Kansas is not a place Republicans are accustomed to spending heavily to save a Senate seat. But with just weeks to go before the midterms, the party’s biggest Senate super PAC is now putting seven figures into the state to help Republican Sen. Roger Marshall fend off Democrat Adam Hamilton, a notable investment in a state where Democrats have not won a Senate election since 1932.
The Senate Leadership Fund is launching the new Kansas ad campaign while putting additional spending in North Carolina on hold, Semafor reported Friday. The group has already spent more than $30 million trying to elect Republican Michael Whatley over former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina.
Now, some of that attention is moving somewhere Republicans once had little reason to worry about.
Hamilton, a longtime Methodist pastor making his first run for political office, has turned what once looked like a routine reelection campaign for Marshall into a genuine fight.
A September Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media survey found Hamilton at 45 percent and Marshall at 43 percent, with Libertarian David Graham at 4 percent and another 8 percent of likely voters undecided. The difference between Marshall and Hamilton was within the poll’s 3.6-point credibility interval.
The numbers are especially unusual in Kansas.
No Democrat has won one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats in 94 years. According to Emerson, Hamilton is also finding considerable support among independents, leading Marshall 42 percent to 27 percent with those voters in its September survey.
The economy could help explain why the race has tightened. Nearly half of voters in the same poll, 48 percent, called it their most important issue, far ahead of health care, housing affordability, immigration and other issues. President Donald Trump’s approval rating among Kansas likely voters stood at 40 percent, while 53 percent disapproved.
Republicans are now spending money to make sure Hamilton does not turn that opening into an upset. The Senate Leadership Fund’s new ad attacks Hamilton as a “two-face extremist,” challenging the centrist image he has presented to voters and tying him to prominent national Democrats.
At the same time, the group is changing course elsewhere. It has recently boosted spending in Ohio and Iowa as Republicans decide where their money can make the biggest difference.
“SLF’s job is to maintain the majority and this move reflects the most effective and efficient use of resources to do exactly that,” a person familiar with its plans told Semafor.
Republicans hold 53 Senate seats and Kansas was never supposed to be one of the places where they had to spend heavily to protect that majority. With Election Day approaching, it is now expensive enough that the party’s most powerful Senate super PAC has decided it cannot simply leave Marshall on his own.