Republican Sen. Pat Roberts
The Kansas Supreme Court
ruled Thursday afternoon that Democrat Chad Taylor’s name should be removed from the November ballot in the state’s Senate race.
The decision comes as a rebuke to Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s efforts to keep Taylor’s name on the ballot. More importantly, it is a further blow to Republican Senator Pat Roberts’s bid to win re-election against independent candidate Greg Orman.
Democratic nominee Chad Taylor dropped out of the race on September 3rd in an effort to consolidate the anti-Roberts vote around Orman. The next day, however, Kobach said that the letter in which Taylor announced his withdrawal from the race was insufficient to remove his name from the ballot because it did not state that Taylor would be “incapable” of serving if elected, as Kobach argued it should have. Democrats wasted no time in taking Kobach to court, arguing that it should be enough that Taylor's letter stated that he was withdrawing “pursuant to” the relevant statute.
The tone of Tuesday's oral arguments led observers to suspect that the Supreme Court was preparing to remove Taylor's name from the ballot, and today the judges did just that. The ruling states that "Taylor's letter effectively declares he is incapable of fulfilling the duties of office if elected."
While Orman's bid would not have been doomed had Taylor stayed on the ballot, this should ease his road to victory: Wednesday Fox News released a poll in which Orman led Roberts 48 percent to 42 percent in a two-way race. But when Taylor's name was read to respondents, it was Roberts who veered ahead 40 percent to 38 percent, with Taylor at 11. The dynamic was the same in an August poll taken by PPP.
But there's a question left: Do Democrats need to appoint a replacement? Republicans have argued that state statutes require it, and Kobach has said that he will demand that Democrats hold a nominating convention. In its ruling today, the Court explicitly avoided that question: "Nor do we need to act on Kobach's allegation that a ruling for Taylor would require the Dem Party State Committee to name his replacement." The issue is that there is really very little time left to litigate this: Absentee and overseas ballots will start being printed in the coming days. For Democrats to appoint a replacement will require a new round of litigation, a new judicial hearing and a new ruling, and then still more time for Democrats to organize and hold a nominating convention. The irony is that by pressing the issue of whether Taylor can withdraw from the ballot at all, Kobach may have wasted the time he needed to push this second issue.
2:59 PM PT (Jeff Singer): Roberts would have been in trouble even if Taylor's name was on the ballot, but this decision further complicates his situation. As a result, we're moving this race from Lean Republican to Tossup. Kansas' dark red nature may very well save Roberts, but there's no doubt that he's in for a real fight.
3:23 PM PT: In response to the ruling, Kobach announced that he was pushing back the deadline for mailing ballots from this week-end to September 27th, and he gave Democrats eight days to name a replacement. But this makes it hard to see how he can force Taylor's name to be replaced: Kobach can only go to court to litigate the Democratic Party's refusal to name a candidate after the eight days are over, which is to say on the 27th.