About a century ago — in 1932, to be exact — Kansas elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. That was the last time. But a newcomer to the political world might change that distinction come November, God willing.
His name is Adam Hamilton, better known to his more than 24,000 parishioners as Rev. Hamilton or Pastor Adam. Hamilton, 62, leads the largest Methodist congregation in the country at the ministry he founded more than three decades ago, the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. The church has nine locations in multiple states.
Hamilton won the Kansas Democratic primary for Senate on Aug. 4. He’ll face Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in the general election.
Talking and listening to Hamilton, it’s not hard to understand how he created a megachurch. A plainspoken Midwesterner, he’s easy on the ears and keeps things simple. As a fifth-generation Kansan whose family helped establish a small community called Hope, he replaces fire and brimstone with kindness and common sense imbued with biblical wisdom. He said his congregation includes Republicans, Democrats and independents in about equal numbers.
The leap from the pulpit to politics was the gradual result of his revulsion over what has been happening in Washington since President Donald Trump reoccupied the Oval Office. (Hamilton expressed this more diplomatically.) The policies coming out of D.C. were, the minister said, “an assault on the values I preached and taught for 35 years.” While watching the news each night, he would say, “That’s not okay with me. Somebody needs to do something.”
While he had others in mind, others had him in mind. His wife was not among them. “If you’re going to run, you’re going to have to find another wife,” said the woman he married one week after high school graduation 44 years ago. “She wasn’t smiling,” he deadpanned, but he didn’t disagree. “My job is to raise people up to run for office, not for me to run.”
Then one Saturday, after he had preached at a funeral, LaVon Hamilton walked up to her husband and said, “You know, I think I was wrong.”
With that, the two set off on an 18-city listening tour in March. They heard frustration, disappointment and dissatisfaction with Washington. As an agricultural state, Kansas has suffered more than its fair share of consequences from the Iran war, which has led to increased gas prices. It has also dealt with tariffs and billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Kansas leads the country with 28 rural hospitals at immediate risk of closure. Farmers nationwide paid $1.4 billion more on diesel fuel for this spring’s planting season than last year, according to a report from the Democratic staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee. Kansas was ranked fifth nationally in percentage increase, with planting diesel costs rising nearly 84 percent year over year. These facts were sufficient to sway Hamilton’s decision, but prayer during Lent helped, too.
“When it comes to discerning God’s will, you’re never quite sure,” he said. “I was 87.2 percent sure I was supposed to do this.”
Within one week of declaring his candidacy, Hamilton had raised $1 million. After two months of campaigning, he had raised $3.66 million. Though he declared his candidacy just a few months ago and was in a field of 11 contenders, Hamilton easily won the primary. He faces a tough contest against Marshall, a physician who, among other things, is a 2020 election denier and voted to support Trump’s agenda 98.3 percent of the time during the president’s first term while Marshall was a member of the House of Representatives.
In light of all that’s happened under Trump 2.0, this would seem a timely opportunity for Hamilton, but Kansas has long been a solidly red state. In somewhat encouraging campaign news, the Cook Political Report on Aug. 4 shifted its rating for the Senate contest from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican.” A recent poll shows Marshall leading Hamilton 46 percent to 45 percent.
There’s still plenty of time to move the needle toward a Democratic victory. If nothing else, Americans, including Republicans, ought to welcome an opportunity to elect centrist Democrats to restore a balance of power to Washington.
Hamilton’s decades of ministering to people suffering hardships including divorce, suicide and bankruptcy have given him what Washington often lacks — empathy and compassion. If elected, he hopes to bring his pastoral experience to the Senate while also filling leadership gaps that occurred to him during a recent visit to Liberal, Kansas — yes, a town — and its Wizard of Oz museum.
“Lots of people [in Washington] have lost their minds,” he said, referring to the Scarecrow’s search for a brain. “A lot of them have lost their hearts. And there’s a lot of cowardly lions afraid to say what they know to be true. They’re so afraid they’ll be bullied and primaried that they go along with it until they lose. Then they’ll speak up. But it’s not courageous when you’re on the way out. It’s courageous when you have everything to lose and say, ‘You know, this is wrong and I’m sorry, I can’t support this.’”
Nearly 100 years of Republicanism seems long enough.
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