How Pat Roberts and the GOP Lost Kansas

If you want to truly understand politics, especially of the Right-leaning variety, you’ll have to look beyond the dumbed-down, self-congratulatory so called journalism of Beltway establishment publications like Politico.

Here is their headline out of Kansas: How Pat Roberts beat Milton Wolf. But the real story has to be read between the lines.

Pat Roberts’ narrower-than-expected win over challenger Milton Wolf on Tuesday night — came with a big lift from party headquarters in Washington.

The Republican Party threw everything they had behind Roberts …. and what did they get for it? Less than 50% of their own base vote, that’s what. The anti-Roberts vote was split, not “defeated.”

Roberts defeated Wolf, 48 percent to 41 percent; a pair of minor candidates combined for the remaining 11 percent of the vote. 

The D.C. GOP consultant class can back-slap all they want. They may even dance themselves silly right out of their expensive loafers. Unfortunately, all the results from Kansas last night proved is that the Republican Party continues to be a party at odds with its base. Furthermore, if they continue to try and ignore that reality, anything and everything they think they are winning now will be wiped away with a disastrous defeat in 2016.

At this point, given the problems with their base voters, they may not even capture their coveted Senate majority in the Fall. Only able to capture 48% of their own vote, the Republican establishment did not emerge energized and victorious out of Kansas last night – what it did was throw just enough money at Kansas to enable an aging, out of touch politician to cling to power for just a few more years.

Fifty-two percent of their base voted against that happening, yet the D.C. GOP still doesn’t seem to care. That’s not victory, it’s a defeat waiting to happen just down the line. The future will prove that isn’t going to be enough for anything like a return to real power for an old, corrupt Republican political establishment with no solid long term plan for America’s future, … let alone its own.