Roger Marshall's campaign has found its closing argument, and it is a sermon. Not a vote. Not a bill. A sermon, delivered in June 2020 by a United Methodist pastor who asked his congregation to reckon with White privilege after George Floyd was killed, and who in the same breath condemned rioting and looting and said all lives matter.
That is the offense. A minister, in a church, in the weeks after a man was killed under a police officer's knee, asked his flock to examine themselves and repent. For a Republican senator who presumably spends some of his Sundays in a pew, this is an odd thing to treat as disqualifying. Repentance is not exactly a fringe concept in Kansas.
The attack works only if voters never read what Hamilton actually said. He denounced the violence. He was not preaching anything a mainstream Methodist would find exotic. Marshall is counting on a two-second clip and a Washington label, not a debate about the content. The Hamilton campaign is right to call it a diversion, and the thing being diverted from is worth naming.
It is Marshall's record on the costs Kansans are actually struggling to pay. Fuel, groceries and medical bills dominate this race, and Marshall is a physician who voted for the 2025 budget law that the Congressional Budget Office said would leave millions more Americans uninsured. Kansas is also one of the few states that has still not expanded Medicaid, and its rural hospitals are among the places that feel it. A doctor-turned-senator should be able to explain to a county hospital board why this is fine. It is much easier to talk about a sermon.
Then there is the endorsement. Marshall has the support of Sam Brownback, the former governor whose tax-cut experiment was supposed to be a "shot of adrenaline" for the Kansas economy. It instead blew a hole in the state budget, squeezed schools and roads, and was repealed by a Republican-controlled legislature over his veto. Kansans remember. If Marshall wants to run on the Brownback legacy, he may keep it.
Now a word to my own side, because Democrats have a habit of mishandling races like this. Hamilton's pitch as an independent-minded Democrat who puts Kansas first will irritate some activists, who hear it as code for hedging. It need not be. In a state that has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, a candidate who attracts former Republican officials is not betraying the cause. He is building the only coalition that can win. Kansans have shown they will cross party lines when something fundamental is at stake: in 2022 they rejected an abortion ban amendment by roughly 18 points in a state Donald Trump carried comfortably in 2020. The voters exist.
What Democrats must not do is let Hamilton's coalition-building turn into an apology tour. If Marshall demands he disown the sermon, the right answer is not a retreat into vagueness. It is to say plainly that a pastor can condemn looting and still ask a country to look honestly at how it treats Black Americans, and that anyone who finds that unthinkable is telling Kansans something about himself.
The contrast the Left should want is simple. One candidate wants to talk about conscience, and the other wants to talk about anything but his votes. When a senator's best argument is that his opponent once preached about moral responsibility, voters are entitled to ask what he is afraid to discuss. The answer is their health care, their grocery bills, and who in Washington is looking out for them.
