David Von Drehle, editor-at-large for Time magazine, summed up what he sees happening in this year’s elections in Kansas with a quote from former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

“Democrats, we don’t win elections in Kansas,” Sebelius said. “Republicans lose elections.”

Von Drehle was among a panel of national and regional journalists who spoke Wednesday night at the Dole Institute of Politics about the 2014 midterm elections and what it has been like covering them.

That quote may have accurately reflected what is happening this year in Kansas, a traditional Republican stronghold where two of its leading Republicans — Sen. Pat Roberts and Gov. Sam Brownback — now find themselves in the re-election battle of their respective careers.

Until recently, the national Republican Party had strong hopes of taking control of the U.S. Senate, where Democrats currently hold a 55-45 majority. But with Roberts now locked in a tight race against Independent candidate Greg Orman, some analysts are now giving them little better than a 50-50 chance of taking control.

Much of Roberts’ problems this year can be traced to an article in February about the issue of Roberts’ residency in Dodge City.

The headline read, “Lacking a House, a Senator Is Renewing His Ties in Kansas,” and the story described how Roberts had recently changed his address from a home that he rents out to tenants to the home of a political supporter in which he famously said, “I have full access to the recliner.”

New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin said Roberts was trying to avoid the same problem that had unseated Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar two years earlier and the senator and his staff all thought they had found the answer. He said Roberts even boasted that his drivers license now showed the address of a home in Dodge City.

But Martin said when he traveled to Dodge City and knocked on the door, no one answered. And when he asked neighbors whether they’d ever seen Roberts there, most of them said they never had.

“So I went back to the office and wrote the story,” he said.

It was a story that Roberts’ tea party challenger Milton Wolf used to great effect and one that might very well have doomed the senator’s chances, had it not been for other revelations about what Martin called Wolf’s “odd Facebook behavior.”

Roberts, a political institution in Kansas for more than three decades, survived the primary despite getting less than 50 percent of the Republican vote and now finds himself in a highly competitive race against another political newcomer, Orman.

Meanwhile, Gov. Sam Brownback, finds himself trailing in the polls in his bid for re-election against Democrat Paul Davis of Lawrence, the minority leader of the Kansas House.

But Dave Helling, a political columnist for the Kansas City Star and a fall 2014 Dole Fellow, said Brownback’s problems are very different from those of Roberts.

A senator is usually judged by ideology, Helling said, while a governor is an “executor whose job is to make the trains run on time.”

“Your problem isn’t with what I write or what any other reporter writes,” Helling recalled telling Brownback in one conversation. “Your problem is that your credit rating has been downgraded three times.”

Helling said he thinks both Roberts and Brownback are still “slight favorites” to win re-election. He said Orman faces an uphill battle because he has never held elected office before and he still has to introduce himself to voters.

And Davis still has a challenge in connecting with people in western Kansas who may know little else about him, besides the fact that he’s from Lawrence.

“You get out west of Salina and tell people you’re from Lawrence, and some of them start to worry about you,” Helling said.

Dole Institute Director Bill Lacy, who hosted the panel discussion, noted that some analysts are predicting the 2014 midterms will be a “wave election” in which Republicans will win controlling majorities in both chambers of Congress.

But others, he said, have predicted that Congress will be just as divided next year as it is this year, and he asked the panelists whether both could be write.

Juana Summers, formerly a reporter for Politico who recently moved to NPR, said she believed both could be true, but that the next two years will be “tough years for (President Barack) Obama.”