Voters cited fuel, grocery and medication costs as patience with Trump wore thin
Voters in reliably Republican Kansas crossed party lines this week, electing Democrat Adam Hamilton to the US Senate and unseating Senator Roger Marshall in an upset. Hamilton is the first Democrat Kansans have sent to the chamber in nearly a century.
The shift, according to reporting and interviews across the state, tracked the price of daily life more than any conversion to the Democratic Party. The Guardian found bills soaring in the rural state — buffeted by tariffs and the war in Iran — with the strain showing up at pharmacy counters, in grocery carts, at fuel pumps and on farm supply invoices.
Linda Olson of Junction City researches before she votes, a habit from a family invested in politics: her father photographed political leaders in Washington, and her grandparents were farmers. In 2024, her homework led her to Trump, whom she trusted to improve economic conditions in the town where she was born and raised.
Two years later, she said, life is just more expensive. Last winter she paid $700 for medication while between insurance plans and skipped doses to stretch the supply. Her grocery bills have become unrecognizably high, and fuel prices run about a dollar per gallon above last year’s. “I thought at the time that he was the better choice of what we had,” Olson said of Trump. Now, she said, he has been acting to “make himself richer instead of really helping the people”.
“I’ve seen what Roger Marshall did over the eight years or so that he’s been doing this,” Olson said of the senator she helped defeat. “And I thought, it’s time we get fresh blood up there.”
Hamilton won, in part, by flipping six counties that backed Trump in 2024 and Marshall in 2020 — a sign, the reporting noted, that patience with Trump and the Republican Party is wearing thin even in remote, traditionally conservative areas. Michael Smith, a political science professor at Emporia State University, which sits in one of those flipped counties, said the election peeled off conservatives who support the party but not the president.
“Not everybody that voted for Trump is part of this cult of personality that Trump has tried to make the Republican party into,” Smith said. “There are certainly people in Kansas that are like that: they’re pretty conservative, but they’re not beholden to Trump. And so I think one of the things this election did is peel off those people.”
Most of Kansas is farmland — nearly 45 million acres employing nearly one in five Kansans — and Smith said the most rural corners of the state remain deeply Republican. But neighboring communities such as Junction City and Emporia, where he teaches, depend heavily on the agricultural economy and have felt the impact of the strains on farmers. “The people that live here aren’t actually farmers,” he said. “And they’re more likely to swing over to the other party because the economy is really taking a beating.”
Lindsborg resident Tom Holmquist said he was voting for Adam Hamilton.
The strain reaches past the farm gate. David Aguirre, a 25-year-old born and raised in Junction City, works at El Patron Dos, a Mexican restaurant, and said hardship elsewhere in the county shows up in his dining room. “It has, like, a domino effect for families,” he said. “If they’re not doing their best, they’re not gonna come out to eat, and then that affects staff, and cooks, and so on.”
Janet Grimm, who considers herself an independent, was grocery shopping on Wednesday afternoon and lamenting her rising bills. Every item she picked up — eggs, chicken, deli meat, two cucumbers, powdered sugar for the banana bread she planned to make — carried a red and yellow “sale” sticker, a conscious choice she now has to make. The handful of items rang up to more than $60. Grimm voted for Hamilton, saying she hoped he would improve the economy for people like her. “I really have faith that they’re going to do good,” she said.
Hamilton campaigned on the slogan “leading from the middle,” following what Smith described as an increasingly reliable playbook in Kansas: candidates position themselves as moderates at a distance from the national Democratic Party. In his victory speech on Tuesday in Kansas City, Hamilton told a packed room of supporters he would pursue greater collaboration between the parties, to “solve problems like it used to be”. “I’m going to tell you a little secret. I want to become Jerry Moran’s best friend,” Hamilton said of the state’s second senator, a Republican. “For the rest of the United States, in deeply red Kansas, the heart of America, I want us to model what it looks like when thoughtful people actually work together to solve problems, instead of slinging mud at each other.”
Drawing on his years as the pastor of a megachurch, Hamilton recounted the parable of the Good Samaritan — the story of a Samaritan who stopped to help a man beaten on his way to the Holy Land — to make his point that Democrats and Republicans should help one another. “If Jesus were telling this parable to a room filled with Democrats, he’d say, ‘And there was a Republican who came along and stopped and helped the man,’” Hamilton said. “If he was talking to a room filled with Republicans, he’d say, ‘And there was a Democrat who came along and stopped.’”
Every county in Kansas shifted to vote more Democratic in this year’s Senate race, but Smith cautioned against reading the result as a transformation. Many areas of the state remain staunchly Republican, he said, and no moderate candidate is likely to change that. “It’s still a pretty conservative state,” he said. “Let’s not get too hasty here.”
Dan Duever blamed Trump without leaving the Republican Party. The 75-year-old semi-retired farmer, interviewed at a grocery store on the outskirts of Junction City in Geary County, said he believed Trump was the reason Republicans “got hurt so bad” in the midterms, “because of the economy and the war in Iran”. Fuel costs on his farm have tripled — from about $15,000 to closer to $45,000 — which he attributed to record-high diesel prices, and he has stopped driving one of his diesel trucks. His fertilizer prices have roughly doubled. None of it moved his Senate vote. “I’m a damn Republican,” he said.