After a month of reflecting on the 2014 election results in Kansas, Republican and Democratic campaign officials offered very different theories Thursday about how the GOP managed to pull off a clean sweep despite running behind in most of the pre-election polls.

Speaking at a post-election conference at the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University, GOP officials gave credit to their candidates and the state party’s highly organized network of volunteers who registered voters and got them out to the polls.

And Kansas Democrats, while boasting that they did better than expected in a Republican wave election, said they fell victim to an onslaught of negative ads financed by independent groups and the national Republican party.

Joining them were political science professors Burdett Loomis of KU and Bob Beatty of Washburn University, as well as two reporters who covered the races: Dave Helling of the Kansas City Star and Bryan Lowry of the Wichita Eagle.

Nearly everyone on the panel agreed on at least one point: Perhaps one of the biggest factors that influenced the election was the candidate who didn’t show up, Democrat Chad Taylor, the U.S. Senate candidate who dropped out of the race in September, changing the dynamics of both the Senate and gubernatorial races.

“That was the moment it really nationalized the race,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, who worked as Sen. Pat Roberts’ communications director during the general election. “That was a tipping point in the race, to a large degree.”

Joan Wagnon, chairwoman of the Kansas Democratic Party, said she was surprised by Taylor’s withdrawal, despite the fact that rumors about the possibility had been circulating in both the national and local news media.

“The Kansas Democratic Party recruited a Democrat to run for the United States Senate. We didn’t recruit an independent to run,” Wagnon said. “Even though I like Greg Orman, we were supportive of Chad Taylor. There was no one more surprised than I when he pulled off.”

Taylor dropped out of the race Sept. 3, barely a month after winning a contested Democratic primary, leaving independent candidate Greg Orman as the lone challenger to Roberts, a three-term incumbent who had just emerged from a bruising Republican primary against tea party challenger Milton Wolf.

Before that, Roberts had been considered a lock for re-election, running against two candidates who would likely split the anti-incumbent vote. But in a head-to-head race against Orman, Roberts trailed in the early polls.

Once Taylor dropped out of the race, the national Republican Party took over Roberts’ campaign. They brought in new staff and millions of dollars worth of advertising by independent groups who immediately cast Orman as a Democrat in disguise and turned the race into a referendum on President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Jim Jonas, who managed Orman’s campaign, said Taylor’s withdrawal immediately put the Kansas race into the national spotlight. But he said they had always planned to run in a three-person contest and were not prepared for the sudden change in the nature of the race.

“By removing him (Taylor) from this, it made it really, really difficult for us to counter (the Roberts campaign’s) narrative of turning us into the nominal Democrat,” Jonas said.

Jonas conceded that the Orman campaign had another weakness. Because they were not directly linked to a political party, they didn’t have the kind of grassroots network of volunteers working on Election Day that Republicans enjoyed. And some on the panel said the GOP’s ability to get Roberts supporters to the polls had a spillover effect on the governor’s race.

“I think Governor (Sam) Brownback came in on the coattails of Senator Roberts,” said KU professor Loomis.

Loomis cited exit polls that showed the majority of those who voted, 53 percent, disapproved of Brownback’s tax policies. Yet Brownback beat Democrat Paul Davis, 50-46 percent.

Mark Dugan, who managed Brownback’s campaign, disputed that there was any coattail effect because there were more than 3,000 more votes cast in the governor’s race than in the Senate race.

Dugan said the governor’s race became a referendum on Brownback’s policies. He said Brownback decided early on to embrace his own record and to lay out an agenda for a second term. In the end, he said, Brownback “won the campaign of ideas.”

James Roberts, who managed Davis’ campaign, disagreed. He said in the final weeks of the campaign Brownback actually stopped talking about his own record while independent groups ran negative ads that had nothing to do with Brownback’s policies.

“The difference-maker was a push away from the center, which is where each of the candidates wanted to be, and that was links to a (quadruple) homicide and links to a strip club,” Roberts said. “Certainly we’re all in politics. We know that’s the name of the game. So that’s the way it goes.”