Is Kansas Mitch McConnell’s Waterloo?

One need not hold a lot of sympathy for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to admit the man cannot catch a break.

Just when McConnell appeared to be putting some distance between himself and Alison Lundergan Grimes in his own race in Kentucky, his bigger dream — to finally become majority leader of the U.S. Senate — is in peril because Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932, may be poised to do so again.

{mosads}Technically, Greg Orman, the wealthy businessman who may unseat 34-year congressional veteran Pat Roberts (R), is an independent. But he has run for the Senate as a Democrat before, donated to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and got Democratic nominee Chad Taylor to not only withdraw, but also fight to have his name removed from the ballot to help Orman.

Orman says he would caucus with whichever party is “clearly in control” of the Senate, but the Democrats did not withdraw their candidate and decline to nominate another for someone they weren’t confident would caucus with their side. There are no coincidences in politics.

There is a path to 51 seats and the majority leader gavel for McConnell without Roberts winning a fourth term, but it is not an easy one. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s number-crunching operation, gives Republicans a 56.9 percent chance of winning a majority in the Senate in November — and that’s with Roberts pulling it out. Political prognosticator Charlie Cook says Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia “look pretty hopeless for Democrats,” and Democratic incumbents Mark Begich in Alaska, Mary Landrieu in Louisiana and Mark Pryor in Arkansas “all look increasingly problematic for Democrats.”

That’s enough to pry the gavel from Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) duplicitous hands, providing Republicans convert their supposed gimmes in Georgia, Kentucky and … Kansas. But take away Kansas — Orman is up a few points in the polls — and the mission becomes far more difficult for Republicans. Without Roberts, they would need to survive a nail-biter in either North Carolina, Colorado or Iowa. All three are close, but all three are moving in the wrong direction for McConnell right now. New Hampshire, where former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R) is hoping for another late rally, is less hopeful now than a month ago, as is Michigan.

It still could work out for McConnell. President Obama’s poll numbers are reaching all-time lows, nearly two-thirds of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction and improvements in candidate recruitment have enhanced Republican chances in Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire.

The minority leader is attempting to hedge his bets. He has dispatched many of the party’s top operatives to Kansas to rejuvenate Roberts’s campaign. But it won’t be easy. Roberts, like Landrieu and former Sen. Dick Lugar (R) of Indiana, can fairly be characterized as a creature more of Washington than Kansas. He has had trouble establishing legal residency in the Sunflower State. He has spent little in the way of money or, perhaps more critically, time campaigning in Kansas — assuming, as had most others, that a Republican couldn’t possibly lose that seat.

If McConnell doesn’t want to find himself being dubbed the “man of constant sorrow” in 2014, his task is clear: Get the spotlight onto Harry Reid and off of Roberts, convince Kansans there are just too many unanswered questions about “independent” Greg Orman and ensure that Roberts has the best get-out-the-vote operation the state has ever seen.

All that might not be enough. But it definitely is the place to start.

O’Connell is the chairman of CivicForumPAC, worked on the 2008 McCain-Palin presidential campaign and is author of the book Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery.