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The home of Dwight Eisenhower and Amelia Earhart is rarely part of the national conversation -- but that could be about to change. Kansas has gone red in every presidential contest since 1968 and hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.
In light of that history, it would be foolish to get one’s hopes up too much about the Senate contest there this year. After all, the Republican incumbent, Roger Marshall, won his 2020 race by more than 11 points.
Though Kansans have a higher opinion of Trump than most of the country, his standing in the state has eroded. At the start of his second term, 60% of Kansans had a favorable opinion of Trump. Today, only 47% do. Among independents, 59% disapprove.
Like the rest of the country, Kansas has been burdened by high costs, but it’s been particularly hard hit by Trump’s trade and immigration policies. A Wichita State professor of international business estimates that Kansas is one of the most trade-dependent states in the country. One in six jobs in the state is directly tied to exports. After imposing tariffs on imported beef, Trump repeatedly withdrew or weakened them, only to announce in August that the United States would suspend quotas on up to 660 million pounds of imported ground beef in an effort to reduce prices at the supermarket.
Marshall said he was “frustrated” by the president’s actions, while Terry Moran, apparently asleep for the past 10 years as Trump has flattened every laissez-faire principle imaginable, urged the president to “let the free market work.”
Kansas is the largest wheat-producing state in the union, and the twin blows of record-high diesel fuel prices and rising costs of fertilizer due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have been painful. Marshall bleats wanly that “the tariffs are working,” but tariffs on steel and aluminum have damaged the state’s large aviation industry, and as one small business owner observed sourly, her fertilizer bill had tripled this year and her diesel bill had doubled.
One of Kansas’ largest employers is the Canadian aviation firm Bombardier, which employs more than 1,500 people. While slapping Canada around, Trump has name-checked Bombardier, saying their products are not “good enough” and threatening to ban sales of their products in the United States. Kansas’ two Republican senators are looking at their shoes and kicking sand, though Marshall did post that “I’m going to fight to keep Bombardier’s over 1,200 Kansas jobs. I’ve already taken that concern inside the Oval Office.”
Here’s another reason Marshall has cause to feel trapped: The Democrats have chosen a fantastically appropriate challenger. They nominated Adam Hamilton, pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, the largest Methodist congregation in the United States.
Hamilton is an articulate moderate, author of 30 books, who agrees that the border was out of control under Biden but notes that the indiscriminate meat cleaver approach to immigration enforcement under Trump is damaging both economically and morally. “So right now, when you travel to southeast, southwest Kansas, you’re talking to people in the meatpacking industry, the cattle industry, and they’re saying, ‘Forty percent of our workforce are immigrants, and we need them, and we care about them.'” Later, he continued, “Stop demonizing them. Figure out a plan to bring immigrants in where it’s legal for them to be here, and where we can welcome them instead of (them) having to live in fear in our businesses or our communities.”
Hamilton calls Trump’s tariffs “a disaster for everyone across the state of Kansas,” and hits the corruption theme hard. That’s exactly the kind of Democrat a Republican state demands.
Kansas is red, it’s true. But it has often chosen Democrats for governor, including incumbent Laura Kelly. It is probably still Marshall’s race to lose, but the tailwind for Hamilton reflects just how badly Trump has betrayed his own base as well as the opportunities that open up when a) there’s a wave building, and b) the nominee matches the constituency.