remove his name from the ballot, so the Democrat has gone to the state Supreme Court, the Court will be hearing arguments in a week or so. The Secretary of State says he plans to carry on printing ballots with the Democrat’s name on them unless the Court tells him not to.
The Republican Sec’y of State says he doesn’t want Democratic voters to be disenfranchised. To which the independent candidate wryly observed, “That’s a first.”
My understanding was that the Republican was the leader with the Democrat and Independent candidates expected to split the remaining vote.
With the Democrat out of the picture (and assuming he gets his name removed from the ballot) the Independent will pick up the remaining Democratic votes under the “well, they would surely rather vote for an Independent than a Republican” theory. The polls seem to support this.
Really long story short, the current Senator from Kansas who’s up for reelection is a 3 term senator, and long term congressman before that named Pat Roberts. Roberts has been in Kansas politics forever and comes from a prominent Kansas Republican family, and has routinely won by enormous margins.
The Democrats figured he’d easily win the election, and had trouble finding a good candidate. They finally nominated the District Attorney of Shawnee County (the county where the capital, Topeka, is), a 40 year old named Chad Taylor. who gained some notoriety when his office got in a fight with the Topeka municipal justice system over who would prosecute domestic abuse cases…Taylor, facing budget cuts, and trying to get the city of Topeka to prosecute domestic abusers, announced that his office would no longer prosecute domestic abuse cases. The backlash against this, and Topeka repealing the city’s domestic violence ordinance, forced his office to back down.
So, everybody going into this year expected Sam Roberts to win in a cakewalk. Kansas is a pretty Republican seat, there weren’t any strong Democratic contenders, and it looked easy for Roberts. Then, the shit hit the fan. The Kansas Republican party is, and for the past couple of years, has been at war with itself, with the Tea Party faction trying to wrest control from the Republican old guard. Roberts, who had the endorsement of most of the Kansas Republican establishment, including former Senator Bob Dole, faced a really bruising primary challenge by a conservative radio host named Milton Wolf. It got nasty, and one of the things that the Wolf campaign discovered is that Pat Roberts might not even meet the residency requirement. The address in Kansas he says is his is actually owned by a member of his staff, and he owns a house in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Roberts won the primary, but the whole thing weakened him, and made him spend all sorts of money and energy on the primary he never thought he’d have to.
Meanwhile, a businessman named Greg Orman is also running as an independent candidate. Orman is fairly middle of the road, conservative on economic issues, and fairly liberal/libertarian on social issues. Orman has also been successful in raising money for the campaign, which is something Taylor hasn’t. Orman has said that, if he’s elected, he’ll caucus with whichever party is in the majority.
So, over August, something interesting happened in the polls…Orman’s popularity increased, and a lot of Kansas Democrats, afraid that with Taylor and Orman both in the race, they’d split the anti-Roberts vote, pressured Taylor to withdraw. So, at the beginning of September, Taylor filed a request with the Secretary of State’s office (in Kansas, the Kansas Secretary of State is in charge of election issues), to withdraw from the race, and then came out backing Orman.
However, the situation soon got more complicated. The Secretary of State, a Republican named Kris Kobach (in Kansas, the office of Secretary of State is a partisan elected office), rejected Taylor’s request to withdraw, saying that Kansas law says that, if a candidate wants to remove his name from the ballot, his request to do so has to be accompanied by a declaration saying that he wouldn’t be capable to filling the office, if elected, and Taylor’s withdrawal request didn’t include that declaration. And, of course, it’s too late now for Taylor to refile his request. So, Kobach announced that Taylor’s name would remain on the ballot.
Taylor is now suing to get his name taken off the ballot, claiming, among other things, that before he turned in his request, he spoke to the Assistant Secretary of State, a man named Brad Bryant, and showed him the request, and Bryant confirmed that it was a valid request and accepted it, so Taylor is claiming that, due to estoppel by reliance, his name should be removed from the ballot as a matter of equity.
Oh my.
That’s all rather … Complicated. And Bizarre.
Will watch with interest on election night.
Thanks for the replies, everyone.
It’s an interesting argument. I’m wondering what harm he alleges will befall him if his name is not removed from the ballot?
Doesn’t matter. The important thing is getting the lawsuit in the news. As much as humanly possible, the Dems want as many people to know as can be managed that even though the name is there, the candidate is not.
Perhaps he’s a convert to the Groucho Marx school of thought: “I wouldn’t want my name associated with a club that would let me in.”
Clearly as a resident of Kansas he will claim he will suffer if the Republican wins the race.
Sorry to hijack, but can we call the “old guard” what they are: “grown-ups”?
Well, both groups are grownups, although the conservative faction might skew younger. The two groups just have different attitudes about the government in general and bipartisanship.
Grown-ups are mature enough to compromise.
You don’t know many grownups, do you? 
Something else – even before the current hoopla about withdrawing from the ballot there was an ongoing rebellion of moderate Kansas Republicans. More than 100 current or former Republican elected officials have essentially repudiated the current state of their own party, and had already endorsed the Independent candidate for senator.
There is a link to his petition in the other thread. He’s claiming a freedom of speech infringement.
Kansas must remove Taylor from the ballot in a unanimous decision. Kobach now demands that the Democrats nominate someone.
So what if they don’t?
Does the Communist Party have to to?
That seems to be the obvious question: Or else what? I mean, they don’t want anyone on the ballot at all so what are you really going to threaten them with?
Rick Hansen’s blog says that Secretary of State Kobach has moved back the ballot mailings a week and told the Kansas Democratic Party that they have eight days to name a replacement. But the KDP could just run out the clock on that and name no one. In that case, what can Kobach do? To try to sue to force them to name a replacement would delay the ballot mailings further and Hansen thinks it’s unlikely that it would prevail anyway (forcing someone to run for office isn’t likely to stand up).