Asked if there was one sleeper race for Senate this year that he wouldn't count out, Daily Kos Political Director David Nir told The Brief it was Kansas, where Democrat Barbara Bollier is running for an open seat against Republican Rep. Roger Marshall.
A New York Times/Siena poll released Thursday showed Bollier running 4 points behind Marshall, 42%-46%, with 6% undecided and independents and non-whites accounting for a larger proportion of those undecided votes. The poll had a 4-point margin of error.
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What's perhaps most interesting about the Times poll is the fact that Bollier, a state senator and former Republican who switched parties in 2018, is running several points ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who trails Donald Trump 41%-48% in the survey. Even with Trump’s lead, that represents a distinct softening for Republicans since 2016, when Trump sailed to victory in the state by more than 20 points.
Like many former Republicans, the party simply got too extreme for Bollier, diverting its focus from actually helping the state's residents to pushing the pet issues of the right. She finally parted ways with the party in 2018 when it explicitly targeted transgender individuals in the state platform.
“That was the last straw,” Bollier told The Washington Post. “I had been at odds with the Republican leadership for years on school funding and expanding Medicaid. At some point, you have to recognize you can’t participate in a party that continues to block what you need to do to get your work done.”
Now Bollier is making an all-out push in the closing days of the race to overtake Marshall before Election Day for a seat left open by retiring GOP Sen. Pat Roberts. Her bid has been boosted by several factors, including a substantial war chest and a more than 40% uptick in Democratic voter registrations in the state since 2016, according to reporter Steve Kraske of KCUR radio.
Bollier raised a whopping $13.5 million in the third quarter, bringing her fundraising total for the campaign to $20 million, writes the Post. By comparison, her GOP rival raised just $2.7 million in the third quarter for a total haul of $5 million.
Kraske told MSNBC Thursday that the lopsided fundraising is particularly evident in this final stretch, with Bollier simply "overpowering" Marshall by a 4-to-1 ratio on the airwaves with a series of straight-to-camera appeals to voters.
That advantage has state Republicans both worried and whining. “It’s not a fair fight right now,” one state GOP operative told the Post, noting the "passion" that Democratic donors and voters are bringing to the fight.
Bollier and Marshall are both doctors, but Bollier supports a Medicaid expansion for low-income residents in the state while Marshall does not. Marshall also used to own a for-profit hospital, and a Kansas City Star investigation this week charged that he urged Congress to ease restrictions on physician-owned hospitals while his wife was profiting from them.
Bollier has also been hammering Marshall on the pandemic. “As a congressman and doctor, @RogerMarshallMD has access to top scientists at the drop of a hat. Yet, he continues to spew toxic disinformation about American deaths," she tweeted Thursday. "I, for one, would like our senator to be someone who doesn’t spread QAnon conspiracies." Marshall has also rated Trump's handling of the coronavirus response an "A+."
Bollier, who has conducted an almost entirely virtual campaign, is particularly concerned about Marshall's embrace of quack science and conspiracy theories. “Kansas is exploding right now with COVID cases," she said. "We’re hot red. We need to take this seriously.”
As the returns pour in on election night, KCUR's Kraske reminded viewers that results from the eastern side of the state would come in first and they would favor Bollier, but the western side of Kansas would go for Marshall. So it's really a matter of how far Bollier can run up the score in the early part of the night.
Whatever the outcome, there's a real sense of excitement about the race. “It’s certainly a tighter Senate race than has happened in Kansas in years," said Russell Arben Fox, a political science professor at Friends University in Wichita.
