United Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton won the Democratic primary in Kansas for a contested U.S. Senate seat Aug. 4 and will face the Republican incumbent in November.
Hamilton formally entered the primary race in April, after a Lenten listening tour across the state. He originally intended to run as an independent but said he was told over and again he must run as a Democrat if he hopes to win.
The founding pastor of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in suburban Kansas City will face Sen. Roger Marshall, who is running for re-election on a pro-Trump MAGA platform.
Adam Hamilton
Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in nearly 100 years, but Hamilton’s name recognition puts him in a different category than most other challengers.
In the primary, with 95% of the vote counted Tuesday night, Hamilton drew 34.9% of votes, besting 10 other candidates, none of whom came close to his total. In Kansas, the winner of a primary election is the candidate who receives the greatest number of votes cast for that office, even if they do not win an outright majority of votes.
There is no recent statewide polling publicly available showing what a Hamilton-Marshall matchup looks like for November. Three months ago, preliminary polling showed Marshall winning but not by a large margin.
Roger Marshall
Several things have changed since then, including precipitous drops in polling favorability for Trump, who is the flag-bearer for Marshall and all Republican candidates in his camp.
Writing for The New York Times, Katie Glueck noted: “Kansas is not as right-wing as some of its neighbors. Its popular two-term governor, Laura Kelly, is a Democrat, as is one of its four representatives in the U.S. House, Rep. Sharice Davids. In 2022, voters resoundingly decided against removing the right to abortion from the state Constitution. And more recently, Kansas farmers were hit hard by the Trump administration’s tariffs.”
As a successful pastor, Hamilton knows something about fundraising. He also knows about community organizing. And in the church, he has been a unifier.
“In a world that feels more and more divided, our congregation has managed to bring all sorts of people together,” Hamilton said in his campaign announcement video. “We’re roughly equal parts Republican, Democrat and independent, and we’ve learned to love and appreciate each other precisely because of our differences.”
BNG columnist J. Basil Dannebohm, a former Kansas legislator, is among those who thinks Hamilton is the wrong candidate
In a nationally syndicated column not published by BNG, he wrote: “There were two candidates in that race who were qualified to take on Senator Roger Marshall. Despite his mysteriously meteoric rise and impressive, albeit interesting fundraising efforts, Hamilton was not one of them.
“Hamilton’s platform lacks substance, focusing heavily on human decency, compassion and a ‘moderate, independent-minded’ approach to governing. He leans on faith-based values, urging voters to focus on his character and religious background. How quaint.
“But this isn’t Sunday school. This is politics, and politics in our nation’s capital can get really freakin’ brutal. As former President Harry Truman said, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’”
If he were to be elected in November, Hamilton would not be the only pastor there. The current U.S. Congress includes five ordained ministers (three in the House and two in the Senate), with the most prominent of those being Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, pastor of historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Hamilton also joins Presbyterian minister James Talarico, who is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas.
Since the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, only three active or former members of the clergy have been elected to the U.S. Senate. Those include Warnock, D-Ga., and James Lankford, R-Okla., who currently serve.
Another prominent Baptist pastor already is on the ballot in Texas and expected to win a seat in the U.S. House — Frederick Haynes of Friendship West Baptist Church in Dallas. He would become the fourth clergyperson currently serving in the House, assuming the other three also are re-elected.
Hamilton attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., then earned a master of divinity degree from Perkins Seminary at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In 1990, he and his wife founded Church of the Resurrection, which is so named because the congregation first met in a funeral home chapel.