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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) will campaign for Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) later this week, Roberts's campaign announced Monday. The tea party star becomes the latest well-known Republican to join the effort to rescue Roberts, who polls show is trailing independent candidate Greg Orman. The Texas senator will help launch a Roberts campaign bus tour on Thursday. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) will also join the effort. "To stop the liberal Harry Reid-Barack Obama agenda, we must win the Senate Majority – and we can’t do that without Pat Roberts back in the Senate," Cruz said in a statement. An NBC News/Marist...

....control of the Senate is stable and tight, with Republicans maintaining the inside track to a majority in the latest round of data from the New York Times/CBS News/YouGov online panel of more than 100,000 respondents.

Kansas Surprise: Orman Leads Roberts by 10 in NBC/Marist Poll BY CARRIE DANN Independent candidate Greg Orman is leading incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Roberts in Kansas by 10 points, while Democrats have a slim lead in North Carolina’s contest and both candidates are in a dead heat in Iowa’s Senate race, new NBC News/Marist polls find. The Kansas poll, which shows Roberts trailing 38 percent to Orman’s 48 percent, is full of bad news for the incumbent and for Republicans, who have suddenly seen Roberts’ sleepy re-election race turn into a very real pickup opportunity for Democrats if Orman decides...

In the race for U.S. Senate in Kansas, independent candidate and businessman Greg Orman leads Republican incumbent Pat Roberts by 10 points among likely voters including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate. Orman’s lead is bolstered by better than a two-to-one lead among independents likely to vote. Voters’ impressions of incumbent Republican Roberts is upside down with nearly half of likely voters viewing him negatively. In contrast, Orman is more positively viewed by likely voters and has lower negatives. Turning to the contest for governor in Kansas, the Republican incumbent, Sam Brownback, faces a tough challenge from...

Republicans remain the favorite to win Senate control in November but have been been unable to cement their lead heading into the final month, the new CBS News Battleground Tracker finds, with the Democrats are hanging in across a number of close races. Competitive Kansas race threatens GOP senate takeover At least two factors could delay Republicans on their road to 51. First is the even the race in Kansas, where independent candidate Greg Orman is now estimated to be deadlocked with Republican incumbent Pat Roberts in this study. It isn't clear with whom Orman would caucus, if elected. (He's...

The Kansas City Health Department said they are monitoring and keeping a close eye on a patient who may have contracted a contagious virus. Spokesman Jeff Hershberger said it is extremely unlikely that this person has Ebola because of their travel history and lack of symptoms. It is unknown at this time what the patient is suffering from or if anyone else is sick.

Kansas governor Sam Brownback received a vote of confidence in his controversial tax cut program Thursday, as the Cato Institute gave him the top rating on its annual fiscal policy report card. The libertarian think tank ranked the Republican Brownback first among governors for his management of taxes and spending, tied with North Carolina's Pat McCrory, also a Republican. The report card, which gives high marks to efforts to lower taxes and spending, specifically cited the tax cuts engineered by Brownback as a "major policy success." The cuts have become a political liability this year for Brownback, who faces a...

Consistent: The topline results — Republicans are ahead. Inconsistent: The margins. NPR measures Obama’s job approval at (41/56) in states with contested Senate races, and an abysmal (29/67) among independents. But on the generic Senate ballot, the GOP leads by just three, fueled by a 16-point advantage among those aforementioned independents: In case you’re curious, NPR’s partisan sample is a reasonable, if slightly generous, D+4. Fox News’ pollster included two more states in their survey, but excluded Alaska. Results: Unless I’m missing something glaringly obvious (Fox’s poll sample is D+0, in line with 2010), I can’t quite wrap my...

A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll has his challenger, Greg Orman, beating him by five points, 46% to 41%. Here are five reasons that won’t happen: ....Obama is widely disliked in Kansas. His approval rating is 33%... ....Roberts is a known quantity. ...3. Nobody has ever heard of Greg Orman. (He would have a better chance of competing if his last name started with an “N.”) 4. Democrats can’t really help Mr. Orman.... ...5. The tea party has nowhere else to go. Tea partyers don’t want to be blamed for losing the Senate to Harry Reid.... ...Polls are a snapshot...

A new poll out Wednesday from Suffolk University and USA Today confirms something we kind of already knew: Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) is in a remarkable amount of trouble. The poll shows independent Greg Orman leading Roberts 46 percent to 41 percent with Democrat Chad Taylor now off the ballot. It has plenty of bad news for Roberts, but also some reasons to believe his goose isn't cooked just yet. Below, we're recapping three ominous signs for Roberts, and three reasons for hope. (And it all comes with the caveat that one poll shouldn't be taken as gospel.) First, the...

Cops can be fans, too. While the Kansas City Royals fought for their playoff lives Tuesday night in a 12-inning victory over the Oakland Athletics, Kansas City Police had a teeny request for citizens.

Why is the GOP struggling? This was supposed to be a “wave” election. The money isn’t coming in, says Karl Rove in a cautionary column titled “Why a GOP Senate Majority is Still in Doubt.” Races that were supposed to be push-overs are suddenly nail-biters. Kansas, that reddest of red states, is in turmoil over incumbent Republican Pat Roberts. In North Carolina, Thom Tillis, the candidate the GOP establishment assured was just the candidate to take Democrat Kay Hagan’s Senate seat, is now behind in the polls. The wave election that was once seen as a certainty is now seen...

A three-judge panel in Topeka ruled Wednesday that Kansas Democrats need not nominate a candidate for the 2014 Senate race. The ruling is expected to help independent Senate candidate Greg Orman’s campaign against incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Roberts. Chad Taylor, the Democrat nominated for the seat in August, dropped from the race Sept. 3. The Kansas Supreme Court later ruled the withdrawal followed state rules. …

Vanquished Republican Senate candidate Milton Wolf is expected to endorse Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback before the midterm elections, GOP sources said Wednesday. Brownback, a Republican, faces an unexpectedly tough re-election bid in usually deep red Kansas, and the GOP has worked hard to unite the party in the aftermath of a bitter Senate primary. (SNIP) National Tea Party endorsements have poured in for Roberts, among them pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson and talk radio host Laura Ingraham. Expected to roll through Kansas and endorse Roberts this month are Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, as well...

A Kansas court has ruled that Democrats can go without a U.S. Senate candidate after their nominee dropped out of the race against three-term Republican Sen. Pat Roberts. The ruling Wednesday is a blow to the GOP in a key race in the national battle over Senate control. A panel of three Shawnee County District Court judges said a state election law does not require Democrats to fill the candidate vacancy. The judges also said the disgruntled who filed a lawsuit to force Democrats to act didn’t prove his case because he failed to show up for a Monday hearing....

Independent businessman and political enigma Greg Orman (46 percent) is leading three-term Republican incumbent Pat Roberts (41 percent) in the race for U.S. Senate in Kansas, with 11 percent undecided, according to the latest Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll of likely voters in the general election. In the race for governor, Democratic state Rep. Paul Davis (46 percent) is leading incumbent Sam Brownback (42 percent), a Republican, with 6 percent undecided in the survey conducted by the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston.

There have been hundreds of television ads this election cycle hitting President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other incumbent senators — just not all in the same spot. But to Kansas independent Greg Orman — the man who could rewrite 2014’s political script — Washington is a hive of dysfunction. And he wants to get there so badly he’s pulverizing both parties. In an ad released on Wednesday by his Senate campaign, Orman name-checks the Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders and calls them an equal part of Washington’s problems. Obama is too,...

Kansas Tea Party supporters are threatening to sit out the state’s pivotal Senate election, potentially dealing another blow to the reelection hopes of Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). Though schisms within the GOP base rarely have such an outsized impact on a general election contest, the lack of support from the conservative base could be devastating to the vulnerable Roberts’s chances against surging independent Greg Orman. Multiple sources tell The Hill that a group of Tea Party leaders in the state are meeting Wednesday to try to decide whether they should go to bat for the incumbent this fall or sit...

On Tuesday, Rosie O'Donnell, the obnoxious 9/11 truther who has made her share of racist comments, thinks that a 15-yard penalty against Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah for a Muslim prayer in the end zone on Monday night is reflective of a systemic anti-Muslim bias that can propel the country to war.

After Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah was penalized for "going to the ground" and engaging in an Islamic prayer after returning a Tom Brady interception for a touchdown on Monday Night Football, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) pressured the NFL to "clarify its policies" on "unsportsmanlike conduct" penalties.