Down Ticket #17: The sleeper race that could decide who controls the Senate (and more!)

Democratic candidate Jason Kander, left, spars with Republican incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt during the first general election debate in Missouri's race for U.S. Senate. (Photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)
Democratic candidate Jason Kander, left, spars with Republican incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt during the first general election debate in Missouri’s race for U.S. Senate. (Photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)

Down Ticket is Yahoo News’ complete guide to the most fascinating House, Senate and governors’ races of 2016. Coming to you every Tuesday and Thursday until Nov. 8. What you need to know today.

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Missouri’s Jason Kander can assemble a rifle blindfolded. Can he hit the bull’s-eye for Senate Democrats?

Democrats know that they can regain control of the U.S. Senate only if they pick up at least four seats in November — and whenever they daydream about that possibility, they tend to obsess over a few seats in particular.

There’s Wisconsin and Illinois, where everyone pretty much agrees the party is on track to sink a pair of Republican senators.

There’s New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, where GOP incumbents Kelly Ayotte and Pat Toomey seem shaky.

Then there’s the open, formerly Republican seat in Indiana, which has been tilting toward former Democratic Sen. and Gov. Evan Bayh ever since he entered the race at the eleventh hour.

Win those five, and the Dems don’t have to worry about losing Nevada (where Sen. Harry Reid is retiring after 30 years and GOP nominee Joe Heck is slightly ahead) or any of the other former tossups that have drifted in a Republican direction during the past couple of months, including Florida (where Sen. Marco Rubio, another late entrant, holds a solid lead) and Ohio (where Sen. Rob Portman is clobbering Democrat Ted Strickland).

Lose any one of them, however, and those Democratic dreams will almost certainly fall flat. There’s no margin for error.

Except what if, suddenly, there is? In recent weeks, it’s started to look like the Democratic Party might have another path to Senate dominance — a path that runs through the increasingly red state of Missouri, to the surprise of many Beltway observers.

Donald Trump greets supporters at the Peabody Opera House in St. Louis last March. (Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)
Donald Trump greets supporters at the Peabody Opera House in St. Louis last March. (Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)

Very few people predicted that the battle between GOP incumbent Roy Blunt and Democratic challenger Jason Kander would prove pivotal this fall. Barack Obama nearly carried the Show Me State in 2008, but since then, its politics have drifted rightward; Mitt Romney trounced the president by 10 percentage points in 2012. Today, six of Missouri’s eight U.S. House members are Republicans, and the GOP enjoys comfortable majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.

Making matters worse for Missouri Democrats is the name at the top of the ticket: 64 percent of the state’s voters have an unfavorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, according to the latest poll, compared with only 51 percent for Donald Trump — the opposite of their national numbers. As a result, Trump is currently positioned to win Missouri’s 10 electoral votes by an even larger margin than Romney — and by all rights, Blunt, the Republican incumbent, should be positioned to return to the Senate. (Sitting senators almost never lose re-election when their party’s presidential nominee wins statewide.)

And yet, on Friday, Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report — the best in the business when it comes to analyzing congressional elections and Down Ticket’s partner for the rest of the cycle — changed the status of the Blunt vs. Kander contest from “Lean Republican” to “Tossup.”

Here’s what’s happening on the ground.

First and foremost: Kander, 35, is a strong, telegenic challenger. A graduate of Georgetown Law, he enlisted in the Army National Guard after 9/11. He went on to serve a tour of duty in Afghanistan and rise to the rank of captain. In 2008, Kander was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives, where he worked with a Republican colleague to pass the state’s first major ethics reform bill since 1991. Kander won re-election two years later with 70 percent of the vote; in 2012, he narrowly defeated a leader of the Missouri GOP to become secretary of state. He’s never lost a race.

Jason Kander, Democratic Senate candidate from Missouri. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
Jason Kander, Democratic Senate candidate from Missouri. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)

Kander’s been running a clever campaign against Blunt. The Democrat’s approach has been two-pronged: (1) weaken his Republican rival — a 66-year-old who spent seven terms in the House before winning an open Senate seat in 2010 — by portraying him as a self-serving creature of the Washington establishment; and (2) bolster his own red-state brand by emphasizing his more centrist — and culturally conservative — credentials.

And so Missouri voters have been treated to a torrent of Democratic television ads pointing out that Blunt’s wife and three children all work as lobbyists (“the family business”); that Blunt has voted to raise his own pay 12 times; and that the senator has repeatedly backed legislation that would slash taxes for big corporations — such as Kraft Foods, his wife’s employer.

Kander & Co. needle Blunt for never serving in the military — the Republican received three deferments during Vietnam — and attack his record on veterans’ issues. On the stump, the Democrat repeatedly asks voters to raise their hands if they approve of the job Congress has done; few hands go up. It’s an anti-establishment year, so the goal is to make Blunt look like part of the problem: an old, business-as-usual politician.

Kander, in contrast, is touting himself as a different kind of Democrat — one who has bucked his party by supporting a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, opposing the Iran deal and rejecting the president’s executive actions on immigration. Oh, and in case you haven’t caught one of the most viewed and talked-about political spots of the cycle, Kander is also the kind of Democrat who can assemble an AR-15 rifle with a blindfold on.

“It’s a very clear choice between somebody like myself, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who is focused on a new generation of leadership,” Kander said at a rally last month, “and someone like Sen. Blunt, who has been in Washington for 20 years doing what special interests want to him to do.”

Blunt and his GOP allies have begun to fight back. Their main line of attack is that Kander is “too liberal for Missouri”: a national co-chair of Clinton’s campaign who backed the (locally unpopular) Affordable Care Act, voted for sales and income tax hikes as a state legislator, and once backed an energy tax. They also note that Blunt is a skilled dealmaker who has crossed the aisle to craft legislation with Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Chris Coons of Delaware and Patty Murray of Washington on various issues, from manufacturing to mental health.

Sen. Roy Blunt greets supporters at the Missouri State Fair in August. (Photo: Orlin Wagner/AP)
Sen. Roy Blunt greets supporters at the Missouri State Fair in August. (Photo: Orlin Wagner/AP)

Still, as Kander recently boasted, “the momentum is really clearly with us.” Early on, Blunt, a well-known quantity in Missouri politics, led in every single poll — often by as many as 7 percentage points. But his support never topped the magic 50 percent mark. Now, the only survey released in the past month shows Kander ahead for the first time, with 42 percent of the vote to Blunt’s 40 percent — and private polling from both parties indicates a similarly close race. Meanwhile, Kander’s AR-15 ad has been viewed 998,000 times on YouTube. Blunt’s response, an ad reminding voters that Kander received an “F” rating from the National Rifle Association, has been viewed 15,500 times.

As a result, big money has started to pour into Missouri. From Aug. 3 — the day after Kander won the Democratic primary — until the end of September, Blunt and his allies (the NRA, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Senate Leadership Fund) spent about $2.7 million more on advertising than Kander and his friends (the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees). But that could change over the next 34 days. The DSCC, sensing an opportunity, just reserved an additional $2 million, and other groups (End Citizens United, Vote Vets) are beginning to chip in as well.

“I think Jason Kander is a marvelous candidate—one of the best I’ve ever seen,” Montana Sen. Jon Tester, the chairman of the DSCC, told reporters last month. “I think that he’s going to do very well in November.”

Whether Kander delivers on that promise remains to be seen. One poll doesn’t constitute a trend line; we need to see more data before we can assess how close the race really is. Right now, the statisticians at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight expect Blunt to beat Kander by 2.4 percentage points; their counterparts at the New York Times’ Upshot give Blunt a 72 percent chance of winning.

Still, as other Democratic Senate candidates fade, Kander’s chances of playing a tiebreaking role on Election Day are rising. Stay tuned for more.

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Kelly Ayotte says Trump is a good role model — then says she “misspoke.” Oops.

“I think that certainly there are many role models that we have, and I believe he can serve as president, so I absolutely I would do that.”

  • Embattled New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, answering a question about whether she would tell children to “be like” Donald Trump and “point to him as a role model” during Monday night’s debate against her challenger, Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan. Ayotte’s awkward position on Trump — she says she will vote for him while refusing to endorse him — has been a major theme of the close N.H. Senate contest.

“I misspoke tonight. While I would hope all of our children would aspire to be president, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have set a good example and I wouldn’t hold up either of them as role models for my kids.”

  • A statement released by Ayotte’s press office at 10:42 P.M. the same night.

Predictably, the Internet went wild — at least according to the Hassan campaign.

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Charlie Crist: Still a fan of fans

As you may have heard, Florida Democrat Charlie Crist — former Republican, former independent, former governor, former Senate candidate — is challenging GOP incumbent David Jolly this year in the Sunshine State’s 13th Congressional District. But while Crist has changed parties several times — and sought every major office in the state — one thing about him, at least, has remained constant: his well-documented love of fans. (And by that we mean the electric kind that blow air on you.)

Don’t believe us? Check out his latest ad:

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