Is Roy Blunt’s Senate seat in trouble?

Some of my political contacts scoff at the notion that Roy Blunt could lose his Senate seat.

National pundits seem to agree. The often reliable Charlie Cook Political Report rates Blunt’s seat as a likely hold for the 2016 elections.

Missouri has sent Blunt to Washington, D.C., since 1997. He started as a House member in the year that the Spice Girls topped the charts, and remained there until he reached the Senate in 2011.

This year he faces a challenge from Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, a 34-year-old Democrat who got his start in politics in Kansas City and quickly escalated his resume to include a statewide seat. 

A new poll out on Friday from Public Policy Polling posits that Blunt is part of a tarnished Republican brand and that his own approval ratings aren’t faring so well. The PPP poll reports Blunt’s approval rating rests at a low 25 percent, with 48 percent disapproving of his performance in the Senate and 27 percent reserving judgment.

The PPP narrative puts Blunt in a group of establishment Republican Senators that include John McCain (Arizona), Richard Burr (North Carolina) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa), who may show a weakness in this election cycle because of their already meek standing among voters and their unyielding resistance to letting President Barack Obama nominate a Supreme Court replacement for the recently deceased Antonin Scalia. 

PPP finds that Blunt’s stance against filling Scalia’s seat until Obama’s replacement is elected doesn’t square with how Missourians feel about the issue. The poll reports that 56 percent of respondents think Scalia’s seat should be filled this year, and 66 percent think the Senate should at least consider an Obama nomination, rather than the leading Republican Senate’s sentiment that it will refuse to consider any nomination. Finally, PPP says 56 percent of respondents say they’d be less likely to vote for Blunt if he held firm on an anti-nomination stance.

Blunt has a sizable fundraising edge over Kander. But 2016 may be another anti-incumbency year among a dissatisfied electorate. Particularly vulnerable are GOP candidates, mired in the Republican Party’s self-made conflagration over its presidential choices and its position on the Supreme Court vacancy.

And Kander is an adept political campaigner. Few gave him a realistic shot at winning the Secretary of State’s office in 2012 to replace Robin Carnahan, but Kander worked rural districts hard and ultimately gained a narrow edge over Shane Schoeller on Election Day.