SALINA, Kansas — John and Nancy Bowden are starting to have doubts about America under the Republican Party.
Diesel prices for their tractors are up, and the value of their cattle has fallen. Wheat’s been stuck near where it was since the Nixon presidency, accounting for inflation, and tariffs don’t seem to be helping on their 900-acre farm, they said.
Yet even as that economic hardship has helped spur the most competitive U.S. Senate race here in a generation, they both said they’ll be voting to send their Republican senator, Roger Marshall, back to Washington.
“I’d rather vote for a known commodity than an unknown one,” said John, 74, sitting at his dining room table on Thursday, a few blocks from this small city’s downtown. “I think he’s the one.”
Marshall, an OB/GYN and first-term senator, has been locked in an unexpectedly close race against Adam Hamilton, a Democrat and minister who leads the country’s largest United Methodist congregation and preaches a “middle of the road” approach. Polls show a dead heat between the two candidates.
Kansas, long an afterthought in federal elections, could be an unlikely linchpin to a Senate map where Democrats need to flip at least two seats in states where President Donald Trump won by double digits two years ago to win control of the chamber.
Hamilton has been drawing heavy support from the affluent Kansas City suburbs where his church is based, home to the kinds of non-MAGA Republicans who say they are repulsed by Marshall’s scandals.
For Marshall to successfully defend his seat, he must run up the margins in the state’s conservative, mostly rural “Big First” congressional district — including cities like Salina, which voted for Trump in 2024 by a 2-to-1 margin.
The GOP seems to be deploying all available tools to excite its base.
Marshall stopped by last week on a bus tour crisscrossing the state, and Trump, who won the state by 16 points in 2024, is set to appear with him at a rally in Wichita on Monday — the president’s first visit to that city since running in 2016.
The party is also shifting money here from North Carolina, in hopes of mitigating Hamilton’s large cash advantage.
The Bowdens’ son James, who lives next door to them and keeps a Hamilton sign in his front yard, has been hoping those efforts don’t work on his parents.
James, 39, made a pitch that Hamilton’s even-keeled approach might restore bipartisan solutions in Washington. Last week, he took his mom to see Hamilton speak at a bookstore a few blocks away in downtown Salina.
He hasn’t had much luck.
Like many voters here, his parents’ political identities go beyond a single election. In their kitchen, they hang a painting of eight Republican presidents playing poker.
Nancy said Hamilton was well-spoken and wants to be open to new ideas. But she felt like “a duck out of water” at the event, she said, because the reality is hard to ignore: She’s simply not a Democrat.
“I have to vote my conscience,” she said.
‘The way he talks, it’s kind of demeaning.’
Like any Democrat running statewide in Kansas, Hamilton faces difficult math: Registered Republicans make up about 45 percent of the state’s voters, compared to a quarter who are Democrats and 29 percent who are independent.
Democrats’ rare statewide victories have benefited from low turnout. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who won in 2018 and 2022, did so with turnout around 50 percent — or more than 10 points lower than the last two presidential contests.
A candidate like Hamilton might tip the scales with a strong showing from independents, tens of thousands of whom have left the GOP, said Dave Baker, a Republican and former state representative who is backing the Democrat.
But he will have tough odds if Republicans turn out in high numbers — especially those in the sprawling “Big First” congressional district, which stretches more than 270 miles to the Colorado border and makes up the state’s reddest House seat.
Marshall, like most of the state’s other recent U.S. senators, held that House seat before moving to the upper chamber. He’s won the district — including Salina and surrounding Saline County — with a large majority of voters every time.
Among those voting for him were the Bowdens, who described themselves as mostly loyal Republicans since they cast their ballots for Richard M. Nixon.
John, a fourth-generation farmer, picked up an allegiance to the party from his maternal grandfather, who lost his road-grading job when a Democrat came into office, he said. John said he cast his ballot once for Bill Clinton and once for Barack Obama, but regrets both votes.
Nancy, who is also 74 and grew up in a Presbyterian household near Topeka, strayed even less. She made an exception for Kathleen Sebelius, a Democratic governor, but said she could not support a party that supported abortion.
Both of them admit things could be better.
John doesn’t like Trump’s efforts to import “substandard meat” from South America and worries tariffs might bump up the cost of equipment for the family’s farm, where drought has already hurt their soybean crop and shrunk their herd of about 100 cows to 80.
Nancy feels “lukewarm” on Marshall’s record and also has some concerns about Trump, though she supports his policies. “The way he talks, it’s kind of demeaning,” she said of the president.
The political ads that come on during Fox News in the evening — from both candidates — have not moved them.
One spot from Hamilton highlights how Marshall sued hundreds of patients for medical bills, which he later called “common business practice” at a debate. Marshall has been accusing Hamilton of covering up a child sexual abuse case from decades ago in his church, which he denies.
“I don’t pay attention to it,” Nancy said. “I don’t know the whole story.”
‘It’s tough convincing people to abandon those political roots’
Although the Kansas GOP has taken a hard right turn under Trump, Kansas Republicans defy easy political categorization.
A double-digit margin of voters in the state (including a slim majority in Saline County) defeated a 2022 ballot measure that would have set aside abortion protections in the state’s constitution.
In August, they rejected a GOP-pushed ballot measure that would have allowed them to directly elect state Supreme Court justices and move the court further to the right.
In interviews with more than two dozen people in Salina across the political spectrum, nearly everyone agreed that these voters might be swayed this year, too, over their frustrations with Trump’s agricultural and economic policies.
Others suspect Marshall’s controversies, including a second home in Florida that he’s accused of treating like a primary residence, may hurt.
The question is how much.
Randall Hardy, a GOP former state senator who represented Salina and the surrounding area, supported Marshall in some of his past elections but has since grown disillusioned with what he said was the senator’s blind allegiance to Trump.
But Hardy admits even some defections may not be enough in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. “I tend to think deep down inside, Marshall’s going to do it,” he said. “People just show up that don’t answer any of the polls. They want to just do their patriotic chore.”
The city’s largest employer, a Salina-based manufacturing company that was purchased in 2020 by the Japanese firm Kubota, puts together skid steer loaders used in construction and agriculture that have gotten more expensive due to tariffs on Japanese engines.
Cheri Koochel, a Democratic candidate for a statehouse district near Salina, said she had heard plenty of frustration while door-knocking in the area.
But getting them to vote against a Republican is a different question. “It’s tough convincing people to abandon those political roots,” she said.
As Nancy and John laid out their reasons for sticking with Marshall, their son James — who is running as an independent for county commission — interjected.
“What about Hamilton talking about wanting to build bridges, and unite people,” he asked, ”just like I do in my own campaign?”
John threw up his hands. “I’ve been here for 74 years,” he said, “and that’s what every one of them has been saying since.”
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