KS-Sen: Candidate filing closed Monday for Kansas’ Aug. 4 primary, and the state has a list of contenders available here.
On behalf of Daily Kos, Civiqs is out with a poll testing Democratic state Sen. Barbara Bollier, who doesn’t face any serious intra-party opposition, in hypothetical contests against her three likeliest Republican opponents:
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42-41 vs. 2018 gubernatorial nominee Kris Kobach
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41-40 vs. businessman Bob Hamilton
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41-42 vs. Rep. Roger Marshall
The sample also shows Donald Trump winning 52-40 in a state he carried 56-36 four years ago.
It’s quite surprising to see Bollier running about the same against all three Republicans, especially since the NRSC and other establishment groups have long been sounding the alarm that Kobach could jeopardize the party’s hold on retiring Sen. Pat Roberts’ seat. Civiqs does show Kobach with a miserable 35-54 favorable rating compared to Marshall’s 31-29 score (Hamilton is right in the middle with a 21-29 rating), but that may not stop him from winning a general election in this red state.
Indeed, Civiqs finds that the 18% of respondents who say they haven't made up their minds or are supporting “someone else” in a Bollier/Kobach matchup back Trump over Joe Biden by a massive 70-10 margin. That means that, while there are plenty of undecideds at the moment, this group would be likely to break for the GOP nominee—even if it's Kobach—as we get closer to November. Kobach, who lost the 2018 governor’s race 48-43, may still turn out to be awful enough to put this seat in play if he’s nominated, but Daily Kos Elections rates the general election as Likely Republican.
Civiqs also takes a look at the GOP primary and finds Kobach leading Marshall 35-26. Hamilton is in third place with 15% while Kansas Turnpike Authority chair Dave Lindstrom brings up the rear with just 4%. This portion of the poll sampled 419 GOP primary voters.
The NRSC, which spent well over a year unsuccessfully trying to recruit U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has not publicly taken sides in the primary, though it has signaled in recent days that it wants Marshall to prevail. The committee recently released numbers from an internal poll that showed Marshall performing considerably better than Kobach in a general election against Bollier.
However, the NRSC did not identify the name of its pollster, which is a problem. As we’ve written before, Daily Kos Elections requires the pollster’s name in order to be included in the Digest: Most pollsters have reputations, some good and some bad, and without knowing who conducted a poll, we have no way to place it the context of that pollster's other work.