ELLSWORTH, Kansas — David Rankin has never been one for putting up campaign lawn signs. As a lifelong Republican in a town of 3,000 — where Donald Trump has won by 50-point margins since 2016 — he’s never seen a reason to put a candidate’s name in his yard.
But recently, Rankin and his wife Dina did something new. Frustrated with their senators in Washington, DC, they went out to their front lawn and hammered in a sign in support of the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor running for US Senate — and a Democrat.
As signs of a midterm blue wave rise around the country, perhaps no state has been more surprising to watch than Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years. A string of polls now show the incumbent GOP Sen. Roger Marshall locked in a tight race for survival, buffeted by low approval ratings, a string of personal controversies, poor campaigning, and Trump’s unpopularity over healthcare cuts, fuel costs, beef prices, and tariffs.
Kansas is now a toss-up, attracting both national attention and last-minute cash investments from the national parties. Pundits have pointed to a range of reasons: the national backlash against the president; the unusual weakness of Marshall’s candidacy; the persistence of pocketbook issues for Kansas voters.
But there’s also something more interesting afoot, a difference that may have its own national repercussions. Hamilton’s campaign is a rare instance of a Democrat deliberately rallying people of faith, boldly proclaiming the Gospels, openly talking about Jesus Christ, and asking voters to find — and embrace — a profoundly Democratic message in the beliefs they profess every Sunday.
“Our faith is respectful…it reflects the ideas of justice and fairness, things that are just fundamental to the Bible,” Hamilton told me in early October. “Two thousand verses in the Bible talk about poverty and taking care of the poor. That’s not what you hear from Christian nationalists.”
That was part of the draw for the Rankins. They had known about Hamilton for a while. Friends had been to his church, and David — a retired choir director — told me that his own Presbyterian congregation had used Hamilton’s books and various sermon series as part of their Bible study. So when they found out Hamilton had decided to run earlier this year — as a Democrat, no less — they prepared themselves for the possibility that they might have to break with their political party this year.
“Things are not right right now. They’re not right in Washington and we have to do better,” Rankin told me. “His faith is just going to make him better as he serves us.”
If Hamilton, and a handful of other candidates of faith in nearby Iowa and Texas, win, it could signal a shift in US politics — or at least a tremor in one of its most rock-solid certainties. One of the defining stories of the last century has been the realignment of religion, religious life, and religious voters on the political spectrum — and the complete shift of evangelicals toward the GOP. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Democrats could routinely count on majority support among white evangelical Protestants in congressional elections, and at least substantial support from them at the presidential level. But by the 1990s — with Americans becoming more evangelical and evangelicals becoming more Republican — the GOP had effectively locked in a permanent voting bloc, especially powerful in the heartland and the South.
Meanwhile the opposite has been true for the Democratic Party: Rapid liberalization and secularization has moved nonreligious and anti-religious voters toward the Democrats, while religious Democratic voters tend to come from smaller progressive churches. The shift has only accelerated in recent years, as Trump has consolidated evangelical voters, while white college-educated voters — who are largely secular — moved left. And when blue-state Democrats try to deploy faith-based messages, they get derided or dismissed as awkward, disingenuous, or off-brand.
The result: In recent years, Democrats have mostly ceded religious voters, outreach, and messaging to Republicans. That has made it almost impossible for the party to compete in red and rural states, where white evangelical voters make up a substantial share of the electorate. In turn, Democrats have faced increasingly long odds to win those Senate seats, or expand the electoral map in presidential contests.
Whether he wins or loses in Kansas, Hamilton’s overperforming campaign poses a high-stakes question for Democrats nationally: Can a true moderate, a self-described radical centrist, and an openly religious person offer a road map for reclaiming Christianity and winning back religious voters?
Maybe Hamilton does represent such a playbook. But to watch him on the trail, you find another fact that makes his path look much harder for other Democrats to walk.
It’s not just that Hamilton is a religious Democrat, or even that he’s mastered a message for religious swing voters hoping to reconcile their faith with a Democratic candidate. He’s also a deeply talented public speaker, well-connected community leader, and authoritative religious voice willing — unlike most pastors — to wade directly into electoral politics. He is, in other words, a unicorn.
He’s the leader of a very unique church — not just a politician “affiliated” with Christianity or training to join the clergy, but an established figure in an established institutional denomination that insulates him against attacks on his faith and character. (One of those came from no less than Vice President JD Vance, who attacked Hamilton in September as “dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”) The skills that come with leading a megachurch also lend themselves easily to campaigning — but might not be replicable for others, at least not to this extent. And Hamilton has managed to ease concerns from secular or nonreligious liberals, without compromising his centrist, at times heterodox, religious and political beliefs.
His campaign could change control of Congress. But beyond that, it also offers a new, possibly more effective, political language for Democrats in a post-Trump world.
On a recent Thursday in Hutchinson, Kansas, Adam Hamilton found himself therapizing a crowd of several hundred. “Republicans for Hamilton” pins floated in the audience at this downtown theater in the middle of the state, as he diagnosed the problems in Washington that have bled into Kansas. Members of the US Senate, Hamilton said gently, had become like Dorothy’s traveling companions in The Wizard of Oz: They’d lost their minds, their hearts, and their courage.
Along the way, he said, they, and President Donald Trump, had torn apart the fabric of the community, turning neighbors into suspicious strangers. Heads nodded in agreement; those closest to me sighed and lowered their heads. Hamilton recounted something a mother once asked him: to be “somebody who’s going to help me not hate my neighbors with the red caps anymore.”
“And she wasn’t talking about Chiefs fans,” he quipped. Laughter broke the silence.
To see Hamilton in action feels like being thrown back to a forgotten era of politics: His tone is conciliatory. He’s eager to dispense with the “extremes.” He slips into preaching about “radical love,” and he’s comfortable quoting scripture and referencing Christian teachings when answering policy questions. Time permitting, he shakes hands and greets everyone in a room.
His public persona is built far less on his political experience — this is his first race — than on his three decades of experience leading a megachurch. In his own telling, tending to the middle has been a defining part of his life’s work.
His faith journey started in high school. Raised nominally Catholic, he embraced atheism as he watched his parents go through a divorce and after his grandmother died by suicide. After a late night of smoking weed with a friend, he heard a knock at the door: a Pentecostal missionary was inviting him to church. Though not necessarily sold on this movement, he did meet his wife LaVon at church — and they married a week after graduating.
Yet around this time, he says he felt a stirring to become a pastor. He enrolled at the evangelical Oral Roberts University to train as a preacher, but was thrown into despair, disillusionment, and doubt when his two best friends died in an accident. Seeking counsel and comfort from Pentecostal pastors and leaders, he was met with platitudes (“Everything happens for a reason”) and unanswered questions — and so began a journey that led him to John Wesley, the English theologian, and the movement he founded, Methodism.
“I carry my pocket testament with me everywhere,” Hamilton told me, pulling out his copy of the Gospels and the epistles of John, as he tends to do on the trail. “This is my defining story. This book and its story define how I understand what it means to be human and is at the center of my life.”
He was just 25 when he founded the Church of the Resurrection, commissioned by his bishops in the United Methodist Church to start a church “for thinking people.”
The point was to “use your intellect and not check your brain at the door,” he says on the stump. “And have a heart. Focus on both a spiritual life, but also on living out faith and justice in the world. These things go hand in hand.”
And so it came to pass that a congregation that started off meeting in the chapel of a funeral home in the 1990s grew into Kansas’s largest church, and the largest Methodist congregation in the country. The church now has nine locations across two states counting about 24,000 members between them, anchored by a spaceship-looking complex in Leawood, a Kansas City suburb.
Hamilton, and members of the church, are quick to point out the radical centrism of the church: It’s split roughly evenly between Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Hamilton himself is a former Republican. The Leawood location features both a 3,500-capacity sanctuary, with a full orchestra and 80-person choir for traditional services, a smaller space for modern, nondenominational-inspired worship, and a chapel.
And though the spotlight of the campaign has brought scrutiny, media visits, and broadsides from out of state, it’s also Hamilton’s experience in the church, combined with an unpopular and inexperienced GOP incumbent, that have made the race competitive.
The light pouring through the Swedish chapel’s windows in Lindsborg seemed to amplify the hundreds of singing voices. Hamilton, stumping at the front of the room, had broken out into song — “All Creatures of Our God and King” a hymn based on St. Francis of Assisi’s 800-year-old prayer — and the crowd at this Lutheran college quickly joined in.
How I reported this story
I’d had my eye on Adam Hamilton for a few months. I was hoping to cover his primary campaign, but given his religious and politically moderate background, it wasn’t clear that he would win.
When he did, I saw a chance to explore a question central to my beat: How does politics influence American religion, and how can religion influence the two major parties — especially today’s Democrats?
I reported this story from Kansas — flying into Kansas City and driving nearly 200 miles to a bookstore in Salina, where Hamilton was scheduled to speak and meet supporters. I spent the rest of the day following his campaign to Lindsborg (about 45 minutes away) and Hutchinson (another 30 minutes away).
The next day, I was off to Garden City in the far west of the state for another campaign stop (another 200 miles away), stopping for a meal in Hanston on my way back to Ellsworth in central Kansas for another event. I spent the following day in Salina and stopped in Topeka, before heading to Overland Park, where I attended a Sunday service at Hamilton’s church before returning to DC in the evening. In all, I covered about 900 miles of roads in four days, crisscrossing the state of Dorothy and Toto and talking to dozens of voters.
“You just got to take the time to do that,” he said after the final alleluia.
Before the song, he had been speaking about the Christian roots of his campaign: the Biblical call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly, all for the sake of God’s creation. Oftentimes life, and especially politics, make it hard to see the beauty in nature, he was saying, and the complexity in everything.
Hamilton’s popularity in both his church and among Kansas voters owes a great deal to the fact that he’s a moderate. Coming from the coasts, that word, used around Hamilton, doesn’t quite mean what I expected. A “moderate” in American Democratic politics usually describes a longtime Democrat who carves out a middle lane on very specific issues — usually defense or reducing the deficit. But Hamilton has no trouble with complicated, unfixed, occasionally heterodox views, including on hot-button social issues.
Take a question a woman in the chapel asked him about abortion: What does he think about reproductive rights in a state like Kansas?
He’s spent the last two decades writing and talking about his evolving thoughts on abortion. He calls himself “pro-life with a heavy heart,” telling the woman that, as a pastor, he feels “personally moral tension when it comes to abortion.”
But he would be taking on a different role as a US senator, Hamilton said. Crisis pregnancies “lead me to have compassion, and say there needs to be legal and safe access to abortion,” he said. On this issue, politicians are usually pressured to take absolutist positions to satisfy their party’s base, but Hamilton sees his own view as representing what most Kansans actually want. People here have already voted multiple times to preserve abortion access, he said, and when an effort to undo abortion rights protections in the state constitution was on the ballot in 2022, it lost by nearly 20 points. He said he believed at the time that the legislature should not “be making that decision for women who are facing really difficult situations.”
This particular tension comes from his mother’s own experience: Worried she wouldn’t be able to support or raise a child at 17, her father, a TWA pilot, had encouraged her to travel to Switzerland for an abortion when she got pregnant. She considered it, but ultimately refused, leading to her being kicked out of her home and moving in with Hamilton’s 16-year-old father. Even today she tells Hamilton to remember her story — “I just can’t imagine how much poorer the world would be if I had gotten on that airplane and you had never been born.”
“There are things that are clearly black and white, but there’s a lot where there’s room; I may not ever get to where you are, but I can see where you’re coming from and I can respect you for that,” Hamilton said to me and other reporters after the chapel event. “People on the extremes on either end, they don’t want me telling the story about my mom. … But in the broad center, the folks who are on the left say, ‘You know what? That’s real. I know that you’re going to solidly make sure that there’s abortion rights.’ And on the right, people say, ‘I appreciate the fact that you understand the moral tension.’”
He applies a similar mindset to LGBTQ issues. His own church welcomes gay and lesbian people, even as he accepts that individual Methodist congregations can choose their own approach (he advocated for that middle ground while trying to prevent a schism between the mainstream UMC and a traditionalist and conservative offshoot that broke off in 2023).
On the trail, Hamilton hews to the middle on other policy issues as well, raising concerns about the national debt, endorsing border security and ICE’s “original” purpose, letting local communities decide on AI data centers, and critiquing “far-left climate” activism. He’s running ads condemning socialism and the extremes of both sides. And he peppers his speeches with the phrase “independent-minded Democrat.”
In the same way, Hamilton is not afraid to evangelize. He’s both eager and willing to talk about his faith, to preach the Gospel, and to share his personal journey to God, while also reassuring liberal, nonreligious people, and Democrats broadly that he believes in the separation of church and state. He isn’t one of those Christians, he seems to suggest, but he is still uncompromisingly Christian.
“We’re not running to force our religion on other people, but we are running as people who say our Gospel calls us to something different,” he said. When comparing the core priorities of the GOP — fiscal responsibility, limited government, personal civil liberties, and a strong defense — with the core priorities of Democrats — social safety nets, education, the elderly, making sure that vulnerable people are cared for — the space to be a gospel-reading Democrat is quite obvious, he said.
“Jesus never talked about civil liberties,” Hamilton said. “He never talked about fiscal responsibility, a strong defense or limited government. But he did talk about, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.’ … Which of these two sounds more like Jesus in the Gospels?”
Which is where the lessons for other Democrats appear plainly. Hamilton thinks the party he joined earlier this year could learn a few things from his campaign, and those of other people of faith running as Democrats across the country.
“Sometimes they have inadvertently alienated religious voters who are just right of center who would easily have come on board if they felt like they were welcomed,” he said. “The Democratic Party would be far stronger and wiser if they were openly willing to say, ‘Of course we embrace people of faith and we need them.’”
And it’s that ability, to combine faith with moderation and openness, that is compelling to the voters across the political spectrum I talked with.
“I’m a Christian and I feel that in Christianity we feed the hungry, clothe the poor, all those things that I read in the New Testament. And I feel that he gets that,” Susan Combs, a 73-year-old registered Republican, told me. “This Christian nationalism that is going on is not really, to me personally, it’s not what Christianity is about.”
She and others pointed to Hamilton and Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, as examples of a kind of Christian political revival. Both of them, plus a handful of other Democrats running on openly faith-based messages, present case studies for strategists, scholars, and others who are watching the campaign for political lessons.
When Talarico and Hamilton use religious language, “it really stands out, even though it’s really more of a return to what we’ve seen in the past,” Dave Campbell, a religion and politics scholar at the University of Notre Dame, said. “The trick with religious language is that people from within a religious community, they pick up on the subtleties. Do they really speak the way I do? Do they really understand the world the way I do? And if you don’t really understand those nuances, your rhetoric can come off as not only inauthentic, but even offensive.”
The former Baptist pastor, religious researcher, and professor Ryan Burge noted that Democrats will likely not be able to pull many white evangelical Christians into their coalition.
But his own examination of the data shows that there’s ample room for Democrats to grow their margins among white Catholics and mainline Protestant voters — those who belong to old non-evangelical institutional churches like the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist churches.
These voters will remain up for grabs in future elections — though outreach may only work in certain states that still have strong mainline traditions. “You can’t win in a place like Arizona — that’s not where your base is,” Burge said. But traditional denominations are still strong in the heartland and farm country. “A place like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, even Missouri to some extent, Wisconsin — those are the kind of places I think that message would do well,” Burge said. “It wouldn’t do well nationwide, though.”
Burge told me the key for Democrats to be competitive in religious spaces again will be to win over old mainliners “who used to be a Bill Clinton voter, even an early Obama voter, who got lost by the progressivism of the Democratic Party on social issues. That’s the kind of voter that you can win back, the 75-year-old Lutheran, Presbyterian.”
The bigger question, Burge told me, is an uncomfortable one Democrats as a party must face: that the secular far left is loud, but not large. “A lot of those people [who are religiously unaffiliated] are actually open to the idea of religion,” he said. Even among those who don’t identify with any particular organized religion, atheists only make up less than one in five.
“A lot of [religiously unaffiliated people] do believe in something. Those people are not going to be turned off by some religious talk,” Burge said. “At some point you’ve got to say to the loud secular left, ‘Hey, we appreciate you and we want your votes, of course, but you’re going to vote for us anyway. We need the votes of Catholics and mainline Protestants and those kinds of people. They’re the ones we’re going for.”
At a rally in the Kansas City suburbs in September, Vice President JD Vance unintentionally delivered an in-kind donation to Hamilton’s campaign. He leveled an attack liberal and mainline Protestant Christians have long fielded from the religious right: that Hamilton’s faith was just “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”
“That is not Christianity,” Vance, a Catholic convert who grew up in evangelical, Pentecostal, and nondenominational faith traditions, said of Hamilton, also calling him “a guy who would insult your faith and spit on your religion to accrue donations to himself.”
By contrast, he described Marshall as “a proud Christian” with “real faith and real principles.” Marshall also attends a mainline Christian church.
More than 100 Methodist clergy came to Hamilton’s defense in the wake of the broadside, urging Marshall, and Vance, to be more careful on the campaign. “When you attack Adam’s pastoral ministry, his home congregation, and our denomination as a whole, you sow seeds of division and dissent,” they wrote. “You tear at the fabric that is the body of Christ.”
The pastor of Marshall’s old church called Hamilton “a middle-of-the-road pastor” who is “pretty good at loving his enemies.”
Trump himself recently called him “a Radical Left LUNATIC Dumocrat,” who is “is not one us [evangelicals].”
But the personal attacks on his faith, and the defenses, may have only underscored one of Hamilton’s perceived advantages. In Kansas, at least, moral character has become one of the defining stories of the race. It’s no coincidence that Hamilton’s big break came in September, when a major New York Times investigation upended the race by reporting that Marshall — a former OB-GYN — had sued more than 700 former patients, some of them new mothers, for unpaid medical bills. Many were charged 18 percent interest, and 81 were arrested in debt-collection cases. Campaign ads interviewing doctors who said Marshall’s practices were unusual and Marshall’s former patients soon inundated Kansas airwaves.
“It is ridiculous to suggest that Dr. Marshall ever arrested patients,” Abbi Enders, Marshall’s campaign press secretary, wrote in response to a question from Vox about the article. “The Kansas Bill of Rights states, ‘No person shall be imprisoned for debt,’ proving this to be a blatant lie.” Many of the arrests in the cases of Marshall’s former patients were due to missed court dates.
That story broke right before Hamilton trounced Marshall during a debate at the Kansas state fair. Videos of Marshall being drowned out by booing crowds spread quickly — while competing clips of Hamilton talking about being both liberal and conservative also went viral during this window.
Hamilton’s favorability has become a prominent example of another shift in Trump-era American politics: the sense that Republicans are now losing the character war, nominating deeply flawed candidates who project strength and bluster at the expense of integrity, decency, and other qualities people trust. Across red states like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, Democrats have held an edge in polling when voters were asked which party’s candidate has better moral character.
In Kansas, more stories would soon drip out, contributing to the deteriorating public image of Marshall: reports that Marshall’s primary residence was in Florida, not Kansas; an unpaid cookie bill from a 2020 campaign event; allegations of inappropriate usage of officials funds or taxpayer money for campaign purposes.
The result: Hamilton leading the field of key toss-up Senate races with the highest net favorability ratings in a CNN average of polls from September and October.
Republicans have fired back, going after his religion and church. Vance and Marshall attacked his church’s participation in a Pride festival. Marshall campaign ads have criticized the church’s handling of decades-old child sexual abuse allegations against a former volunteer at a church camp, alleging that Hamilton “protected a pedophile.” Trump, at his rally in Wichita last week, delivered his own spin on these accusations, saying Hamilton “used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activity,” and “shielded a child sexual predator at his church.”
Marshall has continued calling Hamilton a far-left, “woke megachurch CEO,” and went after his church again at a debate last week, asking if he was “leading from the middle when one in four churches left his denomination? Is that what you call leading from the middle when you split the Methodist church?”
“People know what I’ve stood for — they know I’m not some woke, far left, whatever,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And I feel at peace about it.” Still, “that’s 24,000 other people in my church that you’re attacking and you’re attacking every other mainline Christian across the state of Kansas as you’re doing that.”
When asked about this charge in an email, Marshall’s press secretary did not respond.
When Hamilton discusses religious liberty and the separation of church and state, he makes something clear: “I’m not running to be the chaplain of the Senate.”
Over the days that I followed him, he repeated this line, usually in response to liberal-leaning voters curious or skeptical about endorsing someone so vocally religious.
“If anything, that might have been a negative,” Sally Gillihan, a Democrat, told me in Hutchinson. “I was really worried that that’s what he was relying on, that’s what he was going to go to bat for.” After hearing him talk about policy, religious freedom, and restoring normalcy, those fears went away.
Others, including Sam Buttram, a 2020 Marshall voter who works in the cattle industry, told me that Hamilton’s religiosity wasn’t a selling point for him, but that it’s “a lot of what makes him who he is,” which makes him trust his character. “I just wish more politicians were like him…independent-minded, wanting to do the right thing for the people instead of worried about staying in office or agreeing with some other politician.”
Ultimately, Hamilton’s unexpected campaign success so far might be due to the combination of all this — not only his faith, but the impression that many voters have that he is guided not by right or left but his own values, as evidenced by his heterodox views and moderate temperament. In his case, those values are informed by his faith, but for other Democrats in other red states, they might not need to be.
Still, that might not make it any easier for Democrats trying to emulate the Hamilton playbook.
Much of Hamilton’s success, Burge told me, is due to his unique position. “People don’t realize how good megachurch pastors are at stuff like [campaigning]. When you’re used to talking to 2,000, 3,000 people every weekend, you are a politician,” he said. “It’s a superpower though. … You’ve got to be a one in a million kind of person.”