“Kansas, get ready to learn what a polycule is,” read one Tuesday night tweet. All in due time. Let Kansans rest up. (This includes the ethically nonmonogamous community in Lawrence.)
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.
Giving birth to something new is always a bloodbath. So right now, the state is postpartum.
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.
But repressed radicalism returns, evidently. As the home of Appeal to Reason (1895–1922), the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in American history, Kansas is also the birthplace of campaigns against oligarchs. In the 1890s, popular fury at railroads, banks, and grain-elevator operators drove the founding of the state’s Farmers’ Alliance and People’s Party. A version of this platform is what Holscher, the granddaughter of tenant farmers, campaigned on. She called for a complete moratorium on data centers, and an end to tariffs and the war in Iran, which have walloped the state’s farmers who risk bankruptcy as prices for fuel, fertilizer, and machine parts surge.
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.)
Kansas Republicans were historically progressive or moderate, and they regularly supported the state’s many Democratic governors. But in the 1970s, the rich Koch network, which is headquartered in Wichita, began amassing right-wing influence. In 2012, the network helped oust moderate legislators in the state, and far-right Senator Sam Brownback, the Kochs’ made man, then pushed for deep tax cuts, notably to education. These cuts were so deep that the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state had failed in its legal duty to educate children.
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.”
And then there’s Kansas’s origin story, perhaps the most vivid in the nation. Bleeding Kansas earned its moniker in 1854 when 5,000 pro-slavery terrorists from Missouri invaded the territory, brandishing Bowie fighting blades expressly designed for concussive chops and deep thrusts. They menaced voters at the polls, hijacked elections, and installed themselves in an illegitimate, pro-slavery legislature.
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.
For most of Tuesday night, Hamilton led in unofficial counts against the Republican incumbent Roger Marshall (an anti-abortion obstetrician who once sued 700 of his female patients for unpaid debts at 18 percent interest and had 81 of them arrested), but his lead shrank as the night wore on. When the AP called the race, Hamilton had 51 percent to Marshall’s 45 percent. “This election is a rebuke of unkindness and cruelty in Washington,” Hamilton said in his acceptance speech in Overland Park.
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.
Thomas Frank is circumspect. He’s wary of Democrats. “It’s a whole lot better than Brownbackism or Trumpism, of course,” he told me. “And it was nice to see Marshall’s effort to use the culture wars to cancel people’s economic anxieties—the classic Kansas pattern—fail so completely.”
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.
Hamilton’s tone is mild, but his message is—well, it falls shy of John Brown, but it might have worked as an op-ed in Appeal to Reason. Expressing compassion for even the rowdiest protesters, Hamilton cites Dr. King: “Riots are the language of the unheard.” He says Colin Kaepernick was right, and that Christians must be committed to racial justice. He also shows off an impressive memento: the 1942 rookie card for Satchel Paige, the pride of Kansas City.
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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