Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. The Republican domination of the state’s two Senate seats, lasting nearly a century, is one of the longest partisan winning streaks in Senate history.
But suddenly, a megachurch pastor who became a Democrat this spring appears to have a shot at breaking it.
A race that once barely registered nationally has emerged as one of the most unexpected battlegrounds on a midterm map that has rapidly expanded into longtime Republican strongholds. The arrival of the pastor, Adam Hamilton, as a serious Senate contender in Kansas has come so fast, it appears to have caught the incumbent Republican, Senator Roger Marshall, by surprise.
Polls suggest that the race is neck and neck. This week, the Cook Political Report, a political forecaster, declared the contest a “tossup.” And national Republicans who once hoped that red-state incumbents would look after themselves have promised $14 million to save the seat.
National Democrats are now entering the fray, too. Senate Majority PAC, the top super PAC for Senate Democrats, on Friday revealed plans to spend $5 million in the race.
The pairing of an unconventional challenger — one who was a registered Republican until February — and an embattled incumbent has tantalized Democrats, who believe they just might be able to notch an upset in a state where economic headwinds are hitting particularly hard.
Republicans believe they can muscle through — as long as their base turns out.
“Money won’t be an issue,” said Rob Fillion, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party. “It’s whether or not Republicans show up to the booths.”
Problems in the Prairie
In public, Republicans have worked to project confidence about Mr. Marshall, 66, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a former congressman who dashed Democratic hopes of a surprise flip when he first won his seat in 2020.
In private, though, some Republicans in Washington and Kansas are frustrated that he has not mounted a more robust or nimble response to his challenger in a souring political climate. He has raised just $2.5 million in individual campaign contributions, compared with more than $4 million for Mr. Hamilton.
Voters in Kansas enthusiastically backed President Trump all three times he was on the ballot here, but the deeply agricultural state has been buffeted this year by a series of problems exacerbated by his administration.
The Iran War pushed the cost of diesel fuel to a record high of $6.52 per gallon in September, driving up the costs of shipping and operating farm equipment. (In Kansas, the average price of a gallon of diesel now hovers at just under $6.)
Kansas cattle ranchers were incensed by a Trump administration plan to lower the price of beef by dropping import tariffs. And they pushed back last month when highly visible immigration enforcement raids disrupted the cattle harvest by keeping workers at home.
“Our members want to be left alone,” said Matt Teagarden, the chief executive of the Kansas Livestock Association. “We don’t look for the government to intervene in our markets.”
In a sign of flagging enthusiasm for Mr. Marshall, the trade group decided to sit out this election after endorsing him in 2020, although Mr. Teagarden declined to explain why.
“We had some concerns in terms of where Senator Marshall is,” Mr. Teagarden said.
The senator, who has attacked Mr. Hamilton as “too woke,” has faced persistent questions about how much time he spends at his Florida home, and how those trips were paid for. He sought to rebut those questions this week by inviting a reporter from The Washington Examiner to his hunting cabin in Kansas (he also told the news outlet that the Florida house had just been sold).
And attack ads against him have pointed to the findings of an investigation by The New York Times that found he had sued hundreds of his patients over unpaid medical bills, leading to the arrests of 81 of them for missing court dates.
“That’s just an absolute lie,” he told reporters this week. “I wouldn’t want anyone to be thrown in jail because of that.”
An Unusual Democrat
The chairwoman of the Kansas Democratic Party, Jeanna Repass, learned this year that Mr. Hamilton, who switched his party affiliation from Republican to unaffiliated in February, was considering an independent run for the Senate.
She got in touch with him over text. If he ran, she asked, would he please do it as a Democrat?
He did.
As a candidate, Mr. Hamilton, 62, has sought to pin the blame for Kansas’s economic trouble squarely on Mr. Marshall and his support for Mr. Trump. He has assailed the administration for its cuts to health care and — in a rarer message for a Democrat — its ballooning of the national debt.
“The senator that I’m trying to replace — that I’m hoping to help bless by letting him retire to Florida — is not being a champion for the people of Kansas,” Mr. Hamilton said on Thursday night.
Mr. Hamilton was speaking in front of several hundred people at an ornate theater in Hutchinson, a small city in south-central Kansas that boasts either the world’s longest or second-longest grain elevator, depending on whom you ask.
In a stump speech that unspooled his life story in painstaking detail, he spoke of founding the 24,000-member Church of the Resurrection, the largest United Methodist congregation in the country.
And he levied a particularly Kansan insult at the U.S. Senate, saying that like the characters in “The Wizard of Oz,” it’s missing a brain, a heart and courage.
He is more comfortable talking about scripture than policy. When a woman in the crowd asked how he would fix the health care system, he said he was reading as much as he could about it, rather than offering up “some bogus answer.” In interviews, he has struggled to clearly articulate his position on hot-button issues like artificial intelligence.
But his work in the church has lifted his name recognition. “Adam has a reach through the Methodist Church in corners of the state that I don’t even have county parties in,” said Ms. Repass, the state Democratic chair.
And his willingness to sound conciliatory in a moment when Democrats elsewhere are demanding bombastic fighters appears to be helping him build support, particularly among moderate Democrats and among Republicans disillusioned with Mr. Marshall and Mr. Trump. Two Republican former governors, Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, have endorsed Mr. Hamilton. (The other two living Republican former governors, Sam Brownback and Jeff Colyer, have stayed neutral.)
As she left a campaign event in Lindsborg, Kan., a Swedish American enclave where the local university is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Dianna Dawdy, 81, said she thought she would vote for Mr. Hamilton. A Republican, she said she had voted for Mr. Trump three times.
“A traditional Democrat wouldn’t be having this kind of effect,” said David Kerr, a Republican and a former president of the Kansas State Senate. Mr. Kerr helped organize the event on Thursday night in Hutchinson, where people in the crowd milled around in “Ag for Hamilton” and “Republicans for Hamilton” buttons. It is the first time Mr. Kerr has ever come out so publicly in support of a Democrat.
Will Republicans Come Home?
Democrats in Kansas haven’t won a Senate race in a while, but they have posted other victories in recent years.
The second-term governor, Laura Kelly, is a Democrat. And Democrats in the state celebrated when, after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Kansas voters handily defeated a referendum on a constitutional amendment that would have said there was no right to abortion in the state.
Last week, a poll by The New York Times and Siena University found the race to be evenly split between Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Marshall.
Republicans believe that their base will lock in as the race enters its final weeks — and that partisanship will ultimately win the day.
“The Democrats this cycle don’t have anything to run for,” said Mr. Fillion, the executive director of the state Republican Party. “They’re simply running against President Trump and using fear mongering.”
David Kensinger, a Republican strategist in Kansas, said the state’s Republican tilt was so strong, it could well outweigh any dip in voter enthusiasm caused by high prices or frustration with the president.
“You could both have the closest Senate race in 50 years,” he said, and Mr. Marshall “gets re-elected.”
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