Top Republicans still trailing

A new, independent poll out this week confirms again what other polls have been saying for weeks, that Sen. Pat Roberts and Gov. Sam Brownback are both trailing behind their challengers, but not by insurmountable margins.

The Suffolk University/USA Today poll shows independent U.S. Senate candidate Greg Orman leading Roberts by 5 points, 46-41 percent; and Democrat Paul Davis ahead of Brownback by 4 points, 46-42 percent.

Those margins are fairly close to the averages of other polls taken since the Aug. 5 primary.

The Senate race, of course, has been tricky for pollsters, without knowing exactly which candidates to ask about. That question wasn’t decided until Wednesday, when a three-judge panel in Topeka ruled that the Kansas Democratic Party does not have to put a candidate on the ballot to replace Chad Taylor, who withdrew Sept. 3.

Other recent polls that asked only about Roberts and Orman had put Orman ahead by an average 7.75 percentage points, according to an analysis by the academic team Insight Kansas.

But Washburn University political science professor Bob Beatty said Thursday that Insight Kansas will not use the Suffolk University poll to calculate averages because it does not meet their criteria for reliability. Beatty said the poll under-sampled Republican voters and over-sampled unaffiliatedd voters.

Meanwhile, the numbers in the governor’s race have barely moved since early summer, and the latest poll confirms that Davis is riding a slim but consistent single-digit lead, with less than 10 percent of those surveyed still undecided.

The fact that the top two Republicans on the ballot in a traditional Republican stronghold both find themselves in trouble has captured national attention and may even threaten the national GOP’s hopes of regaining control of the U.S. Senate this year.

In other statewide races, though, Attorney General Derek Schmidt, State Treasurer Ron Estes and Insurance Commissioner candidate Ken Selzer all appear to enjoy comfortable majorities.

The lone exception is Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Although the Suffolk University/USA Today poll put him up by 5 points over Democrat Jean Schodorf, 45-40 percent, other polls have shown a much closer race, with Kobach up by an average of less than 2 points.

Report: Tea party seeking concessions

One factor in the campaign woes of Sen. Pat Roberts and Gov. Sam Brownback may be the reluctance of the tea party crowd to jump on board this year.

According to a report in The Hill, a Washington-based political news site, tea party leaders in Kansas recently tried to extract some big concessions from the GOP establishment before agreeing to endorse the incumbents.

Those included wholesale replacement of top state Republican Party officials; halting the Kansas Board of Healing Arts’ investigation into an ethics complaint against Milton Wolf, who unsuccessfully challenged Roberts in the GOP primary; and a guarantee that if Roberts doesn’t serve out his full term, that Wolf would be appointed to replace him.

Kansas GOP executive director Clay Barker confirmed the story to the Journal-World Thursday, saying those demands were expressed during a meeting last Friday, Sept. 26. Besides Barker, the meeting included at least two staffers each from the Brownback and Roberts campaigns, about five representatives of various tea party groups, and a number of others who participated by phone.

But Barker said the demands were never taken seriously, especially since two of them — halting the investigation and guaranteeing Wolf an appointment to the Senate in exchange for their endorsements — would probably constitute felonies.

In 2009, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blegojevich was impeached and removed from office for allegedly trying to sell an appointment to fill the Senate seat vacated when Barack Obama was elected president. He was later convicted on more than a dozen federal corruption charges and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Barker would not identify all of the tea party activists who took part in the meeting, but confirmed one of them who was named in the Hill story, Steve Shute, a city councilman in Gardner. Shute was not immediately available for comment Thursday.

According to the Hill article, there was supposed to have been a follow-up meeting on Wednesday, but Barker said he did not know if one ever took place.