Sarah Longwell is founder and publisher of the “No Nonsense News” site, the Bulwark (I reviewed her recent book here). For a decade she has been listening to focus groups talk about why they vote the way they vote. It provides a window out of our own silos to see viewpoints we won’t otherwise. I find her work educational, to say the least.
Today she wrote about the Kansas senatorial race, in “Why Adam Hamilton Could Win in Kansas, as Explained by Trump Voters.”
She reports.
We talked to 2024 Kansas Trump voters to find those lessons. And what we found out was that
Hamilton isn’t winning just because he’s a pastor, or because conservative Christians in Kansas see a kindred spirit in him. It’s more complicated than that.
He’s winning because he’s shrewdly presented himself as a benign Democrat in a state that’s deeply Republican and at a time when Republicans are desperately trying to polarize the electorate. On top of that, Hamilton’s opponent is deeply unpopular, providing Hamilton with even more of a cushion to avoid the voters’ wrath. It’s a perfect storm.
The Kansas Trump voters we talked to now disapprove of the president’s job performance. Even compared to how we’ve heard similar voters discuss Republican incumbents this year, this group’s verdict on Marshall was harsh. These voters weren’t attracted to Hamilton because they liked his theology or even the fact that he’s a pastor. They just aggressively disliked Marshall.
Like Melaine, 53, from Garnett:
I don’t have much respect for Roger Marshall just because I think he knows what to say and how to say it to the people that he’s talking to . . . and then he goes and does his own thing. He’s a doctor by medical trade and he is definitely supporting Big Pharma and he is not backing medical research. There’s a lot of things that I’ve struggled with him on. . . . With that, and how he’s supported Trump, I’m not a big fan of his at all—at all.
We played the group an ad from Hamilton’s campaign featuring a former patient of Marshall’s OB-GYN practice. Speaking directly to the camera, that patient, a woman named Meischa, describes how she was arrested at her house one evening in front of her 2-year-old daughter after missing a $50 payment to Marshall’s practice. “Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas,” she adds. “The health care system is broken, but not for Roger Marshall. He’s absolutely profiting from it.”
SO, YES, DEMOCRATS are competitive because the Republican is a schmuck.
This rings true to me. The Republican Party is running a lot of lousy candidates this year, in opposition to some really good candidates run by Democrats (amaze amaze amaze). I’m most concerned with my own state, but even here, we have an incumbent senator who barely lives here (to my admittedly imperfect memory he’s been to Homer once in two terms) and who most of us never hear from until he’s running for office again. In contrast, his opponent is spending the entirety of her campaign in traveling literally everywhere in Alaska you can dock a boat or land a plane (she’s been to Homer twice already).
Our US representative is, like our senatorial incumbent, a multi-millionaire who, also like our senatorial incumbent, wastes no time or money on trifling things like constituent outreach. They both show up to speak at the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, the state legislature in Juneau, and–if invited, not always a given–at AFN in October. And then they vanish from the landscape, never to be seen again.
Until the next election. And of course I’m sure that doesn’t hold true for the people who write them the big checks. That is not me, and not most of the rest of us, either.
Read Longwell’s post in full here. It’s illuminating.
Read about Mary Peltola and Bill Hill here. It’s also illuminating.