What’s the Matter With Moderation?
O ne simple rule shapes Kansas politics: Republicans win statewide.
In U.S.
Senate races, the GOP has prevailed without interruption for more than 90 years.
But the rule has a corollary, which accounts for the occasional Democratic governor.
A Republican thought to be too extreme, too ideological, or too big for their britches can be beaten by a centrist Democrat when the wind blows just right.
And so, on the same August Tuesday that saw Michigan Democrats choose Abdul El-Sayed, Kansas Republicans realized their safe seat might not be so safe.
Kansas Democrats had picked a man who extols moderation as a matter of faith—literally.
Adam Hamilton, the founding pastor of America’s largest mainline Protestant congregation, will challenge the first-term incumbent Senator Roger Marshall in November.
In the handful of months since he announced his candidacy, Hamilton has defeated 10 garden-variety Democrats in the primary while setting new records for Kansas fundraising, pulling in $1 million in his first week and nearly $3.7 million in his first quarter.
Political analysts continue to rate Hamilton a long shot; admittedly, they have nine decades of justification.
But Marshall ticks every box that can mean trouble for otherwise-invulnerable Kansas Republicans.
Full of himself even by senatorial standards (one Republican Senate colleague described him to me as a “know-it-all”), Marshall is leery of public forums where he might hear from protesters and tends to speak before thinking—a hazard of his appetite for cable-TV appearances.
In nearly six years as a constituent of the senator, I have traveled from one end of Kansas to the other, and I have concluded that passionate supporters of Roger Marshall are the electoral equivalent of jackalopes: If they exist, I have never found one.
Should Hamilton break the Senate’s longest GOP win streak, he would score more than an enormous off-year upset; his influence on 2028—a free-for-all to define post–Donald Trump politics—could be even larger.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theatlantic.com — the content belongs to The Atlantic.
