Kalshi currently has Roger Marshall at 65¢ to keep his Kansas Senate seat. Adam Hamilton, the Democrat, is at 35¢. The Cook Political Report calls the race Lean Republican.
Those numbers should be reversed.
I don’t trade prediction markets for a living, and I don’t have a quant model to support my very hot take. But! I did grow up in Overland Park and went to high school less than a mile from where Hamilton’s church is now. Before that, I lived in Hutchinson, and in 1974 I got dragged to the Kansas State Fair to watch Bob Dole debate Bill Roy. Roy was a doctor, and that was the debate where Dole went after him over the abortions he’d performed. People who follow this stuff remember it as the first time abortion got weaponized in that way in a Senate race.
I haven't lived in Kansas for decades, and I don’t visit nearly enough, but I’m in constant touch with my friends there, who serve as a perfect tonic to the Brooklyn bubble I live in now. But most of the coverage treats Kansas as one more deep red state. I’ve lived in the blue part of it and the Trump part of it, and I think the coverage is wrong.
The Gap in One Table:
That 65¢ was 84¢ before the August primary. It dropped to 80¢ the day The New York Times reported that Marshall had sued more than 700 of his own patients over unpaid bills, got to 74¢ after the Emerson poll, and has kept sliding. About $1.8 million has traded on it, compared with less than $200,000 in late July. I can’t find the thing between now and Nov. 3 that turns it around for him.
The Kansas I grew up in
Yes, Kansas hasn’t elected a Democratic candidate to the US Senate since 1932, and that’s most of what the 65¢ is built on. But Kansas is very different from the deep red states we see elsewhere.
When I was growing up, it was always the moderate Republican state, the state of Nancy Landon Kassebaum and the Rockefeller Republicans. It didn’t really go all hard-core red until Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the rest of opinion media sort of changed the political media ecosystem. Rush Limbaugh was on the radio in Kansas City years before the rest of the country heard of him.
It has long elected Democratic governors. Laura Kelly won twice. In 2022, the state voted 59 to 41 to keep abortion protections in its constitution.
It also still has the DNA from when it was settled, primarily by abolitionists who moved there from New York and Massachusetts to fight slavery. Kansans are still very proud of being a free state, though that’s largely expressed now in the rivalry with Missouri in college sports. They’re proud of being common-sensical and doing the right thing, too.
Why I like Hamilton here
Hamilton is close to a perfect candidate for the large swath of center-right voters. He’s religious, well spoken, likable, and honestly he just looks and acts like most Kansans. He started the largest United Methodist church in the country, he says the congregation is split about evenly among Republicans, Democrats and independents, and he was a registered Republican as recently as 2020. Bill Graves, a former Republican governor, has endorsed him.
He’s also a preacher. He has been getting up in front of a few thousand people every week since 1990 and he’s a super communicator.
He comes out of the Johnson County middle and upper-middle class: Shawnee Mission schools, then Blue Valley High. Those moneyed suburban voters are typically the swing vote in an election like this, and he’s one of them. Johnson County is the blue district in a red state and he’ll carry it. Barbara Bollier beat Marshall there 51 to 43 in 2020.
Marshall has been 100 percent all in on Trump. That helped him in 2020, but like so many other Republican candidates, its become an enormous burden, given how unpopular Trump has gotten over gas prices and the Iran war. Emerson has him at 40 percent approval in Kansas, a state he won by 16.
Hutchinson is, historically at least, sort of the prototypical pro-Trump, MAGA place (media buyers would call it a C and D county), and Marshall, given that he's from nearby Great Bend, would normally and probably win there again. He won Reno County by 29 last time, but! Diesel hit a record $5.85 a gallon in September, right at harvest. That’s about 60 percent more than it cost before the war, and when the farm community is hurting like that, it’s likely to bite Roger Marshall in the ass.
Marshall also has his own controversies. As mentioned earlier, the Times found that he and his OB-GYN practice took more than 700 patients to court over unpaid bills, some for as little as $101, and 81 of them ended up arrested for missing a court date. It came up at the State Fair debate last month, and the pro-Hamilton portion of the crowd started chanting “shame on you!”
Then came Marshall’s attack ad backfire. His campaign ran a political ad during a Chiefs game which featured a photo of kids at a church camp without the camp’s or kids’ parents’ permission. The camp has since hired a lawyer and sent a cease-and-desist. That did nothing to help him.
But the biggest tell is how National Republicans are acting, as if it’s a very close race. I wouldn’t say freak out, but others may. The Senate Leadership Fund stopped spending in North Carolina (where it had already put in more than $30 million!) so it could buy ads in Kansas instead. JD Vance has campaigned in Olathe, and John Thune says he’s coming to the area as well. Actions speak much louder than
wordspolling.
Why I could be wrong
Kansas has elected Democratic governors and moderate Republicans for as long as I’ve been alive. It STILL hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932.
Remember the 2020 Senate race that polls had Bollier within a few points of Marshall into late October. He ended up winning by 11!
There is very little polling to go on this time. Emerson is the only independent poll with Hamilton ahead, and that’s by two points, which is inside the margin of error. The other one showing him up was paid for by Democrats, and a Republican firm has Marshall ahead by five.
Hamilton didn’t run well in central and western Kansas in the primary, and that’s exactly where I need Marshall’s margins to come down for any of this to work.
The attack ad was a mess, but there is a real story under it. A volunteer at the church tried to assault campers in 2005 and again in 2006. Hamilton says nobody covered anything up, and that if it happened today he’d go to the police after the first incident. Republicans have plenty of money to keep reminding people about it between now and Election Day.
The trade math at 35¢
I‘ll leave the bet sizing to the experts, but the basic math I can handle (thanks to my world class Kansas public school education!)
Hamilton costs 35¢ right now. If he wins, you get a dollar back, and Kalshi takes about two cents along the way.
The market is telling us Hamilton loses this race two of three times, while the public polls say it’s a legit 50-50 toss-up (including margins of error).
The argument for Marshall at 65¢ is his 2020 race when Kansas polls looked similar, and he won by 11 anyway. I went through that above, and I don’t think it repeats.
A month ago, this same contract had Hamilton at a paltry 18¢. If only I’d written this then.
I agree. It’s a twister, Auntie Em!