Kansas must be exhausted. It swung left 21.06 points Tuesday. As everyone now knows, the state elected Adam Hamilton, a recent Democratic convert and founding pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the country, as its first Democratic U.S. senator since 1932. But it also appears to have chosen Cindy Holscher, an economic populist, as governor. Democrats picked up 20 seats in the statehouse, breaking the 16-year-old veto-proof Republican supermajority.
At the same time, Kansas likes a change. The state was forged in rebellion, and Kansans regularly break hard against anyone who’s exploiting them. Thomas Frank’s bellwether 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? is misremembered as a cautionary tale of a moderate state that got waylaid by conservative Christianity. It’s really about a state that sacrificed its native radicalism to culture wars and trickle-down economics.
The same don’t-tread-on-me-ism extends to reproductive health in Kansas. In 2022, just after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansans soundly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Hamilton, who once described himself as “pro-life with a heavy heart,” is now explicitly pro-choice. “I acknowledge there is a moral tension surrounding the topic of abortion,” he has said, “but I do not believe that politicians should be making these decisions for women.” Last week, Rob Schenk, a former Operation Rescue leader and onetime anti-abortion militant in Kansas, endorsed Hamilton and praised his pro-choice views in the pages of Mother Jones. (Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was a frequent contributor to Appeal to Reason.)
In 2017, over Brownback’s veto, Republicans finally voted with Democrats to roll back the cuts. In 2018, four GOP legislators even defected to the Democrats, saying their party had become too complicit with Donald Trump. “Brownback” became shorthand for the MAGA catastrophe. During this election season, incumbent Democratic Governor Laura Kelly campaigned for Holscher, warning that her Republican opponent in the race, Ty Masterson, would take Kansas “back to Brownback.”
But after the Border Ruffians sacked Lawrence, which had been founded by abolitionists, Free-State Kansans rallied, notably John Brown and his sons, who slashed up five pro-slavery settlers with broadswords in May 1856. Kansas entered the union as a free state in 1861, pledged to the party of Lincoln. To go full wonk on you, Kansas voters have never, in the entire history of the state, elected a Democrat to a full Senate term by popular vote who didn’t already hold the seat by appointment of the governor. Senator-elect Adam Hamilton is the first Kansas Democrat to win a full term from scratch, via the popular ballot, without the benefit of incumbency by prior appointment.
The election was also a rebuke of the party that has made unkindness and cruelty its stock-in-trade. Old habits die hard, party affiliations too. Just after his victory was announced, Hamilton claimed that “hundreds of thousands of Republicans” had voted for him. The numbers aren’t in yet, but this is not out of the question.
Hamilton, who studied at the Divinity School at Southern Methodist University, is about to join quite a club of freshman senators in D.C. He and Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, senator-elect from Texas, will have a lot to talk about. Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, another religious man (he identifies as a “practicing Muslim”) with advanced degrees, will surely have something to add. But if the cool leftists in Congress ever privately doubt whether Hamilton, with his Ned Flanders–like affect, is rad enough to hang with them, they should fire up “Jesus, Protest, and Repentance,” the 2020 sermon Hamilton gave a few days after the murder of George Floyd.
This is the sermon that Vice President JD Vance dragged incoherently in September, as he stumped for Marshall. Hamilton, Vance said, believes “it’s a sin to be white and a sin to raise cattle and eat meat.” Vance was bluffing as usual. But Kansans paid him no mind. And a few weeks later they voted Marshall, and MAGA, down.
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