Although Kansas has a two-term centrist Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, the state is still deep red. The last Democrat to win Kansas in a presidential election was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and Kelly’s gubernatorial victories in 2018 and 2022 were the exception rather than the rule. But according to Never Trump conservative Mona Charen, Kansas is turning out to be a worry for Republicans despite the fact that President Donald Trump carried the midwestern state in three presidential elections in a row.
In an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, Charen — a veteran columnist who worked as a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan during the 1980s — doesn’t gloss over the fact that Kansas is a tough state for Democrats. But she stresses that the state’s 2026 U.S. Senate race appears to be in play for Democrats.
“The home of Dwight Eisenhower and Amelia Earhart is rarely part of the national conversation — but that could be about to change,” Charen explains in The Bulwark. “It is becoming clear that the race for Senate this year could be a huge upset … Kansas has voted Republican in every presidential contest since 1968 and hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. In light of that history, it would be foolish to get one’s hopes up too much about the Senate contest there this year. After all, the Republican incumbent, Roger Marshall, won his 2020 race by more than 11 points.”
Charen continues, “But he isn’t sounding confident. At a recent debate, he bellowed over boos from the crowd, ‘What you’re going to get from me — you may not agree with me on everything — but you’re going to know exactly where I stand.’ That sounds like someone who feels trapped and is making a virtue of necessity.”
Incumbent Marshall, the conservative journalist/author argues, is “trapped” thanks to Trump.
“Like nearly all Republicans,” Charen emphasizes, “he has lashed himself to Donald Trump as Odysseus bound himself to the ship’s mast. He has bowed and scraped to MAGA with the best of them, even going so far as to praise Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cracked Make America Healthy Again agenda while measles deaths mount — and now, he cannot escape. Midterm elections are nearly always referenda on the sitting president. You can track the out party’s likely performance by knowing the popularity of the incumbent president. Though Kansans have a higher opinion of Trump than most of the country, his standing in the state has eroded.”
Charen continues, “At the start of his second term, 60 percent of Kansans approved of Trump’s job performance; today, only 47 percent do. Among independents, 59 percent disapprove … Like the rest of the country, Kansas has been burdened by high costs, but it’s been hit particularly hard by Trump’s trade and immigration policies.”