Kansas has not elected a Democratic Senator since 1932. In 2026, the Republican stronghold in the state appears to be weakening. Trump’s imports of Argentinian beef and recent wave of tariffs on Canada have dealt a major blow to Kansas’s economy. A recent report that incumbent Senator Dr. Roger Marshall sued over 700 of his patients for unpaid medical debts has further inflamed frustration with Republican politics in the state. Hearing the concerns of his community, Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton felt called to action.
Rev. Hamilton joined Jen Rubin to talk about how his faith and dedication to service motivate his Senate campaign, and he outlined the urgency of bringing Kansans the change they deserve. The pair discussed restoring trust in government, making life affordable for Americans, and refusing to let the United States become the world’s bully.
Adam Hamilton is the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Kansas. Rev. Hamilton is a fifth-generation Kansan, and he has served as the pastor of a United Methodist church for 36 years.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I am delighted to welcome Adam Hamilton. Anna Hamilton is a pastor of a very large church in Kansas. He is also the Democratic nominee for Senate. Welcome.
Adam Hamilton
Jen, it’s a pleasure to be with you today. Thank you so much for having me.
Jen Rubin
My pleasure. You have one of the largest Methodist churches in the country, you do great work, you have an adoring congregation, and yet you decided to go into politics. Why is that?
Adam Hamilton
well, I’ve either lost my mind, or I feel desperately that things have to be better in Washington, D.C, and for our country as a whole. And that’s what happened for me. I spent a year and a half, well, really, I spent about a year, watching what was happening in D.C, and feeling like I’d say almost every night on the news, this is not okay. This feels like an assault on the values, the things that I’ve been preaching for the last 36 years, and decency and corruption and, you know, loss of decency, corruption, chaos in Washington, people being hurt, the rhetoric. And I said to my wife over and over, somebody’s got to do something. And finally, about 6 months ago, she looked at me and she said, maybe you should do something. You spent 36 years, you know, caring for people, listening with empathy, trying to solve problems, trying to help our community and the world look more like it’s supposed to look, and maybe… maybe we should consider doing this. We went out on a listing tour. We were listening to people across Kansas, and we heard again and again, please run, we need you, we think you could be a great senator, and we have to have something different in Washington. So, we jumped in in May, the first of May, and we’ve been in four and a half months, so not quite four and a half months, and it’s been quite an exciting venture.
Jen Rubin
I’m very curious how you approach the issues. Let’s take ICE, which has been unleashed on American cities, streets. How do you look at that from a religious perspective, and then how does that inform your political view of what should and shouldn’t be going on?
Adam Hamilton
Yeah, well, first of all, ICE was formed after 9-11, and it was formed to protect people from having airplanes flown into buildings, right? So, that role is really important. I value and appreciate the idea that they’re supposed to be, you know, watching to see where are there dangerous people who could harm Americans. Unfortunately, ICE has been politicized, it’s been militarized, it’s been sent into cities on what feel like political agendas. And, and that’s not the way ICE was meant to work, and so what that’s done is it meant, you know, that there are fear, there have been American citizens who’ve been killed. You know, the idea that we set up quotas of the number of immigrants that we’re gonna try to round up, and so we’ve got to figure out who we think might be, might be people they should be arresting. We’ve stopped looking, so ICE has talked about very proudly, you know, that they’re looking for the most dangerous elements out there, and being able to, you know, rid our streets of them. But it’s moved from being the most dangerous elements out there to being anybody who might be here for however long they’ve been here, you know, with… without, you know, without having gone through the right process. There’s a place I want us to have safe and secure borders, that’s really, really important, but I also want us to make sure that we’re treating people with decency, with humanity, that we are not militarizing and politicizing law enforcement groups in America, and I think what’s happening today is not okay.
Jen Rubin
Your opponent, it’s come out in press reports. Has spent quite a bit of resources suing former patients and trying to collect benefits or payments, rather, for healthcare. This has been an extreme hardship for many, many people, hundreds of people. What was your reaction when you heard that news?
Adam Hamilton
Yeah, I read this story this week in the New York Times, and first of all, I thought it was sad. I was thinking about the people who couldn’t pay their medical debts, and I know people like that who’ve struggled to be able to pay their medical debts. And I think there was one person who had $120 they were owed, and they were sued, by, you know, by Roger Marshall’s, you know, attorneys. One woman who was arrested, there were, like, 81 people who were arrested. One of these women was 8 months pregnant, she was arrested in front of her children. She was asking, please don’t handcuff me in front of my children. I’m just thinking. That’s not okay. I know a lot of doctors, I don’t know doctors, I don’t know any other doctors who make that a routine practice. And… but what I was really interested in was, okay, so 700 people who were sued, 81 people were arrested, 3 or 4 spent time in jail. And yet, Roger Marshall went to Washington, D.C, and he voted not to continue the subsidies for people on the Affordable Care Act. These are working people. They’re working hard, but they’re finding health insurance is impossible to cover anymore, and so instead of finding a way to make sure we’re you know, we’re helping them find some other solution. If he didn’t want to continue the subsidies, he just ended the subsidies. Then he voted to take away a trillion dollars in spending from Medicaid over a 10-year period of time. So in Kansas, we now have 51,000 people who used to have health insurance in January of 2025, they don’t have it anymore, in our home state. And I’m thinking, so wait a minute, here’s a man who was suing people for not being able to pay their bills, low-income, struggling people. And then he’s taking away health insurance from 51,000 more people in Kansas. There’s something not right about that, and this is part of why I’m running. It’s… there’s just a fundamental… indecency about this. We have to find a better solution than that. And of course, you know, we’ve got to find real solutions when it comes to healthcare, so people have a basic level of access to healthcare, no matter what.
Jen Rubin
It’s been a very, very long time since Kansas sent a Democrat to the United States Senate. When people hear you and they listen to your message, are they surprised that you’re a Democrat? Do they ask you, well, what is it about you that makes you different, or are all Democrats like that? There seems to be a disconnect between you, your message. And what many Kansans have assumed Democrats are like and what they are for.
Adam Hamilton
Yeah, I think that’s right. So, when I first announced I was running as a Democrat, I had a family member who said, okay, so I just need to know, are you a communist or a socialist? And I’m like, no, I’m not a communist, and I’m not a socialist. I’m a guy who cares about people. I spent 38 years caring for people, and trying to look at places in our society that are broken, and how do we inspire people to go about fixing them? And, and wanting people not to be harmed. And so, you know, as I ran for office, I think there were people… when I go across the state, there are people who say. well, you’re the kind of Democrat I could vote for. I was in a group with about… I was in a meeting with about 80 Republicans the other day in western Kansas. This is, like, the reddest part of the state. And when I was finished, you know, to a person, they came up to me and said. we’re voting for you. What you stand for is what we stand for, and we’re tired of the mess in Washington, and we need somebody who’s going to speak up for us. And I tell people, I’m an independent-minded Democrat. I’m a Democrat who wants to work across the aisle. Look, Republicans have good ideas. There are things that we need to, you know, they have emphases that are important for us. I’m proud to be a Democrat, but I want to work across the aisle with people and solve real problems, as opposed to hurling, you know, hurling rocks at the other party, and never really working to address the critical issues. So, we can’t solve immigration, we can’t solve healthcare, we can’t solve the national debt, we can’t solve Social Security unless Republicans and Democrats are willing to work together. And at the church I serve, you know, we have 24,000 members. 9,000 of them are Republicans. 9,000 are Democrats, 6,000 are Independents. I love my Republican members. I love my Democrat members. They each see things in slightly different ways, but they’re decent human beings who are trying to do the right thing, and I think there’s a lot of people like that across the country. We’ve got to look at ways of bringing people together instead of dividing them to solve big problems.
Jen Rubin
One of the reasons why some Republicans voted for Donald Trump was that they were tired of these forever wars. We’re now in a forever war in Iran, and Senator Marshall, other Senate Republicans have just kind of gone along with this. What would be your approach to issues of war and peace, and in specifically this war, which most Americans are very much opposed to, has raised gas prices, raised diesel prices, is costing us tens of billions of dollars?
Adam Hamilton
Yeah, well, first of all, when it comes to war, war is a measure of last resort. You use war, I mean, if you believe in just war, which I do, war is something that you enter into either to defend yourself or to defend somebody else. or because there’s an imminent danger, a very serious and real imminent danger. So last year, the president bombed the nuclear facilities in Iran. He told us that the mission was accomplished, that the nuclear facilities were now under a, you know, under a mountain of rubble. And then this year, earlier this year, we sent an armada to Iran, and suddenly there was a new imminent threat that, you know, we were in danger. Now, Ronald Reagan didn’t send the troops over to do what’s happened here. Neither President Bush has sent the troops over to do what’s happened here. But, but our president did. So the direct cost of that was something like $40 billion of taxpayer money funding what’s going on in the Strait of Hormuz today. But the indirect costs have been over $100 billion, and in Kansas, we feel it. $650 million more Kansans spent on fuel crisis since January of this year than we did last year. People know it. The farmers are feeling it, you know, so you’re talking about, in their case, almost $2 a gallon more for diesel fuel. Set a new record this last week. And the cost of that is family farms. The cost of that is higher prices at the grocery store. The cost of it is fear that people aren’t going to make it. All of this because the president made a decision that Congress didn’t approve. to send our troops to war. We need to stop this kind of thing. This is… this is not how our government, and not what a country like ours is meant to look like. We’re not the world’s bully. We are the world’s champion for liberty and for justice, and that’s what we need to show.
Jen Rubin
The farm… community in Kansas and elsewhere has had a very hard time of it, in part because of tariffs. What are some of the things you’d be looking to do to help farmers, ranchers in Kansas?
Adam Hamilton
Well, first of all, there is a bill that’s being considered in Congress that would ask the President, require the President, to submit requests or his proposals for tariffs. There’s a place for tariffs. Tariffs can help us sometimes. There are unfair trade practices, and there are times tariffs are the only answer. But what’s happened in the last year is the president has changed the tariffs single-handedly, changed the tariffs, I think it’s 55 times now. Now, how do you run a business when you don’t know what the cost of your inputs are going to be from week to week? I mean, these tariffs could change 2 or 3 times in a week sometimes. And so, this is bad for business, it’s bad for farmers, small businesses, large businesses. I’ll give you an example. There was a shopkeeper who opened her shop 3 years ago, and a dress shop, and she was very excited. Her first 2 years, you know, her dream, and her first 2 years. She, she did really well, and this year she’s lost money, and she’s lost money because the price of merchandise that she buys and sells has gone up so dramatically, she can’t even sell that merchandise anymore. And now she’s looking at possibly closing. Well, the decisions in Washington, whether it’s the President or Congress, shouldn’t be killing the dreams of Americans. It should be making it possible for them to flourish. This is happening for farmers, where trade agreements that took 10 or 15 years to negotiate are up in smoke over a tweet and a tariff from the president. Or this last week, you know, we saw the Bombardier, who is the Canadian airplane maker, manufacturer, their U.S. headquarters are in Wichita, Kansas, and in Wichita, there are 1,500 people who are employed there. And as you look at that, you know, with the President’s comment. You know, just one comment. and his threats, we might be losing 1,500 jobs in Kansas. That’s just not right. That’s hurting people in Kansas. And it’s because of a president whose thinking and actions are chaotic, and part of the role of Congress is to act as a check on executive power. They need to reclaim that role so that Americans can flourish and not be hurt at the whim of a president.
Jen Rubin
Last question for you. Politics, religious organizations are positions of trust. They have money that is supposed to be used for the public benefit. But we’ve seen this present… get rich in office. We’ve seen him involved in crypto deals. We’ve seen him get a gift of a airplane from the Qataris. We see his relatives making out like bandits in foreign real estate deals. And we see members of Congress continuing to trade stocks. What’s your solution to restoring a sense of trust, a sense of propriety back to government? People have become so cynical and so upset at the level of corruption. Some 90% of Americans now think government is corrupt.
Adam Hamilton
Right. It’s sad and tragic, and you do think, you know, today, the things that are happening, you know, in Washington would have been, in my mind, unthinkable in past administrations. When it comes to Congress, so there’s certain things we’re championing. One is making sure that there are term limits. We need… we want term limits. We actually think age limits are pretty good. There’s some… some age, maybe 80, that would be a maximum age that somebody could be and be holding offices. This is true for Congress, it’s true for the Supreme Court. We believe that there… that we would be better served by having term limits on the Supreme Court that allow each president to be able to appoint, you know, one or two Supreme Court justices instead of, you know, having it overweighted by one particular president. So we think these things are important. We don’t think… we are advocating for members of Congress not trading individual stocks. So either having a blind trust or having a, you know, a mechanism so that they aren’t making day-to-day decisions on which stocks they’re buying or selling. Because they have insider information. They have access to information about policies and what’s going to be happening in the future that could lead them to play on that, on that information in an unfair way. So we don’t think that’s right either. I also think it’s interesting you mentioned cryptocurrency, and I just think, you know, most Americans don’t understand it, can’t make sense of it, and yet the president has managed, while he’s, you know, in office. you know, utilizing this as a means of enriching himself. I just… I think we have to do better. Americans feel… I mean, as you said, 90% of Americans go, this is just not normal. This is not right. It feels unethical. How do we get out… how do we change this? And I think it’s going to take some years to repair the damage that’s been done.
Jen Rubin
You have a debate coming up with your opponent, next week. If they want to find out more about you, or they want to learn what some of your positions are in advance of that, what should they do, where should they go?
Adam Hamilton
Thank you for asking that, Jen. So, Hamiltonforkansas.com is our website. You can read some of our positions there. I’d love for people to watch the debate. It’ll be online. I don’t know the information. We’ll have to post it on our website, but it’ll be out there where people can access it. And we’re gonna have a great debate. We’ve got a real race going on here in Kansas. For the first time in 94 years, there’s a good chance that a Democrat is going to be elected to the United States Senate from Kansas. And this will be not because Democrats elected me, they are going to help elect me, but that’s only 25% of the state’s population. 29% are independents, 45% are Republicans, and I’m hearing probably a third of the people who are donating to my campaign and coming to my events are Republicans, saying, we have to do better. And Kansas is going to send a message to Washington, D.C, and the message, not just to Washington, our entire country. that this is not okay with Republicans, it’s not okay with Democrats, and it’s not okay with Independents. We have to do better. So I’m very excited about it. I think we have a really strong chance of winning in November, and I appreciate you having me on your program, Jen. Thank you.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Well, this is one of the races we are following, folks. I did not think that Kansas would be a Senate race that’s in play. It absolutely is, so we’ll continue to follow the race. Thank you so much for joining us, Pastor, and we will look forward to the debate, and to following the rest of your race.
Adam Hamilton
Thank you so much, have a great day.
Jen Rubin
You too, bye-bye.
