The Kansas Senate race is looking like a toss up. Yes, really.

I'm about to say something previously unthinkable, at least in the last two years, but honestly, maybe in the last six months. Kansas has a competitive Senate race. Today on the pod, it's another red state where a politician is unexpectedly playing defense. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. So, Stephen, you were just reporting in Kansas on this really interesting Senate race. Let's just start with the candidates. Who's facing off in this race? You have incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall facing off against Adam Hamilton, who is a Methodist pastor of the largest United Methodist denomination in the country. And it is a race that has heated up in the last few weeks, even. I mean, I wouldn't have even said three weeks ago that Kansas was a race worth watching. But here we are. Yeah, this is interesting, because in 2022, there was a Senate race there, and Republican Senator Jerry Moran won by 23 percentage points. So forgive me for being even a little skeptical that this race is competitive. I mean, how do we know that? There have been a number of polls that have shown Adam Hamilton either just behind or just ahead of Marshall. High quality polls, people who poll the state regularly. You also have to look at how the parties have been spending money. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have redirected millions and millions and millions of dollars to the Kansas Senate race because they have data and they have intuition and they are hearing things on the ground that says this is a very competitive race. If you look big picture, the places where we have these sort of September, October head scratcher surprises are states that have a lot of Republicans that have Republican control of government for a long period of time. And they're places that are disproportionately impacted by a lot of Trump administration policies that have become relatively unpopular. And being on the campaign trail, I took the Vanessa Carlton method and drove about 1000 miles over the course of three days last week. I didn't know where you were going to go with that when you when you mentioned Vanessa Carlton, but okay. You got to keep people on your toes, which is how it is when you go across the campaign trail. I ended up speaking with Adam Hamilton after his campaign, stops that he did in Lawrence, Kansas for a get out the vote event, and then spend some time on the Kansas Republican Party's bus tour across the state. And talking to both candidates and seeing both candidates in action, they would also agree this is a competitive race. Domenico, I do want to zoom in on the race specifics in just a moment. But I also just want to zoom out and talk about Kansas because this is not a state we have talked very much about on the pod in recent years, because this was not thought to be a competitive Senate race until very recently. Can you just give us some context on Kansas's political dynamics? You know, there's a phrase called the Plains Democrat, you know, but it's never referred to Kansas, because it's been 94 years since Kansas elected a Democratic senator. In fact, Kansas has the longest continuous streak of single party control of both Senate seats than any state in the country. So it's been since 1932, a man named George McGill, who won a special election in 1930 then won the seat in 32 and then lost reelection in 38. And that's been it for Democrats in the Democratic Party was a very different party in 1932 and 38 than it is today. Got it. So then, Stephen, I'm curious about what it is about the incumbent there, Roger Marshall, that makes him vulnerable. I mean, you mentioned a couple of the sort of bigger picture political themes that we've talked about on the podcast in terms of Republican vulnerabilities. But are there specifics about Marshall that are more relevant? The race got on my radar a few weeks ago, when there was a debate at the Kansas State Fair between Hamilton and Marshall. And it was a public debate, the crowds were able to show up and show their support for either candidate. And Marshall was pretty thoroughly booed by the crowd. And from there, there was sort of this rollout from the Hamilton campaign of a bunch of ads that attacked Roger Marshall for things like medical debt practices, where there was a woman who said, she was sued by Marshall over medical debt, and had police show up to her door when she was pregnant. Yeah, we should say Marshall's a former OBGYN before he got into politics. Right. Marshall's an OBGYN. And he had medical debt lawsuits where he was trying to recover medical payments from people. And the Hamilton campaign has put out ads highlighting some of those lawsuits and what they say is a predatory practice. There were also social media, viral reports that came out of Marshall's first campaign in 2020 for Senate, not paying a vendor for cookies that went viral. And the campaign very publicly had to post a credit card statement saying that they paid a six year old cookie debt. And so it's a snowball effect, compounded by the fact that Roger Marshall doesn't really have any campaign staff. If you look at his campaign finance filings, there's not, you know, payroll or other things for a robust campaign staff and field staff. Last week's campaign finance results show that he raised less than a million dollars in the quarter, while Adam Hamilton raised $10 million. And he's one of several incumbent House and Senate members that have just been kind of caught flat footed because they live in very conservative areas and have very conservative voters that are usually the ones that elect them to office, then that's not really the case in this environment. So it's sort of the wrong place, wrong time to be an incumbent Republican not used to fighting tooth and nail for votes. And just to give some context on just how conservative Kansas is, in 2020 and 2024, Trump won the state by 16 points. So pretty wide margin. Marshall, though, interestingly, in 2020, when he first won the Senate seat, only won it by 11. So he underperformed Trump. So maybe there was something to the fact that he, you know, was potentially vulnerable. And given this environment and a candidate that Democrats like, then you wind up in this kind of situation, especially when we've seen every campaign cycle, there's always like somebody who's an entrenched incumbent who thinks that they're fine, and they don't really staff up and they don't really raise that much money. And this cycle looks like it's Roger Marshall. Well, it's also interesting because there's two big statewide races on the ballot in Kansas this year. There's the Senate race, which has heated up recently. But the governor's race was always thought to be competitive, because whereas Kansas has not, as Domenico mentioned, elected a Democratic senator since before my grandparents were born, they have elected Democratic governors in recent years, right, Stephen? And that is another race that is looking to be competitive this year. Yeah, for the past several governors, it's flip-flopped between a Republican and a Democrat, a Republican and a Democrat. For the last eight years, Laura Kelly has been the Democratic governor of Kansas. So unlike some of these other states where there's longtime Republican control, and the thought of electing a statewide Democrat is a little bit of a stretch, there is very recent muscle memory for electing a Democrat in Kansas. And so it's created an interesting dynamic where you have a Democratic governor and a Republican senator. And the way the polls sit right now, you could see Kansas elect a Democratic senator and a Republican governor. And so it's created some interesting dynamics on the campaign trail that I haven't seen in some of these other states, where you have the Republicans talking about things like affordability and prices and things like beef, which is big in Kansas, but doing so by saying that current Democratic policies are the problems and Republicans are the ones who can fix it. Here is Ty Masterson, who is the Republican governor nominee, speaking in Dodge City. 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. Because it is the opposite. If you vote Democrat, you will never see low energy prices. They hate oil and gas. The problem we have right now is not the Strait of Hormuz, it's a refining bottleneck due to the Democrat policies. Slight fact check there. I mean, when you talk to economists, the Iran war is the main reason for why gas prices have gone up. And Republicans have started to use this talking point about refinement slowdowns, but it's the Iran war that has caused gas prices to go up. And it's the Iran war that has caused gas prices to go up. But it is kind of nice to be able to have someone to point the finger at, I feel like, in Kansas, whereas if it was completely Republican controlled, you wouldn't have anybody necessarily to point the finger at. I feel like I saw this recently in watching a debate in Maine with Susan Collins, who was able to point for Troy Jackson, who is her opponent, who has been in state government in Maine, which has been held by Democrats. And that's definitely been a strategy by Republicans who are running in blue states often, or states that have a Democratic governor in this case, to say that, you know, the issues that you're seeing is because, of Democratic governance. All right, we have to take a quick break, but more in just a moment. And we're back. So Stephen, I want to focus in back on the Senate race here, where Democrat Adam Hamilton is facing incumbent Republican Roger Marshall. What campaign themes seem to be coming up or driving voters when you're talking to them as you traverse the state? Affordability, cost of living, health care, the same things that you're seeing and hearing everywhere else. I was struck when I was driving across the state, by the few billboards that there were. Many of them were signs that said, for adam hamilton from an outside group saying adam hamilton will lower costs adam hamilton will protect health care and the way that hamilton talked about it hamilton supporters talked about it it was less about you know a democratic view of what health care should be or affordability should be or things like that and really more focused on a little bit more of the human cost and human aspect of it same on the republican side when talking about the need for a republican governor and cost of living and affordability in kansas in particular the legislature super majority for republicans passed a lot of bills that the democratic governor vetoed and then they overrode those vetoes and so there was a lot of talk about you know basically just making sure that everybody's on the same page working together to fix the health care system and to make sure that everybody's on the same page working together to things for voters even if there's a disagreement about which party is responsible for it you mentioned earlier in the pod about beef being a big deal in kansas can you explain that a little bit and why that i've seen this pop up in other races across the country as well that this seems to be a big political issue this year but frankly i'm a little confused on why can you explain it well one of the stops on the bus tour that i went into was in dodge city kansas and as you drive into dodge city you can roll your window down and you can see that there's a lot of people that are driving around and you can smell the product of beef and all of the cows there uh people said you can smell like money uh because of how profitable the industry is domenico's frowning because now he's imagining the smells that you just he just he just he just got a big old whiff yeah it's a it's a big old whiff and uh what what's going on there is there's tariffs and a lot of the trade wars that president trump has enacted with different allies or uh different trading partners and specifically the trade wars that president trump has enacted with different allies or uh specifically some decisions he made to try to do some imports of beef it's hurt domestic farmers and domestic productions with agriculture in particular a lot of decisions that were made months and months ago a kind of set into motion a longer term economic shock for beef producers for farmers and other things like that because the input costs that go into producing beef for consumption or producing soybeans or corn or things like that are going to be a lot more uh you can't just flip a switch and be like okay gas is 10 cents cheaper today so i can actually save some money there's a lot of baked in costs and a lot of baked in pain from these economic policies that will take a lot to unwind i want to talk about the democrat in this race adam hamilton who as you mentioned steven does seem to be running a really competitive race unexpectedly um i've seen some buzz about him as kind of an interesting choice for democrats in this very red state why is that he is a democrat uh he is not a democrat that would come anywhere close to winning a primary in brooklyn or anywhere in california or oregon or anything like that specifically i asked him after his campaign event uh like how do you separate yourself or do you separate yourself from the national unpopular democratic party brand and this is what he told me 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 not just a little a lot different um but yes i think people know they've elected a new democrat and they've elected a new democrat and they've elected laura kelly before that kathleen sebilius they knew that democrats can can be great leaders and i think they will also see that with me and as i travel across the state it's been really fun i'm meeting with republican leaders in the party who are telling me they're voting for me so he's really emphasizing that uh you know to win as a democrat in a state where there are not a lot of democrats you have to reach everybody and so a campaign of decency is part of his pitch and he ends pretty much every campaign stop with a nod to the wizard of oz talking about how there has to be a senator with a brain and who acts with courage and who has heart and so you know it's a trend not just in kansas of these democratic candidates doing well in red areas running for the state they try to represent and maybe against and away from the unpopular parts of the democratic party brand without hitting people over the head with the fact that they're a democrat i assume steven you're not in kansas anymore i am not in kansas anymore yeah but if there's one word that has defined this election it's trump right if there's a second word that might define this election if people like hamilton can win if people like mary peltola win in alaska it's authenticity and a lot of people are looking for those authentic candidates to say i feel your pain and you know you may not like my party and my party might not work in this state generally speaking but you know me right and that's how democrats have tried to walk this line of competing in red states by having the kinds of candidates in those places that align with those places values and that's something we used to see a lot more often when national politics wasn't the thing that everybody was talking about and what dominated at kitchen table conversations and town halls and maybe you're seeing a little bit more in this election of those local issues being a big deal and frankly the national wins um you know in a state like kansas when beef policy from the white house has made it more difficult for a lot of kansas ranchers oh it's interesting just the fact that he's a pastor i feel like is an interesting candidate decision it reminds me of james talarico in texas as well and i wonder about um whether this is an intentional decision on the part of democrats it's pretty hard to paint somebody who's been working uh in the christian faith professionally before they got into politics as a sort of radical leftist or somebody who doesn't match their values if he's been working in the space well and what's interesting about hamilton is he speaks a lot more like a pastor than james talarico does a seminarian um who had made his uh you know got became viral by kind of taking down in his view um you know kind of right wing views of religion and how that should be part of public policy he went at it from a more liberal perspective of what the bible teaches right and hamilton certainly is that kind of pastor uh his church the church of the resurrection is the largest united methodist church in the country he's very proud of that fact he talks about it often um and he recently pushed back hard against jd vance the vice president who was in kansas and uh essentially accused him of not being of not preaching real christianity and he's pushed back on that saying that he feels that people like jd vance and uh donald trump are not implementing um you know the teachings of the gospel of jesus christ so you're having this really interesting uh theological uh political debate that's playing out from so many of these democratic candidates who also have deep religious backgrounds you mentioned dominico earlier that president trump is the thing that hangs over this race in kansas i mean hangs over the entire midterms really and he's going to be in kansas campaigning tonight uh i feel like another sign steven that this race actually could be competitive this fall but i'm wondering at a time when the president's approval ratings are as low as they are is it helpful to roger marshall to have president trump in kansas right now abstractly yes because in a midterm election cycle you need to turn out as many of your voters as possible especially if you are of the party in power where people are kind of fading on how they feel about you and how you're governing on the other hand i mean as dominico mentioned you know trump is a key word in this midterm it has motivated democrats and independents who support democrats to vote out people who have a lot of ties to trump so it's a bit of a double-edged sword i mean the calculus with many of these visits in many of these places is that it is worth having the rally the attention to get out the vote effort the activation it is worth having republican voters show up to the polls rather than worry about another trump rally uh activating people who already don't like trump and don't like his policies and don't like candidates that he supports to somehow vote against him even harder you know it's interesting someone like marshall is also kind of separating himself a little bit from trump in the way he talks about ice for example immigration and customs enforcement because we've seen the polling on ice and just people really highly disapprove of the tactics that have been used in deportations and so what marshall is decided to do is he went he went and uh put an x post and said that there needs to be more local coordination more coordination with local police because that's how you keep people safe this came after about a hundred people were rounded up by ice and there was confusion so that's a sign right there of how much uh marshall is on the defensive in this race right now all right well we can leave it there for today a lot to watch in the coming weeks i'm miles parks i cover voting i'm stephen fowler i cover politics and i'm domenico montanaro senior political editor and correspondent thank you for listening to the npr politics podcast