Political challengers tend to their day jobs when they can, but the Rev. Adam Hamilton has an unusual professional calling. So on a recent Friday afternoon, the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate from Kansas took time out from the campaign trail to perform a wedding. Two days later, he baptized a baby on the vast campus of Resurrection, a United Methodist Church he founded and leads.
Not a word of politics was spoken amid the prayers to Jesus and wonder at the mightiness of God. Instead, it was the insistent calls for selfless love and neighborly service echoing through Resurrection’s hallways and chapels that offered a quiet rebuke to the angry battles raging outside the sanctuary.
It may go too far to speak of the miraculous in an election, but it is a source of wonder and some amazement, for Democrats especially, that Kansas’ Senate race has joined the growing list of 2026 contests in which Republicans are vulnerable.
In a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, at least one recent poll, from Emerson College/Nexstar, gave Mr. Hamilton a two-point lead over the incumbent Republican senator, Roger Marshall. Those who rate Senate races have moved Kansas from a G.O.P. slam dunk to competitive status.
His campaign is important because it wraps together several trends visible across this year’s political map. They include a revolt against the Republicans in a farm belt hit hard by tariffs and rising diesel and fertilizer costs. The rebellion has affected Senate races in Iowa and Nebraska as well as Kansas, and some polls suggest it may be spreading to South Dakota. Mr. Hamilton is also part of a cadre of Democrats whose politics are rooted in their Christian commitments — James Talarico in Texas is prominent among them — defying longstanding G.O.P. claims that their foes are hostile to people of faith.
A former Republican himself, Mr. Hamilton embodies a nationwide shift in the allegiances of moderate Republicans toward the Democrats. And like many other candidates in the middle of the country, Mr. Hamilton is trying to balance blunt criticisms of Mr. Trump — on high prices, tariffs, the war in Iran, cuts in health care and nutrition programs and his handling of immigration — with promises of a less partisan, less angry, more cooperative politics on the other side of the Trump experience. Implicit is the idea that the opposite of Trumpism is not an equally in-your-face politics from the other side but a return to a degree of mutual respect.
This is why the often heated debate among Democratic factions that plays so prominently on the coasts and in the media seems so distant in places like Kansas that local Democrats are determined to make competitive.
“I don’t really pay much attention to the national debate” among Democrats, Mr. Hamilton said in an interview. “My focus is here in Kansas.” But if he prevails, the merits of his middle-of-the-road, values-based approach will become part of that debate. He speaks in fiercely moral terms of how much damage Mr. Trump’s cuts in safety net programs have done to Kansans living on the edge and how tariffs have hurt farmers and small businesses. But he is also running an ad calling out “socialism” and describes himself as “a moderate or independent-minded Democrat.”
The point, he told me, is “to differentiate who I am as a Democrat in Kansas,” noting that is “very different than, maybe, a mayor in Washington or New York City.”
Addressing a living room gathering in Overland Park in the suburbs of Kansas City that account for nearly a third of the state’s voters, Mr. Hamilton devoted considerable energy to detailing the costs of Mr. Trump’s policies and Mr. Marshall’s failure to challenge them. “Senator,” he said, “your job is to be a champion for the people of Kansas, not to be spokesperson for the White House to the people of Kansas.”
His stump speech always returns to a friendlier kind of politics. “I’m pretty sure in this room we have Republicans and we have Democrats and independents,” he told those gathered in Overland Park. “It’s not about that. It’s about decency. It’s about humanity. And what’s happening in Washington, D.C., is not normal. It’s not how things work. I’ve never seen it before.”
If you listen to Mr. Hamilton long enough, you learn that “normal” is both a very good thing and the counterpoint to all the country is experiencing now.
One other thing about Mr. Hamilton, and it may be the most important thing: He has built the largest Methodist congregation in the United States (24,000 members across nine sites in the Kansas City area and 22 services every Sunday) by preaching a Gospel that combines a thoroughly traditional promise of salvation through Jesus Christ with a call for community engagement and a dedication to those in need. He regularly notes that his congregation is divided roughly equally among Democrats, Republicans and independents.
In a state where 70 percent of adult Kansans identify as Christians, Mr. Marshall has taken to calling Mr. Hamilton “a megachurch C.E.O.” Mr. Marshall means it as a negative, even though a lot of Republicans frequent megachurches and respect CEOs. At the least, Mr. Hamilton can counter a favorite conservative talking point against Democrats “who never met a payroll”: Resurrection has 461 employees.
To sharpen the attack, Mr. Marshall and ads on his behalf have added politically loaded adjectives, labeling Mr. Hamilton a “woke mega-church C.E.O.” or a “millionaire megachurch C.E.O.”
If “woke” is just an all-purpose right-wing epithet these days for anyone who believes in equal rights for Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people and for women, well, sure. But “woke” is a strange word for Mr. Hamilton, who has written dozens of books defending the Christian faith and urging readers to embrace it. The title and message of one of them, “Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White,” may best capture Mr. Hamilton’s disposition and his efforts to define what he calls a Christian “middle way.”
In his book, he argues that the use of Christianity in the culture wars has turned it into “a wedge that drives people away from Christ, rather than drawing them to him.” He also insists on “holding on to what is good in the past” and “retaining the historic doctrines of the Christian faith as articulated in the creeds.”
To walk Resurrection’s campus on a Sunday, attend a service and watch hundreds of families take advantage of its meeting rooms and coffee bars is to experience what you might call Heartland Homeyness. The Lord’s Prayer and — this being what Kansas City Chiefs’ fans call their kingdom — a whole lot of bright red Patrick Mahomes shirts take precedence over any kind of politics.
Republicans are finding it awkward this year to confront opponents such as Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Talarico whose faith defines them. The G.O.P.’s backup plan? To insist that their foes embrace defective or heretical brands of Christianity.
Campaigning for Mr. Marshall in mid-September, Vice President JD Vance accused Mr. Hamilton’s church of supporting a “devil-worshiping” drag group. The attack was false in just about all its specifics. The only actual fact Mr. Vance had to work with is that Resurrection joined dozens of other local sponsors of Kansas City PrideFest. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas on Twitter accused Mr. Hamilton of being “heretical” for insisting that Muslims, Hindus and Jews are not condemned to an “eternity in hell.” Presumably, Mr. Cruz is prepared to explain to his non-Christian constituents that they face eternal damnation.
The attacks on Mr. Hamilton’s faith drew reproaches from his Methodist bishop and 120 Methodist ministers in Kansas, and Mr. Hamilton sees the onslaught as a sign of Republicans alarm: “We’ve got a real race on our hands, or they wouldn’t be here,” he told the Overland Park crowd.
Republicans should be worried. In a state Mr. Trump carried with 57 percent of the vote in 2024, his approval rating was down to 40 percent in the Emerson survey. It also found that 48 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of Mr. Marshall; just 41 percent saw him positively. Compounding his troubles, Mr. Marshall has come under scrutiny after The Times reported that he sued more than 700 patients for unpaid bills, the subject of a tough Hamilton ad that went up last week.
As for what Mr. Hamilton’s called his “inclusivist” view of salvation, he said in an interview that it is thoroughly orthodox, shared by, among others, the Roman Catholic Church and widely revered Christian thinkers such as C.S. Lewis and the early church father Justin Martyr. “God can give that salvation to anyone He chooses,” Mr. Hamilton said.
If this theological controversy seems strange in an election that for most voters is about economics, war and Mr. Trump, it reflects back on what makes Mr. Hamilton’s campaign a potentially compelling model: Because of who he is and what he believes, he is constantly linking values to policy.
This is where Democrats have historically fallen short, said Ashley All, a Kansas-based Democratic strategist. A veteran of two decades in Kansas politics who is not part of Mr. Hamilton’s campaign, Ms. All said Democratic campaigns and candidates did not ask often enough, “What are the things that connect people?” Mr. Hamilton does this regularly, she told me, “because building bridges has been his entire job for 40 years.”
He’s trying to prove that’s possible even in a fraught political moment. Recently he posted a video responding to a question he says he gets a lot — are you liberal or conservative? His answer was “Yes, of course!” He continued, “I think we can be both. To be a liberal means to be generous of spirit, open to seeing things with new eyes and open to reforming. And to be conservative means holding on to values or beliefs that are really important. We can be both of those things at the same time. … We need each other, we really do. We’re better together. And that’s how our system’s meant to work.”
A pastor who insists on seeing the grays in debates over politics and religion is making Kansas a laboratory for testing whether that’s still true.
E.J. Dionne Jr., a Times contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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