"Greg Orman has grabbed this race by the throat," said Chapman Rackaway, a political scientist at Fort Hays State University, noting that Orman leads Roberts in several recent polls. "You just have the sense—I see it every time I talk to people—that politics is broken. When someone reinforces that, saying, 'Yes, both parties are the problem,' that really resonates with people right now."

Control of the Senate could hinge on this unlikely contest between an insistently nonpartisan, Ivy League-educated former consultant and a Republican incumbent who's spent 33 years in Washington. If elected, Orman says he would caucus with whichever party has the majority. But if there are 50 Republicans and 49 Democrats, he would play tiebreaker: Joining the GOP would give them 51 votes; joining Democrats would give them 50 votes plus the vice president. In that case, Orman says, he would ask both parties to commit to issues like immigration and tax reform, and join the one that agreed. "We're going to work with the party that's willing to solve our country's problems," Orman said in an interview.

Almost every ballot has an independent or third-party candidate who blames the two major parties for America's problems. Most of them are flakes or gadflies who go unnoticed. But Orman has money, he's run a smart campaign, and he seems to be in the right place at the right time. A weak Republican incumbent, a Democrat willing to get out of the way, and a state whose Republican majority has been badly split by years of toxic intraparty battles—all these factors have made Kansas uniquely receptive to Orman's message.

Most of the teachers in Wichita were Democrats, but not Jim Unruh, a 73-year-old Republican who'd come with his wife. Unruh owns an auto-repair business, and his brother is a Republican county commissioner, but he'd decided to support Orman. He told me he had three candidates' signs in his yard: Paul Davis, the Democrat challenging Governor Sam Brownback; Jean Schodorf, the Democrat for secretary of state; and Republican Representative Mike Pompeo, a Tea Party-aligned conservative. "I think those people can get something done," he said. "The road we're going down right now is a washout."

* * *

You can buy a lot of television ads for a million dollars in Kansas, and that's what Greg Orman did.

The ads played all over the state starting in July. Two teams of men—one in red shirts, one in blue—stand in a muddy field, pulling in opposite directions on a thick rope. As they grunt and strain, going nowhere, a clean-shaven man in jeans, sitting on a set of bleachers, says, "Washington's stuck between two parties who care more about winning than they care about our country." The screen reads "Greg Orman, businessman."