Latest polling

Two new polls came out over the weekend that may indicate a shift in races for governor and U.S. Senate. Or, they may not.

One came from NBC and Marist College purportedly showing a dead heat in the governor’s race and a 10-point lead for independent candidate Greg Orman in his race against Republican Sen. Pat Roberts.

Both of those are significantly different from the majority of other polls, which have consistently shown Democrat Paul Davis leading Republican Gov. Sam Brownback by about four or five points, while Orman has shown up with a razor-thin lead over Roberts.

The NBC/Marist poll showed Davis with a one-point lead over Brownback, 44-43 percent, with Libertarian Keen Umbehr polling at 4 percent. The sample of 636 likely voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

The poll was conducted Sept. 27- Oct. 1, meaning it’s the first public poll since stories were published that Davis had been seen at a strip club during a drug raid in 1998.

That same poll showed Orman leading Roberts, 43-38 percent, a far wider margin than any other recent poll has shown. It also found that 47 percent of those surveyed have an unfavorable impression of Roberts, compared with only 27 percent who feel that way about Orman.

It also showed that more people now know something about Orman. Only 6 percent said they have never heard of him, according to the NBC/Marist poll. That’s down from 11 percent who said that in a Rasmussen Reports poll in early September.

The other poll over the weekend came from the New York Times and CBS, who are contracting with the British firm YouGov to conduct an entirely different kind of tracking poll. It’s one that has gotten little if any attention in the local media because of a unique method that uses an Internet-based panel of voters nationwide, instead of a random selection of voters polled over the phone.

That poll also showed Orman and Roberts tied at 40 percent each in the Senate race.

Earlier YouGov polls have also shown Brownback leading slightly in the governor’s race, something no other public poll has found since the Aug. 5 primary.

But political science academics in Kansas have been leery about drawing any conclusions from it because instead of the pollster sampling the population of voters to measure their sentiment, the YouGov polls are based on people who volunteer to sign up and be part of the panel.

Roberts receives endorsements

Sen. Pat Roberts is continuing his strategy of trying to nationalize the U.S. Senate race in Kansas, bringing in endorsements from a national business group and nationally prominent GOP figures.

On Monday, he received the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. At a news conference in Topeka, the Chamber’s senior vice president Rob Engstrom echoed Roberts’ main argument that the election is a referendum on President Barack Obama and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

“With so much at stake, we can’t afford another vote for Harry Reid and the Obama Administration’s agenda,” Engstrom said.

Most polls have shown Roberts either tied with or trailing independent challenger Greg Orman, who has tried to make the election a referendum on Roberts and the entire partisan dysfunction from both sides of the aisle in Congress.

Later this week, Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Ted Cruz of Texas will be in Kansas to stump for Roberts. Cruz is considered the leader of the tea party faction within Congress, a group that Roberts is still trying to court since the brutal primary campaign against Milton Wolf.

Orman’s campaign has called Cruz the “architect” of last year’s 16-day partial shutdown of the federal government because of his insistence to not approve a spending bill unless it included provisions to delay or defund implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Think tank lauds Brownback

Although several economic reports have shown the Kansas economy lagging behind the rest of the nation, suggesting Gov. Sam Brownback’s policies of cutting taxes to stimulate growth haven’t worked, one conservative think tank is ranking the Kansas Republican as the most effective governor in the nation.

The Cato Institute recently gave Brownback a grade of A on its Fiscal Policy Report Card, putting him in the same category as North Carolina’s Pat McCrory, Maine’s Paul LePage, and Indiana’s Mike Pence.

The Cato Institute was founded in Wichita by Charles Koch, chairman and CEO of Koch Industries. It states on its website that it is “dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.”