T-Minus 8 Days

On Monday morning we will be eight days away from knowing who has won the 2004 elections. While the Bush-Kerry race is by far the most important, in Kansas we will have virtually no impact and more and more it seems like Bush will do well in Missouri, so I would like to spend some time over the next few days focusing on some of our local races that are still up in the air.

The five that interest me the most are the Kobach-Moore race in the Kansas Third Congressional District, Bi-State II, Blunt-Claire! (MO-Governor), Patterson-Cleaver (MO-5) and Ryun-Boyda (KS-2).

Over the next few days I hope to write about all of these, but the Kobach vs. Moore race is the one that interests me the most. The KC Star released poll numbers today that make it look like Moore will clean up. Moore has a significantly larger lead at this point than he had over either Adam Taff or Phill Kline, Moore has millions of dollars in ad time that has not run yet, the endorsements of the Kansas City Star and the Johnson County Sun, a reasonable following among Republicans and Moore has an established reputation in Kansas that will be difficult for Team Kobach to change in the next eight days.

But Kobach has a Republican (by registration, but not always by votes) district, a driven campaign staff, a natural grass roots organization that can operate without a lot of funding, a decent amount of money in the bank, a stealthy campaign truck, and should get good support from the NRCC (including a new ad I saw this evening for the first time).

I need to give Kobach credit, he surprised me in August, in fact he surprised a lot of people when he beat Adam Taff. I supported Taff, and Taff had a lot of the advantages Moore now has, but Kobach pulled out a win. He beat Taff by going negative (using charges that were generally unfounded and misleading), bringing a strong conservative message, and registering new voters. The new voters were the key in the primary, since pollsters try to qualify who is a "likely voter" they generally disqualify people who have not voted in the past couple of elections, so newly registered voters are kind of stealth voters regarding polling.

Kobach has been on the attack for a long time and hitting hard, in the end we will see if his message pushes voters away from Moore, or if it pushes moderate Republicans into the arms of a Democrat. Regardless, November 2nd is going to be interesting.

Timothy Burger