When it comes to picking senators, no state is nearly as consistent as Kansas. The last Democrat to win there, a former county attorney named George McGill, was elected in 1932. Kansas's other senator, a Republican incumbent, won reelection in 1936. McGill lost to a Republican in 1938. And Kansas has been sending Republicans to the U.S. Senate ever since.
That's a 90-year winning streak.
But the composition of Kansas's Senate delegation could change on Nov. 3 — and with it, Republican control of the chamber as a whole. To the surprise of pretty much the entire political world, first-term GOP incumbent Roger Marshall is currently locked in a too-close-to-call contest with megachurch-pastor-turned-rookie-candidate Adam Hamilton — a former Republican who considered running as an independent before deciding to seek the Sunflower State's Democratic nomination.
Hamilton, 61, is one of several heartland Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents who are giving Senate Republicans a run for their money in ruby-red states that President Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024 (including Texas, Iowa, Nebraska and even South Carolina). He describes himself as "a liberal conservative and a conservative liberal."
"I'm not somebody who favors the Socialist Party," Hamilton said Wednesday night during a debate against Marshall. "I'm somebody who stands in the middle. I'm going to try to work for all Kansans, Republicans, independents and Democrats."
Here's everything you need to know about one of the key figures of the 2026 midterms.
Who is Adam Hamilton?
In some ways, Hamilton is similar to James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, who is equally unapologetic about his Christian faith. But where Talarico has studied at seminary on the side — his main gig has been serving in the Texas House of Representatives — Hamilton is a bona fide church leader.
Born in 1964 and raised in the Kansas City suburb of Prairie Village, Hamilton didn't go to church regularly as a child. His parents were teenage high school dropouts when they had him; they divorced by the time he was a teenager. Hamilton started drinking and taking drugs in seventh grade; two years later he got clean and started attending Pentecostal services on the recommendation of a door-to-door evangelist. Before long, Hamilton was heading up the church's youth group; he married a fellow attendee a week after high school graduation. Eventually, he earned a bachelor's degree in pastoral ministry from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa and a Master of Divinity from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
In 1990 — when Hamilton was just 25 — his United Methodist denomination tapped him to start a church for nonchurchgoers in suburban Kansas City. Worshippers initially met in the small chapel of a local funeral home. Today, Hamilton's United Methodist Church of the Resurrection is the largest United Methodist congregation in the U.S., with an average weekly attendance of about 25,000 people online, on television and across its nine area campuses. Its Christmas Eve offering, which is devoted to mission work, has topped $2 million.
Hamilton has also written more than 30 books that have together sold millions of copies; his video-based lessons are used in Sunday school classes nationwide. In 2013, he preached at the National Prayer Service after President Barack Obama's second inauguration. Three years later, Obama appointed Hamilton to his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
Hamilton was registered as a Republican as recently as 2020; when he was first considering a 2026 Senate bid, he formed an exploratory committee as an independent. At the time he told his congregation — "a nearly equal mix of Republicans, Democrats and Independents," according to the Associated Press — that he could "bridge partisan divides in a highly polarized political climate" (as the AP put it).
"Every week, it seemed there was another news story in the last year where I would find myself shaking my head and thinking, we have to do better," the self-described fifth-generation Kansan told the AP.
But Hamilton was persuaded to run as a Democrat so as not to split the anti-Marshall vote in the general election. He wound up massively outraising his Democratic primary opponents and winning the party's Aug. 4 primary by more than 20 percentage points.
What does Hamilton stand for?
In college, Hamilton chose not to become a Pentecostal preacher because the denomination felt too black and white. In contrast, Methodism struck him as a thinking person's church, he told a local Kansas City paper in 2002. "It seemed to me there was some gray in the world," Hamilton explained. "It is OK if you have doubts. It's OK if you have questions. We don't have to check our brains at the door."
He now says he is an "independent-minded Democrat" who is "going to work across the aisle."
At the Wednesday debate, Hamilton criticized Marshall for supporting the Trump administration's least-popular policies — tariffs, the war in Iran, immigration raids in farm country — while trying to distance himself from national Democrats. He called former President Joe Biden's immigration policy a "disaster," for instance, and promised not to "support Chuck Schumer for Senate majority leader if the Democrats [were] to control the Senate." When asked about transgender girls playing women's sports, Hamilton said he would not want his 12-year-old granddaughter competing against people assigned male at birth. "It's not a fair fight," he argued.
At times, Hamilton — who reminded the audience that he has "been a pastor for the last 38 years" and has "not been a senator" — struggled to provide specifics on issues such as farm subsidies, the Social Security wage cap and AI regulation, according to the New York Times.
But Hamilton's general approach — his focus on "decency," affordability and "bringing people together" — has its roots in his ministry. Following the recent surge of federal immigration agents to Minneapolis, he cited on his podcast an Old Testament verse that commands Israelites to treat foreigners with love and fairness. In April, he said that he had voted against a state constitutional amendment that would have cleared the way for tougher abortion restrictions, arguing lawmakers should not be "the ethicists and the spiritual guides" for women (even as he lamented that his mother considered having an abortion when she was pregnant with him). And he has criticized Republican cuts to federal safety-net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.
"I just want to know, when did it become 'woke' to care for your neighbor?" Hamilton asked the AP, claiming that "Marshall would call [Jesus] 'woke'" if he were alive today.
How could Hamilton perform in the midterms?
Hamilton's local prominence, fundraising prowess, "centrist" message and skill on the stump have made this year's Kansas Senate contest very competitive. ("No one has more practice at extemporaneous talking than a megachurch pastor," the Times noted.) Marshall leads by 1 percentage point in the most recent poll to be released — but it's the only survey conducted over the last month that shows the Republican candidate ahead. The rest (save one tie) give Hamilton a slight edge (between 1 and 5 percentage points).
Both candidates have faced controversy. Marshall has pushed back on reports that he sued hundreds of patients over unpaid medical bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, calling the allegations "blatant lies." And Hamilton has admitted he made a "mistake" by failing to bar a volunteer who had previously been accused of sexual abuse in 2005 from going on a retreat where he allegedly abused another boy.
"I was actually preaching that weekend at Church of the Resurrection, and I did not sign off on him going back. I should have checked to make sure that he wasn't going back," Hamilton said during Wednesday's debate. "That was a mistake on my part. But I will tell you, when he was investigated the next year, we forbade him from working with youth or children anymore. He left our church angry and upset. And again, we played a critical role several years later in getting him arrested and convicted."
Kansas hasn't sent a Democratic senator to Washington, D.C., since the Dust Bowl days — a conservative bent that's also reflected in its heavily Republican state legislature and the fact that it has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1940 except for Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 landslide.
But the state has elected two Democratic governors in recent years — Kathleen Sebelius (2003-2009) and term-limited incumbent Laura Kelly (2019-2027) — and there is a tradition of ticket-splitting that goes back even further. (Since 1957, neither major political party has held the Kansas governor's mansion for longer than eight consecutive years.)
Could Hamilton benefit from that sort of checks-and-balances heterodoxy on Nov. 3? It's possible. In Wednesday's debate, Marshall embraced the Trump agenda and explicitly told viewers that "if you want [it] to continue, you need to come out, because we delivered on those things." But even in Kansas, 53% of likely voters currently disapprove of how the president is handling his job. The fate of Hamilton's campaign, and perhaps his party's hopes of winning the Senate, will turn on whether he can convince those voters to cast their ballots for him on Election Day — even if they haven't voted for a Democrat in a long, long time.
This article originally appeared on Yahoo News at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/who-is-adam-hamilton-a-guide-to-the-megachurch-pastor-who-may-become-kansass-first-democratic-senator-since-the-great-depression-213234050.html