He's trailing by 8, as a republican from Kansas, as an incumbent. I don't know how this happens, but clearly he made it happen and he probably deserves losing.
One can lose in a state with a large partisan edge for one for one of two things:
INCOMPETENCE
CORRUPTION
I can see the narrative of this race being similar to the one in Illinois. One party thinks that 50+1% of voters are die hard loyal and just sees that as a green light to play.
That is the idea. The Democrats have few such races, but Republicans seem more frequently in denial:
We can't lose this Governorship -- this is conservative Georgia!
We can't lose this Senate seat -- this is conservative Georgia!
Politicians can so disgrace themselves in most states that they can give a comparative unknown a good chance to win a political office that they think invulnerable because 'this is...' The other is that an agenda either does not work or that it has run out of ideas.
So far we have yet to see anyone lose by trivializing rape or its consequences as did Todd Akin in Missouri or Richard Mourdock in Indiana in statewide races, contradicting a trend in Missouri or the norm in Indiana. "We are conservative but we are not crazy" is one possible voting explanation of electoral behavior. The Democrats won the Senate seats despite Barack Obama losing the state by 10% or so. (Maybe the President believed that the Senate seats mattered more than the electoral votes of those states, so he did not campaign in two states taht were very close in 2008).
