Senator Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, has faced a series of challenges in his unexpectedly close race for re-election.
The latest: A six-year-old unpaid bill for 150 frosted sugar cookies, 100 mini strawberry muffins and 100 fudge brownies, posted online by an angry baker.
The bill, the baker wrote in a social media post that quickly went viral on Thursday, was from Mr. Marshall’s primary night watch party in 2020. The cookies’ buttercream frosting carried his name in blue and yellow. And the source of her frustration was that Mr. Marshall’s 2020 campaign had never paid her the nearly $700 she said it owed her.
On Saturday, Mr. Marshall wrote on social media that he had paid the bill, bringing more attention to a curious saga that his opponent’s campaign had seized on.
The bill began gaining widespread notice on Thursday afternoon, after the baker, Holly Thomas of Hutchinson, Kan., wrote an eight-paragraph Facebook post.
“Six years later, I haven’t forgotten,” she wrote, recalling that repeated phone and email inquires seeking payment had gone unanswered. “That experience is why Roger Marshall will never get my vote.”
Mr. Marshall, a first-term Republican who may need every vote he can get in a race that polls indicate is neck-and-neck, rushed to respond. He was already contending with a separate revelation about unpaid bills that he had sought to collect on: Last month, The New York Times reported that he had filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, and that he had routinely charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate.
On Thursday evening, Tyson Brody, a spokesman for the Rev. Adam Hamilton, Mr. Marshall’s Democratic opponent, amplified the baker’s post, writing on social media that the bakery bill was “larger than debts for which Roger Marshall had patients sued.” (The unpaid medical bills ranged from $101 to several thousand dollars.)
By Friday, Mr. Marshall had paid Ms. Thomas back, she said in an interview. On Saturday, he addressed the issue in a post on his official X account.
“As some folks may have seen, there was a post on social media regarding an unpaid 2020 cookie bill,” Mr. Marshall wrote. “We have absolutely no idea how this happened.”
But, he added, “as it became known to us, we immediately attempted to contact the business in order to apologize, and we have repaid the bill from 2020, double.”
The senator attached an invoice showing that he had sent $1,300 to Ms. Thomas’s bakery, Holly’s Sweet Treats. That amount was not quite double the original bill, which had been for $678.75, according to the copy that Ms. Thomas posted on Facebook this week.
It was not clear if Mr. Marshall’s response would satisfy some of the commenters who had seized on the initial post. One had argued that Mr. Marshall owed Ms. Thomas more than $1,400, accounting for interest.
Mr. Marshall’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on the bill. Several Republican strategists said that Mr. Marshall had handled an unfortunate situation as well as he could.
Ms. Thomas, for her part, said she still had no intention of voting for Mr. Marshall, though she added that his payment was “the right thing to do.”
“I can’t put all the blame on him,” said Ms. Thomas, 43, recalling that the initial order had been placed by a campaign staff member. “But as a business owner, when my staff messes up, it falls on me as well.”
She has been closely following the Senate race and “impulsively” wrote her post as she complained at work about the years-old order, she recalled.
“I just made a post about Roger Marshall and how he didn’t pay me,” Ms. Thomas said she had declared at work. “We’ll see what happens. Maybe he will pay me.”
By Thursday evening, her phone began pinging with messages as she watched her daughter’s volleyball game. She had a theory, she said, for why the post took off.
“He’s let a lot of people down in the state,” said Ms. Thomas, who declined to share her political affiliation. “And people are frustrated with how things are going.”
Some on social media accused Mr. Marshall of hypocrisy, citing his own business practices.
“I do think he’s a hypocrite,” Lindsey Derr, 43, a Democrat in Hutchinson, Kan., who had already planned to vote against Mr. Marshall, said in a phone conversation. She added, “It makes me very upset.”
Mr. Marshall is trying to avoid becoming the first Republican to lose a Senate race in Kansas since 1932. His campaign says the senator gets results for Kansas. But he has been challenged by steep price increases that the Iran war has inflicted on farmers in the state.
On Saturday, Mr. Hamilton’s campaign issued a statement that attempted to encapsulate the episode in a single word: “Cookiegate.”
Evan Gorelick contributed reporting.
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