A “Perfect Storm to Put Kansas In Play”: Roger Marshall Faces “Uphill Battle” in Toss-Up Senate Race

CNN’s Manu Raju: “I caught up with Marshall in central Kansas, a place that Donald Trump won overwhelmingly, and I asked him initially about the Iran war. Instead, he pivoted to another issue”

Wall Street Journal: “A series of controversies surrounding Marshall, tariffs squeezing farmers, high gas and diesel prices and a weak national environment for Republicans have created what analysts call a perfect storm to put Kansas in play”

New reporting from across the Sunflower State is highlighting the “toxic brew” confronting floundering GOP Sen. Roger Marshall as his toxic, price-spiking agenda “hang[s] over Kansas in an extraordinary way” and he faces “the most serious challenger for a Kansas Senator in over a decade.”

For weeks, Marshall has been contending with “a series of damaging stories” that include extraordinary allegations of corruption and “headlines of suing patients that were trying to seek health care, at a time where Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill also made cuts to the social safety net.”

Now, the race has become “a real Republican liability,” with even members of Marshall’s own party admitting that he is “the weakest Republican incumbent candidate across the board,” and GOP operatives are conceding that it may “already [be] too late” to turn things around as he grows closer to becoming “the first person to lose a Senate contest to a Democrat in the state in nearly a century.”

See for yourself:

CNN: Can a Democrat Snap Kansas’ 94-Year Republican Streak and Turn Kansas Blue?

• CNN’s MANU RAJU: Republicans are on a mission – in Kansas, of all places – to rescue Senator Roger Marshall. It has been 94 years since a Democrat won a Senate seat in Kansas. The state has only had three Democratic Senators in its history, but the pastor-turned-candidate, Adam Hamilton, is seeking to change that. 
• Kansas Voter MARILYN HARRISON: I don’t think I’ve ever voted for a Democrat Senator. 
• RAJU: You haven’t. This will be the first time? 
• HARRISON: First time. 
• RAJU: A toxic brew is confronting Marshall here in Kansas: high gasoline prices, high diesel prices, the unpopularity of the Iran War, the unpopularity of the President’s tariff policies, and the President himself seeing his own approval sliding.
• RAJU: So, on Iran. What about Iran? I’m asking about Iran. 
• MARSHALL: No, I think you guys need to talk about something that Kansans want to be talking about. 
• RAJU: They don’t want to talk about the Iran war? 
• MARSHALL: I’ve given you my comments on Iran before. […]
• RAJU: But Marshall has faced a series of damaging stories, including billing practices associated with his medical practice. The New York Times reporting that he filed lawsuits against roughly 700 patients who had outstanding debt. 81 of those patients later were arrested for missing court dates. 
• RAJU: What about the billing practices? The New York Times billing practices? They reported about that. When you look at those people who had about $100 of outstanding debt, was it okay to go after them? 
• MARSHALL: So why do you continue to repeat this lie? 
• RAJU: It was in the story? It’s not true? 
• MARSHALL: So why are we repeating the lie? You’re repeating the lie. 
• RAJU: Did you guys do anything wrong? 
• MARSHALL: No, of course we did not. 
• BYSTANDER: You’re lying. 
• RAJU: And the Kansas City Star reported that Marshall’s practice charged an unusually high 18% interest rate on unpaid medical bills. What about the 18% interest rate that’s come out? Is that an appropriate interest rate to charge? 
• MARSHALL: Listen, I think you’re losing the real story here, right? […]
• RAJU: Should the President end the trade war with Canada? Should he end the trade war with Canada? 
• MARSHALL: *Walks away*

CNN: Can Democrats End 94-Year Streak and Turn Kansas Blue? 

• CNN’s MANU RAJU: Jeff, can Adam Hamilton actually pull off what would be a remarkable upset? 
• CNN’s JEFF ZELENY: He can. I mean, even many Republicans there are so concerned about it. The President going to Wichita tomorrow. The President’s own policies are hanging over Kansas in an extraordinary way here that complicates this for Roger Marshall. Roger Marshall is the weakest Republican incumbent candidate across the board. Every Republican I talked to agrees. […]
• RAJU: And the amount of money that’s coming in on the Democratic side actually shows you, too, because the ad spending – actually, Democrats are now outspending Republicans on TV. Future ad reservations, they are – at the moment – outpacing them. And Adam Hamilton raised $9.9 million in the last quarter, compared to $866,000 for Roger Marshall. 
• Puck News’ LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: So Roger Marshall’s inability to fundraise is one of the things that Republicans months ago started to flag to me about how this could be a problem in a bad political environment. And it is absolutely coming true. National Republicans have spent about $14 million there trying to boost and to save Roger Marshall. Democrats have responded. And Democrats – you know, the national Democrats – the fact that they’re spending money there in such an expanded map matters. 

Wall Street Journal: The Senate Race Republicans Never Expected to Sweat

• A series of controversies surrounding Marshall, tariffs squeezing farmers, high gas and diesel prices and a weak national environment for Republicans have created what analysts call a perfect storm to put Kansas in play—giving Democrats a shot to win a Kansas Senate seat for the first time in nearly a century.
• For over a year, party operatives have given Marshall warnings that his campaign needed to raise money, build a solid team and not get comfortable, because party resources needed to be spent in tighter races, according to people familiar with the conversations. This month, a super PAC aligned with GOP leadership, the Senate Leadership Fund, announced it would put $14 million into the race—money it hadn’t planned to spend there. Its Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority PAC, also jumped into the race, dropping $5 million.
• Since January, Hamilton’s campaign has raised $13.5 million to just $2.2 million for Marshall, according to recent federal election filings. Marshall’s campaign listed no paid staff as of Sept. 30.
• Brent Robertson, Marshall’s chief of staff, headed campaign operations until roughly a week ago, according to people familiar with the campaign. Robertson reached out to veteran Republican strategist Chris Grant last Saturday, after the campaign had decided they needed help, and more bodies, two senior GOP operatives said. Axios first reported the hire.
• Ads from Hamilton and allies highlight a series of controversies surrounding Marshall.
• The New York Times reported in September that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist, sued more than 700 patients over bills as small as $101. Last week, a joint investigation by MS NOW and the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news organization, reported Marshall and Robertson used congressional staff and taxpayer money for the campaign, a potential violation of congressional rules and federal law.

POLITICO: A sleeper Senate battleground has turned into a real Republican liability

• Marshall is playing catch-up as he races to avoid becoming the first person to lose a Senate contest to a Democrat in the state in nearly a century. He faces the most serious challenger for a Kansas senator in over a decade as his party stares down a grim environment under President Donald Trump’s second term.
• National Republicans are pouring millions into the state to prop him up; national Democrats are responding in kind, and Democrat Adam Hamilton, a well-known United Methodist pastor, is suddenly flush with cash for the campaign’s homestretch.
• But some Republicans think it’s already too late for Marshall.
• “He took it way too much for granted,” said former Kansas Gov. Mike Hayden, a Republican who supported Marshall’s previous campaigns but is now publicly backing Hamilton. “He’s been almost invisible, except on national television. And there’s not a lot of love in Kansas for Washington D.C.”
• National Republicans have privately urged Marshall to take his race more seriously on numerous occasions, according to a person familiar with the conversations who was granted anonymity to discuss them. Marshall, this person said, never appeared too worried about the race. Marshall’s latest Federal Election Commission report indicates this may be true. He raised just $866,000 for the third quarter to $9.9 million for Hamilton, and that filing did not appear to include any full-time payments to campaign staff.
• One Republican strategist close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged the race is an “uphill battle,” comparing Marshall to an “old athlete who, it takes them a lot longer to warm up to get ready for the game time, and they didn’t start that early enough.”
• As the race nears the homestretch, a deluge of bad press has dogged the senator: His campaign used pictures of a Kansas campground without permission and had to edit the ad; his team faces accusations of blurring the line between his official and campaign offices; his campaign reportedly didn’t pay a bill to a local bakery for six years until after the unpaid debt was made public (he apologized).
• Two other stories landed the hardest. The first focuses on a Florida property that he owns, raising questions about how much time he actually spends in Kansas. The second stems from a New York Times report that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist who served two terms in the U.S. House, had allegedly taken legal action against hundreds of medical patients who didn’t pay their bills. 
• At a Monday rally in the liberal college town of Lawrence, Hamilton told supporters that Kansans deserve a senator who isn’t just “showing up for photo ops” between “time with your family in Florida.”
• Kansas has been especially hard-hit by some of Trump’s policies. His tariffs and spiking fuel prices left the state’s row crop farmers struggling. A plan to import cheap foreign beef infuriated ranchers in a state that produces the second-most cattle annually. And his threats to cut off U.S. sales of Bombardier planes — a Canadian company whose U.S. headquarters are in Wichita — rattled the state’s robust aviation industry.
• But as Marshall tagged along with the other GOP candidates for their barnstorming tour, holding mini-rallies across central and western Kansas on Tuesday, he was reminded how deep the anger at Washington runs right now — even in ruby-red Kansas.
• There’s a belief among some Kansas Republicans that Marshall has thrown together so poor a campaign that if he wins, it won’t be of his own accord — it will be because of Ty Masterson, the Republican state Senate president running for governor who joined him on the bus tour and has polled a few points ahead of Marshall in most surveys.

Kansas Reflector: Roger Marshall praises Trump’s tariff policies after Kansas executive says they hurt his business

• Kansas metal fabrication business executive Zac Surritt says tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump sliced into the company’s global demand and lowered margins, while transportation costs soared and the cost of living for employees escalated.
• “Our small businesses can’t sit and wait on a promise for things to happen,” Surritt said.
• Marshall, who has repeatedly endorsed Trump’s tariff policies and the president’s war against Iran while on the campaign trail, said the experience of the northeast Kansas industrial millwright, metal fabrication and machine shop company was likely an anomaly.
• “I think your experience is different from most of the other manufacturing companies that I have talked to. Most of them are expanding,” Marshall said. “How’s your business?”
• Surritt, responsible for strategic growth initiatives at R&S Maintenance, said, “Business has slowed down this year. Our margins aren’t where they were a couple years ago.”
• “So, I want to move jobs back to America,” the senator said. “I think most manufacturing across the state of Kansas is growing because of these tariffs.”
• In a separate Topeka appearance Friday also hosted by the Greater Topeka Chamber of Commerce, Hamilton said Trump’s tariff regime had damaging unintended consequences for U.S. businesses. Hamilton said his meetings with most of the largest employers in Kansas revealed criticism among executives of tariffs adopted by Trump and endorsed by Marshall.
• “They’ve all told me the same thing. They said, ‘For a business to run well we need stability and predictability.’ What we have today is instability, unpredictability and chaos. This makes it really hard to run a business,” Hamilton said.
• “There have been 56 tariff changes in the last year,” Hamilton said. “Often announced at 2 in the morning on Truth Social when the president is maybe upset about somebody or doesn’t like something somebody said. So, we now apply a tariff as a way of getting back with people. That’s not how tariffs are meant to be applied.”
• He said Trump blundered by insulting Canada, which annually imported $4 billion of goods from Kansas. The president foolishly cast doubt on the ability of Bombardier to build quality aircraft, he said. Wichita serves as the U.S. headquarters for the aviation company and 1,500 of its employees work in Sedgwick County.
• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported in October that tariffs imposed by the United States in 2025 and 2026 added a 2.9 percentage point increase in inflation on a basket of 67 everyday consumer goods. The New York Federal Reserve estimated consumer prices would have declined during the period without initiation of president’s tariff.
• Marshall, locked in a toss-up race with Hamilton, echoed in Topeka the support he gave Trump’s tariff program as early as February 2025.
• “President Trump put the world on notice,” Marshall said at that time.  “America will no longer be taken advantage of. Reciprocal tariffs are strong, strategic negotiating tools that ultimately strike better trade deals, ensure long-term economic growth and strengthen our national security. With President Trump’s leadership, I am confident we will bring more jobs back to our country, prioritize American-made goods and level the playing field.”