Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about an unexpected tight electoral contest.
The reason Kansas has remained solidly Republican is deeply rooted in its soil and demography, but its history most of all. Maybe even most modern-day Kansans don’t know (or no longer care) about its haunted, strife-torn origin as a territory that joined the Union only in 1861 as a free state in the teeth of wanton pro-slavery Democratic Party terrorism. But “generational memory” is undeniably real: Certain cultural antipathies, once embedded, cut as deep as a blade to the bone, and some wounds do not easily suture.
Yet here we are, in October 2026, contemplating the unthinkable: Otherwise innocuous (and relatively unknown) Republican incumbent Senator Roger Marshall is facing a surprisingly fierce battle to hold on to a seat absolutely nobody had on their race card as a toss-up a year ago. This weekend’s gold-standard New York Times/Siena poll places Marshall at a shockingly close +1 advantage, 47–46 percent, over Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton. Lest you think this is the mere product of “liberal media polling,” it is actually a tick better than the one returned by GOP pollster Trafalgar, which with its 45–45 percent dead heat is in complete conformity with every other recent measure of this race.
Why? What has made the heartland of rock-ribbed Republicanism suddenly threaten to blow away? To start off, Kansas is not so much divided by ideology as it is by partisanship: For the reasons mentioned above, the Democratic Party has historically been as federally poisonous in Kansas as the Republican Party once was in Alabama. The politics? Not always so much. (Hence the surprising amount of “moderates” in the GOP state legislative caucus.) In fact, Kansas has elected its share of Democratic governors, including its current (outgoing) one.
But the Sunflower State is in the midst of federal tornado season for the same predictable reasons the Iowa GOP is currently barricading itself in the root cellar: Donald Trump’s various trade wars have turned the United States’ otherwise deep-red, agribusiness heartlands into Ground Zero for the economic fallout of his tariff policies.
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