Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932. But 50 days out from Election Day, Vice President JD Vance is spending Monday in a suburb of Kansas City campaigning for a Republican incumbent.
“We’re excited to do a fraud task force event in the Kansas City area, and then a campaign [event] with my very dear friend ‘Doc’ Marshall, who’s one of the very best United States senators, and very important that we get him re-elected,” Vance told reporters earlier on Monday.
Sen. Roger Marshall won his seat in 2020 after representing a sprawling House district across western Kansas. Democrats tried to make that race competitive by nominating Barbara Bollier, a state senator who had switched parties after years as a moderate Republican. She lost by 11 points.
Democrats argue that the ground has shifted since. In a midterm cycle that is turning into a referendum on President Donald Trump, they see an opening in a farm-heavy state where his policies carry real political risk.
Their candidate is Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist Church pastor making his first run for office.
“No amount of Washington politicians parachuting in to campaign for Roger Marshall will be able to save the senator from his flailing campaign and disastrous debate,” Glynnis Harvey, a Hamilton spokesperson, said in a statement ahead of Vance’s visit.
Kansas is not a conventional red state. It has voted Republican for president for decades, but the governor’s office changes hands regularly, and the state has a recent history of rewarding pragmatism. After tax cuts under Republican Gov. Sam Brownback pushed Kansas into deep fiscal dilemmas and split the GOP, Democrat Laura Kelly, then a state senator, won the governorship in 2018 — and won again in 2022, a cycle that was otherwise unkind to Democrats in much of the country.
Republicans are well placed to win back the governor’s role this fall, even if the national environment is kinder to Democrats. That creates a dilemma for Hamilton, who is attempting to win despite the national branding issues of the Democratic Party and the potential for Republicans to perform well statewide in the governor’s race.
For Democrats, the math is daunting. Bollier’s 11-point loss was not an outlier. In the last Kansas Senate race before that, independent Greg Orman was defeated by Republican Sen. Pat Roberts by around 10 points.
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