By Frederic J. Frommer
Adam Hamilton has a decent shot at becoming the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate from Kansas since 1932, which was a pretty good year for the party nationally. That was the same election in which Franklin D. Roosevelt swept out Republican Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression.
Kansas Democrat George McGill benefitted from that national wave by winning a full Senate term for the first time. He had been first elected in 1930 to fill the remainder of an unexpired term — ironically, created by the departure of Kansas Republican Sen. Charles Curtis to become Hoover’s vice president. Curtis, who was one-eighth Kaw and grew up on an Indian reservation, was the first (and to this day only) Native American vice president.
Hoover and Curtis cruised to the 1928 election, the third straight White House victory for the GOP. But the Republicans’ stranglehold on national politics evaporated with the October 1929 stock market crash, which ushered in the Great Depression.
The 1930 midterm elections proved to be a bonanza for Democrats. As the New York Times reported at the time, “Overwhelmed by the tidal wave of votes that engulfed the candidates on their State ticket at Tuesday’s election, Republican leaders spent yesterday attempting to pull themselves together sufficiently to get their bearings.”
Even still, it was no easy feat to turn Kansas blue — or whatever color they used back then to indicate Democrats. In the special election that year, McGill defeated Republican Henry J. Allen, who had been appointed to fill out the roughly 1 ½ years after Curtis resigned until the special election, by just 2 percentage points.
McGill became the first Democrat from Kansas to win a Senate seat by popular vote since William Howard Thompson in 1912.
In 1932, when McGill ran for a full Senate term, it was more of the same. FDR and John Nance Garner won 42 of 48 states in defeating Hoover and Curtis. McGill beat former Kansas governor Benjamin Paulen by 3.64 percentage points.
And that was it for successful Kansas Democratic Senate candidates. In the 1938 midterm elections, when Democrats took a bloodbath, McGill lost to Republican Clyde Reed, a former Kansas governor. Republicans picked up eight Senate seats and a whopping 81 House seats.
Still, it was impressive for McGill to win even those two races.
“George McGill will always be reverently remembered by his fellow Kansas Democrats,” the Washington Post observed in McGill’s 1963 obit.
McGill was a big ally of FDR on the New Deal, and his main legislative accomplishment in the Senate was co-authoring the Pope-McGill bill with Idaho Democrat James P. Pope, which set up farm price supports and a federal crop insurance corporation.
Just as the national political climate laid the groundwork for Kansas Democrats to succeed in the ‘30s, today’s tough political terrain for Republicans is creating an opening for Hamilton to join McGill in an exclusive club.
President Trump’s growing unpopularity could lead to huge Democratic gains in next week’s midterm elections, and he’s visited the state to try to prop up Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in his race against Hamilton.
Kansas is still a very conservative state, but agriculture remains a major issue, as it was in McGill’s day. Farmers are reeling from huge increases in diesel and fertilizer prices, fueled by the war in Iran, and from Trump’s tariffs, which obliterated overseas markets for Kansas’s agricultural products.
Hamilton, a former Republican, fifth-generation Kansan, and founder of the nation’s largest United Methodist church, could have the right background to capitalize on this, and help Democrats party like it’s 1932.
Meanwhile, when it comes to governors, Kansas has been swingy, in contrast to the one-party state it’s been for senators. The current governor, Laura Kelly, is a Democrat; she won election in 2018 and 2022 with the backing of independents and moderate Republicans. And historically, she is no outlier.
Since 1960, there have been seven Democratic governors and seven Republican governors.
Frederic J. Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other national publications, is working on a book, Right On! How Money and Mayhem Revolutionized Baseball in the ‘70s.