Adam Hamilton wins Kansas Senate seat, urges work across party lines

Hamilton credits rising costs, tariffs and the war in Iran for his victory

Adam Hamilton, a Methodist pastor and former registered Republican, has won election to the U.S. Senate from Kansas, becoming the first Democrat to win the seat since 1932 and ending a stretch of nearly a century without one. In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin on Morning Edition, he named rising costs, tariffs and the war in Iran as forces behind his victory.

Hamilton said voters were looking for more than a change in party, and told Martin that Americans are “sick and tired of the hyperpolarization in Washington.”

One of the voters he described was a Republican who said he had voted in 46 elections without ever supporting a Democrat — until Hamilton. The man told Hamilton that Washington had become cruel and indecent.

In Greensburg, Kansas, a woman asked Hamilton to help Americans stop hating one another and described family relationships fractured by politics. “I really want you to help us remember that we’re fellow human beings,” Hamilton recalled her saying.

Hamilton said Democrats should reach more religious voters and work across party lines. He was registered as a Republican until earlier this year, and he said his own account of the election was that voters were looking for something broader than a partisan verdict.

He hopes to develop a close relationship with Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran. “I want to be his best friend in Washington,” Hamilton said, describing his ambition to show that Republicans and Democrats can work together.

The proposal to a Republican senator from his own state is the sharpest version of the argument Hamilton made to Martin. Voters, in his telling, were tired of a politics they described as cruel and indecent, and they asked him for help with something broader than an election: stopping Americans from hating one another and remembering that they share a common humanity.

For Kansas, the result changes who the state sends to the Senate for the first time since 1932. For the Senate, it adds a member who says he wants to work with a Republican from Kansas and who argues the voters behind his victory were asking for more than a change in party.

The interview ran as part of NPR’s election coverage, which also included a separate story saying Mike Johnson will step aside as top House Republican next Congress.

NPR’s digital story was edited by Treye Green.