Close-Up: Ghosts of Indiana in Kansas

The political Newspeak term we'd use to describe the prospect of Sen. Pat Roberts losing renomination to Tea Party activist and radiologist Milton Wolf is "primaried", as in "After Eric Cantor got primaried by David Brat in the June 10 primary, Republican fears that Thad Cochran himself would get primaried in the Mississippi runoff scheduled for two weeks later soared dramatically." However, Roberts campaign adviser David Kensinger elected to use a different phrase: "We're not going to get Lugar'd," he told The New York Times, a jab at 2012's surprise loser, six-term senator from Indiana Dick Lugar, who was notoriously crushed in that year's primary by Tea Party-backed state treasurer Richard Mourdock.

Sen. Lugar, apart from being perceived as not conservative enough, was confronted by the problem of not actually owning a home in his own state. The political Newspeak we'd use to describe that problem is "going Washington", and it occurs when a politician begins spending more and more time in the wealthy northern Virginia suburbs than in his home state. In his 36 years in the Senate, Sen. Lugar admitted, he had only spent 1,800 days in Indiana. While registered to vote in Indianapolis, the supposed "residence" at which he was registered to vote was actually an expansive, 600-acre farm about 10 minutes' drive outside downtown Indianapolis. "Getting Lugar'd" is a special case of getting primaried where the incumbent has physically lost touch with his home state by not living there anymore.

It's by Sen. Lugar's ghost that Sen. Roberts is now being haunted. Sen. Roberts' "home" is actually a house on a country club owned by two donors with whom he stays every once in a while when he visits Kansas. But there are three key differences between Kansas 2014 and Indiana 2012 that make Sen. Roberts a lot safer than Sen. Lugar:

• Kansas is even more Republican than Indiana. Indiana, despite then-Senator Obama's narrow 1-point victory there in 2008, is solid red at the presidential level. Like Kansas, the last time Indiana was carried by the Democratic presidential nominee was in 1964. But Indiana has had its fair share of Democrats winning at statewide levels, including the prominent Bayh family, which held statewide office for all but 7 years between 1963 and 2011. By contrast, Kansas has never elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932 and has no Democrats in its congressional delegation. 
• Polling: Sen. Roberts has maintained a double-digit lead since January, and in two of the three most recent polls he received at least 50%. By contrast, at this point in the Indiana primary Sen. Lugar either led by single digits or trailed Mourdock, and he never received more than 50%.
• Conservative credentials: The DW-NOMINATE scores are the latest iteration of a scaling method developed by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal to give each member of Congress a liberal-conservative scale score based solely on co-voting patterns of who votes with whom during roll call votes on legislation. In the 112th Congress (comprising the senators elected in 2006, 2008, and, most importantly, the 2010 Tea Party wave), Sen. Lugar was actually the 5th-most centrist Republican--or, if you like, the 5th-least conservative. (That center was held at the time by Senators Snowe and Collins of Maine.) Sen. Roberts was the 20th-least conservative, which is really something of a meaningless superlative considering there were 47 Republican senators at the time, but it still makes him much more conservative in his voting habits than Sen. Lugar was.

While DW-NOMINATE scores boil down to numbers on a sliding scale, the difference can be seen in policy positions. Not only did Hoosiers resent Sen. Lugar for not living in Indiana, Indiana Republicans didn't like the platform he stood for: he voted to approve Justices Sotomayor and Kagan; he supported various iterations of the DREAM Act; he received an F from the Gun Owners of America. And so on. You could read "conservative credentials" as "Republicans are learning": Sen. Roberts has tacked right on roll call votes, likely to appease conservatives in the Republican primary and avoid Sen. Lugar's fate. 

But it's not just the primary that looks like Indiana 2012. The general election is shaping up that way too. Chad Taylor, the D.A. for Shawnee County (home to Topeka), is trailing Sen. Roberts in polls where both candidates poll well below 50%, largely due to the presence of two strong third-party candidates in poll matchups. What's frightening about the prospect of Wolf Lugar-ing Sen. Roberts is that Taylor actually leads Wolf narrowly in polls (but again, with both candidates polling in the low 30's, there's a lot of room for improvement on both sides).

Despite all this sound and fury Sen. Roberts doesn't have as much to worry about as Sen. Lugar did in 2012, or even as much to worry about as Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi did earlier this year (although, more than a month after the runoff, Chris McDaniel is continuing his legal challenge to the results). There's just over a week left before the polls open for the primary on August 5. A week before the primary in Mississippi Sen. Cochran was running neck and neck with McDaniel in the polls in a statistical dead heat; right now Sen. Roberts, as previously said, leads Wolf by double digits. He maintains this lead despite the fact that Republican Party politics in Kansas is a total mess. So right now, the primary is shaping up to be LIKELY ROBERTS still. The general is still SAFE REPUBLICAN, but in the unlikely even that Wolf knocks off Sen. Roberts, I'd change it to LEANS REPUBLICAN due to the state's continued rightward tilt.