Former challenger Milton Wolf endorses Pat Roberts

Milton Wolf, the Leawood radiologist who narrowly lost to U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts in a contentious primary, has endorsed the three-term senator with just five days left in the pivotal race for U.S. Senate.

Wolf’s loss to Roberts – which came after a string of attack ads – had left many tea party activists sore.

Wolf hadn’t said whether he would endorse Roberts, who faces a tough general election fight against independent Greg Orman. He finally did in a Facebook post that went up late Thursday afternoon. It began with the phrase “My fellow patriots.”

He called on his fellow conservatives to support Roberts over Orman in order to create a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate.

“Whatever your opinion of Pat Roberts, his re-election to the United States Senate may be the deciding factor that dethrones Harry Reid and elevates solid constitutional conservatives like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul into positions of influence to save America from Barack Obama,” Wolf wrote.

The Roberts campaign has worked aggressively to repair relations with the tea party in recent weeks, bringing the three Republican senators Wolf named in his endorsement to the state to join Roberts on the campaign trail.

Wolf accused President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Reid, D-Nev., of “crushing individual liberties under the oppressive weight of their unprecedented and unconstitutional government expansion.”

Wolf repeatedly attacked Roberts over his residency and long tenure in Washington during the primary campaign. The Roberts campaign attacked Wolf over Facebook posts in which the radiologist mocked X-rays of dead and wounded people, resulting in a still pending investigation by the state’s Board of Healing Arts.

Wolf’s campaign accused Roberts ally Anne Hodgdon, a member of the board, of leaking the posts to the media and starting the investigation as a way to discredit Wolf. Hodgdon has said she did not do that.

Even in his endorsement Wolf seemed to have not forgiven the Roberts campaign on this point.

“Be assured that if Pat Roberts is to be re-elected, I will do everything in my power to hold his feet to the fire,” Wolf said in his post. “And be assured that the fullness of the duplicity, dishonesty and abuse of power that has marked this election will be exposed.”

This story was originally published October 30, 2014 at 5:15 PM with the headline "Former challenger Milton Wolf endorses Pat Roberts."