Steve Kraske: Many don’t know Roberts

If you’re wondering why a three-term U.S. senator from Kansas continues to struggle against a largely unknown independent, here’s one explanation:

Pat Roberts – and the work he’s done in Washington, D.C. – has left absolutely no impression on a whole lot of Kansans.

That’s simply astonishing, given that the Republican was first elected to Congress in 1980.

In fact, more people draw a blank on Roberts than on any senator across the country seeking re-election since 2010, says Patrick Miller, a University of Kansas political scientist who has spent a lot of time crunching numbers.

That lack of familiarity carries deep consequences.

Roberts’ opponent in the August primary, fellow Republican Milton Wolf, pounded Roberts relentlessly for not living in Kansas. Roberts, Wolf insisted, is really a Virginian masquerading as a Kansan.

Roberts fought back hard against that allegation. But his closer-than-expected primary battle with Wolf and Roberts’ neck-and-neck scrum with independent Greg Orman suggest that the charge stuck.

And it stuck because many Kansans largely regarded him as a blank slate. They didn’t have any other information about Roberts, so the consistent message from Wolf had staying power.

In February, when Public Policy Polling released a survey on Roberts, almost one-third of Kansans – 32 percent – said they were “unsure” about his work in D.C. No other veteran senator left his constituents so mystified. In fact, PPP concluded in 2013 that Roberts was “one of the most anonymous senators in the country.”

Some first-term senators don’t make much of an impression either. Roberts’ Senate colleague from Kansas, Jerry Moran, checked in at 34 percent of Kansans having no opinion of him.

On job approval, Roberts stands at minus-17, based on last week’s PPP survey. That means his disapproval score tops his approval total by 17 percentage points. That’s a bad place for a politician to live.

Miller found that going back to 2010, the average winning incumbent was at a plus-4.

If Roberts should pull off a win in November, he would be the least popular senator to claim victory in a competitive race since 2010, Miller found.

This story was originally published September 24, 2014 at 7:02 PM with the headline "Steve Kraske: Many don’t know Roberts."