Roy Blunt is `fighting for his political life’
Source: Kansas City Star
This year, polls suggest Trump holds a comfortable lead, but state Attorney General Chris Koster (D) has at least a coin flip’s chance of winning the governorship, and Secretary of State Jason Kander (D) now appears to have roughly even odds of beating Blunt. The New York Times reported last week that Kander is running slightly ahead of Blunt in internal polling, something we have also heard.
Kander, a veteran, ran perhaps the best ad of the entire cycle, and Blunt is struggling with being an insider candidate in an outsider kind of year. Blunt’s son, a lobbyist, is running his campaign, a connection that is causing his campaign headaches. Like Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), who we also recently downgraded to Toss-up, Blunt has frustrated national Republicans, who believe both incumbents have not run strong enough campaigns in a difficult environment.
Ultimately, this race might be something of a re-run of Arizona’s highly competitive Senate race in 2012. In that open-seat content, ex-Surgeon General Richard Carmona (D) was locked in a very tight race with Rep. Jeff Flake (R) and ran ahead of Obama statewide, but the state’s Republican tinge allowed Flake to get over the finish line. However, it’s an incomplete comparison: for one, Blunt is an incumbent, and Missouri has more of a history of electing Democratic senators than Arizona (Missouri currently has a Democratic senator, while Arizona hasn’t elected one since 1988). In any event, Trump coattails could be helpful to Blunt, but there will be at least some Trump-Kander voters.
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article107220642.html
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and he seemed to mostly be a single-issue representative (at least in terms of his appearances and statements on the floor) - i.e., "pork barrel spending". I would watch him at the debates for many of the appropriations bills over the years where he would stand up and read a list of riders that had been added to those bills that funneled money to various congressional districts for particular projects. He usually highlighted what he thought were "wasteful" items.
He fascinated me regarding his unrelenting consistency in doing this (and I expect he never added any of his own riders himself as the GOP is wont to do when attacking someone else's "projects" as "pork"
. But then I found out later that he was a Mormon too, which immediately explains why he has firmly, publicly, and unequivocally trashed Trump very early on (like most of the rest of the LDS community) without the type of ambivalence shown by folks like Cruz... 
Maybe I'm wrong, and it is Missouri after all. But the state elects Democrats to the Senate and governorship all the time. Kander is dynamic, seems immune to the usual wedge issues, and Blunt, like Burr, is the absolute epitome of the zero-personality, do-nothing Republican senator. Come on, Mr. Kander!!!!! 
