Republican Sen. Pat Roberts announced Friday that he would not seek a fifth term in 2020, setting off an open-seat race to replace him. Roberts’s departure wasn’t a big surprise, especially after his chaotic 2014 re-election campaign, but the GOP will be favored to keep this seat. In fact, Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, at the height of the Great Depression—by far the longest such streak of any state in the nation.
Roberts’s announcement caps off a long congressional career that began in 1980, when he first won a heavily Republican House seat in western Kansas. Roberts easily won re-election until he decided to run for the Senate in 1996 to succeed retiring Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, a moderate Republican. He took the nomination that year with little opposition and defeated Democratic state Treasurer Sally Thompson 62-34.
Roberts likewise had no trouble winning re-election in 2002 and 2008, and he seemed to expect that his 2014 campaign would be just as easy. However, the senator badly underestimated how tired the GOP base was with longtime establishment figures like himself, an exasperation that earned him a primary challenge from tea partying radiologist Milton Wolf, a distant cousin of Barack Obama and therefore a favorite of the right-wing media circuit. (Wolf was also a bizarre figure who posted leering comments about gruesome X-rays of his patients on Facebook.)
One of the first signs that Roberts was in trouble was when the news broke in early 2014 that he had no full-time home in Kansas but rather was registered to vote at a home alongside country club golf course owned by two supporters. Roberts joked he had "full access to the recliner" at this address, but the joke was almost on him, as he only held off Wolf by a 48-41 margin. Afterward, Roberts’s campaign manager announced that the senator had gone home to rest —that home, of course, being in Virginia.
Roberts then faced a competitive general election against a well-funded independent, Greg Orman, who became the de facto Democratic candidate after Team Blue's nominee dropped out of the race to give Orman a clear shot. National Republicans airlifted a new campaign staff in to save Roberts, and outside groups spent heavily to save him. Polls showed a tight race, but Roberts ended up winning 53-43—still by far the closest race of his career, and not a good performance for such a red state in such a red year. Given how badly that campaign went for Roberts, national Republicans are probably better off with him retiring this cycle.