Speed Reads

2014 Watch

GOP Sen. Pat Roberts defeats Tea Party challenger Milton Wolf in Kansas primary

Republican Sen. Pat Roberts has just survived a Tea Party primary challenge back in Kansas, with a victory over medical doctor Milton Wolf.

With 71 percent of precincts reporting, Roberts has 48 percent of the vote against Wolf's 41 percent; The Associated Press has projected Roberts as the winner.

In this contest, both candidates offered voters quite a bit to dislike about them. For Roberts, who has been in either the Senate or the House for a total of 34 years, it was his lack of an actual home in Kansas — a problem he exacerbated with a recent gaffe: "Every time I get an opponent — I mean, every time I get a chance, I'm home."

Milton Wolf (who is also a somewhat distant cousin of President Obama, whom he frequently denounces) had his own scandal, when it was revealed this past February that he had previously posted X-rays of severely injured patients on his Facebook account, along with jokes about gruesome contents of the pictures. Wolf would go to explain that this sort of thing is a coping method for medical professionals who deal with such cases on a regular basis — and even then, his explanations could still sound rather impolitic.

Roberts "accuses me of releasing private patient information, but quite frankly he's lying," Wolf told ABC News, in a recent quote published earlier Tuesday. "We're talking about anonymous X-rays. If there was an X-ray of you, you would not be able to recognize that it's you, and there's a good chance you probably wouldn't know what body part it is."