On Monday, vice-president JD Vance flew to Kansas in a bid to stamp out a Senate election rebellion in a part of the country that has reliably returned Republican senators since the 1930s.
Vance’s mission was clear: to boost the standing of Roger Marshall, the incumbent junior senator for the state who is facing an unexpectedly fearsome rivalry from Adam Hamilton, a pastor with an unimpeachable surname and a salty line in retort.
During the weekend, when Marshall and his opponent stood on the stage for an open debate at the Kansas State Fair, the Republican was booed as he attempted to defend the Trump administration’s tariffs and to argue that the administration is lowering living costs.
So, in front of a curated crowd on Monday, Vance sought to reframe the November election as a choice between “Doc Marshall, who has devoted his life to delivering babies” and a preacher who is, he told the small crowd in a factory in Olathe, near Kansas City, a conduit for “left wing radicalism dressed in the skinsuit of our religion”.
Hamilton, he told them, was someone who had used his pulpit to tell his congregation that they needed to repent for white privilege; that they needed to atone – in the barbecue heartland of the world – for eating meat and who directed donations to “something called Pride Fest”; an event “led by strippers and drag-queens”.
In short, he was symbolic of the hijacked Democratic Party that the Republicans now find themselves debating and campaigning against ahead of a midterm election cycle that Donald Trump has declared the most important in living history.
“We’re not dealing with FDR’s Democrat Party. We’re not dealing with JFK’s Democrat Party, we are not even dealing with Bill Clinton’s party,” Vance told them before reminding them what the previous Democrat administration had meant for Americans like them.
“Time after time the same people who came to your towns and your cities asking for your vote; they threw you under a bus when the stakes were highest. For four years, remember, Democrats invited millions of illegal immigrants to take over your communities, to make your towns less safe and compete with you for jobs that all by right go to American citizens.
“They let in the very worst of the worst into small towns and big cities across this state. The people that flooded our country – they were murderers, they were predators, they were gang leaders, they were fraudsters and they were drug traffickers, and the previous administration let them in by the bushel.”
Homicides, the vice-president told Kansas, are at their lowest level in 126 years. “Because we got the criminals out”.
It’s true that the precipitous drop in migrant crossings at the southern border – already under way in the closing year of the Biden administration – represents the clearest delivery of a campaign promise by Trump. And the Ice deportations continue at pace. But Vance’s speech illuminated an odd dilemma for his party as it sets into a torrid autumn campaign cycle. It’s clear that resurrecting the presidential campaign trope of immigrant fearmongering will be part of the message. But if the US is, right now, the safest it has been for a century and a quarter, then how fearful can the electorate reasonably be?
The contentious moments of Saturday’s debate had nothing to do with immigration or safety, with attendees openly unhappy with Marshall’s staunch defence of the tariffs and the fuel prices exacerbated by the Iran war.
To Marshall’s protest that the “tariffs are working”, Hamilton pointed across the stage and said: “If you love six-dollar gallon diesel fuel you can thank Roger Marshall, he supported this. We were supposed to be out of this war after four weeks. Maybe six. We are six months in,” he said before telling the crowd that some 18,000 Kansan children have lost SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Programme) benefits through benefit cuts caused by the administration.
Vance’s 40-minute stump speech stayed on a different altitude to the high living costs and the struggles of farmers across the Midwest. He had remarkably little to say about Marshall apart from linking him to Trump’s vision of the revival of the 20th-century American manufacturing industry across the interior.
“We have been able to reverse 40 years of industrial decline in this country – you have to remember that I grew up in a town where every single year it seemed like a factory closed down. But president Trump came in with a totally different vision and thanks to Roger Marshall, we have been implanting it every single day which is to give American workers a fighting chance again and have a government that fights for you.”
America had shed one million manufacturing jobs, he told them. The Trump administration had created 60,000 since returning to power. Something about the statistic did not inspire huge faith – or applause.
Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1930 and holds the record for the longest Republican-dominated return of any state. Hamilton announced his intention to run as recently as April and adroitly converted his pulpit experience as the founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection. The church began life in a converted funeral home in 1990 and is now a megachurch, with livestreamed services and representing one of the biggest United Methodist congregations in the country.
He weathered a nasty primary campaign during which he rejected claims of covering up child sexual abuses at the church 20 years ago and still came through a crowded primary field.
Marshall holds the advantage according to the aggregate polling, but it is shrinking and the sound of booing at Saturday’s state fair has pushed what was, just a few months ago, considered an automatic return for the GOP into the spotlight. And as a megachurch pastor, Hamilton is accustomed to the attention. At their debate on Saturday, he responded to Marshall’s contention that he “is too woke, too weak, and doesn’t stand for anything”.
“I’m pretty sure if Jesus were here,” Hamilton told him. “you would call him woke.”
In the absence of a saviour, the administration had vice-president Vance fly in first thing Monday morning.