Trump plans Wichita trip as Marshall faces series of controversies
A Kansas Senate race that two years ago looked safely Republican has tightened into one of the country’s most closely watched contests, with Democrat Adam Hamilton leading in polls against Sen. Roger Marshall — putting Republicans on alert that a Democrat could win a U.S. Senate race in the state for the first time in nearly a century, according to reporting by Stephen Fowler in Dodge City for NPR. Both parties have redirected tens of millions of dollars to the state in recent weeks as early voting gets underway.
President Trump, who won Kansas with 57% of the vote in 2024, announced Tuesday he would campaign in Wichita next week for Marshall and other Republicans on the ticket. NPR reported that the last-minute shift in national attention to the Sunflower State is reflective of how unpopular Trump’s second-term agenda has become with voters, especially in typically Republican Midwestern states that have been disproportionately affected by rising fuel prices and tariffs. Hamilton’s campaign is also bolstered by backlash to Trump’s second-term policies, including tariffs and rising fuel prices, which NPR reported have caused the Republican Party’s favorability ratings to plummet.
A self-billed “independent-minded Democrat,” Hamilton is the founding pastor of Church of the Resurrection, the country’s largest United Methodist Church congregation across its multiple campuses. At a get-out-the-vote event in Lawrence on Monday, Hamilton told the crowd that his priorities if elected are tackling affordability and health care, but also restoring “human decency” to politics. He has positioned himself as a moderate voice seeking to tame rabid partisanship that has dominated modern politics, telling NPR that “we’ve got to find solutions that will be a compromise between what the Republicans want and the Democrats want, but are going to end up getting something done as opposed to right now, where that doesn’t happen very often.”
At the Lawrence event, Hamilton told supporters: “Now listen, I had somebody say to me, ‘Look, I don’t want somebody who’s going to build bridges, I want somebody who’s going to crush the Republicans.’ But here’s the thing: if you want that in a state with only 25% of the population who are Democrats, you’ll never get them elected. And if you did, they become part of the problem instead of part of the solution.”
Hamilton also told NPR of a recent event where Republican Party leaders said they were crossing over to vote for him. “There were Republicans who were saying, ‘We’ve got to do better,’” he said. “You represent our values. You represent the character we’re looking for in somebody in leadership. And we know you’re going to fight for both Republicans and Democrats. And they’re exactly right.”
Hamilton has drawn endorsements from former Republican Kansas governors Mike Hayden and Bill Graves. He has sought to distinguish Kansas from more liberal states, telling NPR that “we’ve been trying to make clear in our commercials that a Kansas Democrat is a bit different than a New York Democrat or a Los Angeles Democrat, and not just a little — a lot different.” Most of his stump speeches conclude with a “Wizard of Oz” allusion, calling for senators “who have a brain and use it, who have a heart and feel empathy with it, and who have courage and speak up because of it.”
Marshall has spent recent weeks on the defensive. At a debate at the Kansas State Fair, he was shouted down by the crowd repeatedly. His campaign released an attack ad claiming Hamilton “protected a pedophile” that used images of two unrelated businesses. And after a Hutchinson, Kansas, bakery owner went viral on social media for posting that the Marshall campaign had failed to pay a $678 bill for cookies and baked goods from 2020, the campaign paid the balance — with interest.
For his part, Marshall has painted Hamilton as too liberal, saying he would destroy Kansas’ cattle, agriculture, oil and gas industries if elected. “Kansans need to know that my opponent, Adam Hamilton, is the most radical liberal person that ever got through a primary in the state of Kansas,” he said to cheers.
Republicans are simultaneously contesting the governor’s office, where State Senate President Ty Masterson, the Republican candidate, leads Democratic state Sen. Cindy Holscher in a race that NPR described as less nationalized than other competitive gubernatorial contests around the country. Incumbent Democrat Laura Kelly is term-limited after eight years in office.
Speaking in Dodge City, Masterson framed the choice as straightforward: “There’s never been a clearer choice than we’ve had in this election. If you want working families to be able to afford to live, if you want to stop taxing people out of their homes and out of their businesses and off their farms, if you want safe communities, lower energy prices, i.e. then lower grocery prices… It’s not really a choice. You need to vote Republican.”
On the trail, the nominees pointed to Kelly’s frequent vetoes of measures from the Republican supermajority in the legislature — and overrides of those vetoes — as a motivating factor to get voters to the polls.
The Kansas Republican Party is on a weeklong bus tour across the state, bringing a message of contrast that NPR described as more state-focused than dealing with the challenging national environment for the party. State Rep. Pat Proctor, the Republican nominee for Secretary of State, said “we are closer to where Kansans are on all the individual issues. And when they hear us talk and they look at what we actually do, we’re just closer to where they want Kansas to be.”
Kansas is one of only a few states that currently have a senator from one party and a governor from the other, and is one of nearly 10 states where voters could split their choices for those positions next month.