On October 4, an NBC News/Marist Poll showed that Greg Orman, independent candidate for U.S. Senate in Kansas, has increased his lead over incumbent Republican Pat Roberts to ten points. See here. Scroll down to page five: Orman 48%; Roberts 38%; Libertarian Randall Batson 5%; other 1% (which would need to be write-in votes, because only three candidates are on the ballot); undecided 9%.
Assuming Orman wins, the result will be historic. He would be the first independent ever elected by popular vote to the U.S. Senate who had not already been elected to statewide office in that state.
Open-minded supporters of top-two, who support top-two because they sincerely believe that top-two helps independent candidates, should notice that if Kansas had a top-two system, Orman’s victory would not have been possible. Orman was only at 14% in the SurveyUSA poll on July 25, in third place behind Roberts at 38% and Democratic nominee Chad Taylor at 33%. The Kansas primary was on August 4. Of course, Kansas does not have a top-two system, so the fact that Orman was in third place at the time did not injure him. But if Kansas had a top-two system, Orman would have been eliminated from the general election ballot on August 4.
Even two weeks after the Kansas primary, an August 19 Public Policy Poll showed Orman still in third place, but he was catching up. Roberts was at 32%; Taylor was at 25; Orman 23%. The normal default in is for the vast majority of U.S. voters to assume that they will be voting for a Democrat or a Republican. For a minor party or independent candidate to overcome that default position takes an enormous amount of luck, energy, hard work, and above all, time. It takes time for public opinion to decide that, yes, in this case, the normal default pattern will be overcome. Supporters of top-two might say that if Kansas had a top-two system, Orman could simply have done all his advertising much earlier in the year. But the key to Orman’s success is not his advertising. The key to his success so far is that revelations about both major party nominees came out in the middle of the season, partly after the primary. A top-two system shuts out candidates before the public learns these revelations. Timing is essential in election campaigns, and top-two shuts the door on outsiders far too early in the system. If Oregon were to adopt a top-two system, the results would be even worse, because whereas the Kansas primary is in August, the Oregon primary is in May.
