WASHINGTON — National Republicans on Thursday moved to take control of the campaign of Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas by sending a longtime party strategist to the state to advise him, a day after his hopes for re-election and those of his party for taking control of the Senate were threatened by the attempted withdrawal of the Democrat in the race.
Also on Thursday, the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach, a Republican, ruled that the Democratic nominee, Chad Taylor, could not withdraw his name from the ballot. Democratic officials said Mr. Taylor would file a legal challenge to the ruling.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee is sending Chris LaCivita, who has served as a political troubleshooter in past Republican campaigns, to counsel Mr. Roberts and help oversee his campaign. The committee will also seek to hire a local lawyer in any legal challenge against Mr. Taylor, who had tried to drop off the ballot on the last day candidates were allowed to do so.
Mr. LaCivita is expected to be in Kansas by this weekend.
Mr. Taylor’s attempt to drop out of the race elevated Greg Orman, a well-funded independent candidate whose television ads have been on the Kansas airwaves since July. With a Libertarian, Randall Batson, who may take votes from the right, also on the ballot, Mr. Roberts could be in jeopardy after having been thought to be a relatively safe incumbent.
Further, Republicans’ expectations nationally that they would have to defend just two seats, in Kentucky and Georgia, in a year that finds them targeting as many as a dozen Democratic-controlled seats, have been scuttled. With many of the most competitive Senate races still effectively tied two months before the election, surprises in places like Kansas could prove crucial in determining whether Republicans take the six seats they need to win a Senate majority.
Continue reading the main storyRepublicans have had a lock on Kansas’ two Senate seats since 1939, and Mr. Orman has notably refused to commit to caucusing with the Democrats if he wins.
But after a congressional career of more than three decades in which he has never received less than 60 percent of the vote, Mr. Roberts now finds himself in what is shaping up to be the race of his life. Many senior Republicans, who privately hoped that the 78-year-old senator would retire, say he partly has himself to blame.
Mr. Roberts won just 48 percent of the vote in his primary last month, holding off a Tea Party Republican in part because there were two other minor candidates on the ballot, each of whom took more than 5 percent. In that race, Mr. Roberts was battered over revelations in The New York Times that he had no home of his own in Kansas and stayed in the spare room of a donor’s house when he visited Dodge City, the town he lists as his residence.
Mr. Roberts’s campaign manager resurrected the issue immediately after the primary last month when he said the senator was heading “back home for two days or three to rest.” By “home,” the manager, Leroy Towns, meant Mr. Roberts’s home in Alexandria, Va.
More troubling to Republicans, and stunning to Mr. Orman’s backers, is that Mr. Roberts has not aired any television commercials in the month since his Aug. 5 primary win. In that same time period, Mr. Orman’s ads have consistently aired. National Republicans have complained for months about Mr. Roberts’s spending decisions, the quality of his TV ads and the campaign’s overall readiness to confront the serious political threat facing the senator, who first came to Washington as a staff member in the late 1960s.
It was not until Mr. Taylor moved, at the nudging of some Democrats, to take himself off the ballot late Wednesday that Republican officials were able to fully seize the campaign. Republicans, in making the case that Mr. Taylor, a local prosecutor, could not drop out this late, had noted that Kansas law states that a candidate who withdraws must be “incapable of fulfilling the duties of office if elected.”
Mr. Taylor said in a statement on Thursday that the secretary of state’s office had told him the day before that his letter requesting that his name be removed from the ballot “was sufficient” for him to withdraw from the race. He also made it clear that he was ending his campaign, even if his name was still on the ballot.
Mr. Roberts’s campaign on Wednesday called the move “a corrupt bargain,” and Democratic sources said that Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, had been in touch with Mr. Taylor. But Republicans’ central focus will be on hammering Mr. Orman — “making him a Democrat,” as one Republican strategist put it.
“Like many Kansans, Greg’s tried both parties and has been disappointed in both,” said Sam Edelen, Mr. Orman’s spokesman. “That’s why he’s running as an independent.”
Mr. Orman, a 45-year-old former energy entrepreneur who became wealthy selling his business to a utility, has criticized both parties. His consultants are Democrats, but he has been embraced by a group of disaffected moderate Republicans in Kansas who have been locked in a political feud with Gov. Sam Brownback, also a Republican.
Kansas politics have been roiled in recent years. The rise of the Tea Party and the election of President Obama have prompted Republicans to embrace a purer brand of conservatism and purge what had long been a robust moderate wing from its ranks. Mr. Roberts has sought to adapt to this new era, voting against spending bills that included projects for the state that he had sought, but both public and private polling indicated in the month since his primary that he was vulnerable to Mr. Orman.
Now, Mr. LaCivita, a Marine veteran, is being sent in to rescue Mr. Roberts, himself a former Marine officer.
An earlier version of this article misstated the year Republicans began their lock on the two Senate seats in Kansas. It is 1939, not 1932.
