If you’re wondering how worried Republicans are about the midterms, five words from Vice President JD Vance this afternoon might offer up a hint.
“Kansas, how we doing today?” he called out, as he took the stage for a campaign rally with Senator Roger Marshall looking on.
We’re less than eight weeks away from Election Day. This is a moment when a party typically deploys its biggest guns to its most important battlegrounds — the places where control of Congress could be won or lost.
So the political world took notice when the Republican Party’s second-most important surrogate spent some time campaigning in a state that last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1932.
For Republicans, is something the matter with Kansas?
On the margin
Let’s be clear about what we know and what we don’t. There isn’t much in the way of “high-quality” polling in the Kansas Senate race, my venerable colleagues on The Times’s polling team say. And while Vance’s campaign appearance was notable, it wasn’t the only reason for his trip. He also made a stop on the other side of the border, in Missouri, to highlight the Trump administration’s effort to punish people suspected of defrauding pandemic-era programs.
And while Kansas has a Democratic governor, it also has a history of delivering double-digit margins for President Trump.
But this year, several states where the president racked up big victories have nevertheless become Senate battlegrounds. They include Iowa, Ohio and Texas — even Alaska. The fact that Kansas may find itself on the margins of this list speaks to both the difficulty of the national environment, and a few particularities of this race.
Marshall, a first-term senator, is an obstetrician-gynecologist. His business practices came under scrutiny last week when my colleague Sarah Kliff reported that he had sued 700 of his patients over outstanding bills — 81 of whom were arrested.
“I had every intention to pay, I was just struggling,” said Kellie Clutts, whom Mr. Marshall sued in 2015 over a $129 bill. Ms. Clutts said the charge was from a postpartum visit shortly after her daughter’s birth.
Mr. Marshall sued Ms. Clutts when her baby was 9 months old and eventually garnished her bank account.
That story came up in the messy debate between Marshall and his Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton, at the Kansas State Fair over the weekend. There, in front of a jeering crowd, Marshall defended his debt collection efforts as “common business practices.”
A little distance
But it’s not just Sarah’s story he may have to worry about. This hasn’t drawn a lot of attention outside of Kansas, but in recent weeks, Marshall has also moved to put some distance between himself and the president, who won Kansas by 16 percentage points in 2024.
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Today, he urged the Agriculture Department to provide “targeted relief” to farmers and ranchers burdened by sharply rising diesel fuel costs — an implicit acknowledgment of the high energy prices that have persisted under Trump.
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After Trump threatened to ban the sale of jets made by Bombardier, a Canadian company, unless they were made in the United States, Marshall defended the company, noting on social media that it employs some 1,200 people in the Wichita area.
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At a telephone town hall, according to the Kansas Reflector, Marshall said he was as “frustrated as anybody” by the Trump administration’s policy of lowering tariffs on beef imports in an effort to bring down consumer prices.
Kansas may not become a top-tier Senate battleground anytime soon. But his race shows how even Republicans in reliable red states may face a trickier path to re-election than you might expect this year.
A.I. anxiety grows
I wrote last week that concerns over the pace of A.I. development were roiling the political world. A few days later, it’s looking even more likely that these midterms will become the killer robot election.
Some of the industry’s biggest names — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk — said over the weekend that they would support a coordinated slowdown in the development of A.I. Humans could use that extra time to protect ourselves from the technology’s more doomsday-ish outcomes.
There is a big fight to come over what should be done and who should be doing it. Two of the most prominent politicians in America have made their thinking clear.
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President Trump said the panic is overblown. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” he wrote today on social media.
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Former President Barack Obama thinks the government must step up. He told Democratic leaders that the party should put A.I. regulation at the center of its platform. “This is something that is moving very fast in private hands,” Obama said, “and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous.”
The A.I. threat has also led to some strange alliances. Tomorrow, Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon will join forces at an event calling for a “pro-human” approach to the technology.
Quote of the Day
“Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda.”
That’s from a statement by Donald Trump Jr. and his new wife, Bettina Trump, after ProPublica reported that a Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin had helped finance an after-party for their wedding. (He paid for the rental of a private island in the Bahamas and a fireworks display.) The Trumps said that the businessman was a “dear friend.”
Video of the Day
In the video above, Hamed Aleaziz explains why the Department of Homeland Security is rushing to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls — and how agents are using public websites to get that information. Click the clip to play.
Related: A report from a federal whistle-blower, released today, says Homeland Security’s investigators may have broken state laws.
What I’m watching
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We’re waiting to see how the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s changes to mail-in voting. A decision could come any day. (A ruling in Trump’s favor would make this election more chaotic, local officials have warned, considering some states have already started sending out ballots.)
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Joe Manchin, the former Democratic senator from West Virginia, said on CNBC today that he will campaign in support of Senator Susan Collins, the moderate Maine Republican. Collins is running against a progressive challenger, Troy Jackson.
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The Senate is back from its late-summer recess, and Senator Mitch McConnell, whose prolonged absence after a fall has become something of a Democratic obsession, returned to the Capitol in a wheelchair this afternoon.
ONE LAST THING
One day more
It’s finally here: The end of the primary season.
Voters will head to the polls tomorrow in Delaware for the very last primaries of the year. The contests are not terribly suspenseful, but there’s one candidate who caught my eye: a Democratic challenger to Senator Chris Coons who has changed his name to E. No-Trump Hansen.
Hansen, who previously ran for Senate as a Republican, says on his website that the new name is not a gimmick — just a show of his commitment to change.
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
The post The Trouble With Kansas appeared first on New York Times.
