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We are reaching a point in this midterm election cycle where — 77 days out — it may indeed be reasonable to start expanding our idea of the possible. We simply have never had a situation where the incumbent president is simultaneously a bloodthirsty fascist and also literally the stupidest person who ever lived and so thoroughly loathed. For Christ’s sake, he’s trying to blame the grass that got damaged during his 4th of July White House Country-Fried Inbreeding Hootenanny on vandals. What happened, Mr. President? Line-dancing without a permit?
His approval rating is negative LOL percent, he and his dumbshit Defense secretary continue to find new ways to lose the war against Iran they lost on their very first day, the military is running out of munitions, everything is unaffordable, ICE murderers are rampaging through the streets, people are exploding from diarrhea lettuce, and as Jon Ossoff said last night, Trump doesn’t even want to do the job, he “just wants to travel with Natalie” on his flying trash palace the Qataris bribed him with.
Yeah, it’s not a good situation for Republicans trying to get elected/re-elected to Congress!
Here’s a stat for you: Trump is 41 points underwater with Hispanic men. As in, one of the primary demographics that enabled him to manage the squeaker win he pulled off in 2024. He won them by 10 that year. That’s a 51-point drop.)
We’ll see what Cook does in coming days, but right now in the Senate, their tossups are Alaska, Maine, Michigan and Ohio. We are on record as believing the wringing of hands over Michigan is misplaced. We also think Maine is already moving back in the right direction. (Polling is still all over the place in Michigan. Meanwhile the last Maine poll that had Susan Collins up, Graham Platner was her opponent.)
Those other two “toss-ups”? Red states. Cook is getting more and more confident that Sherrod Brown will be taking that race in Ohio. They’re still calling Iowa “lean Republican,” and also Texas. Who knows, but Texas is getting polled a lot and James Talarico is ahead in almost every poll.
And then there’s their “likely Republican” category. That’d be Nebraska, where independent Dan Osborn is giving it another go, and Kansas, where hardly any polling is being done, but the most recent one, by Public Policy Polling, shows incumbent Republican Roger Marshall one measly point ahead of challenger Adam Hamilton.
And y’all, if you didn’t know already, this Kansas race is a Moral High Ground race, just like Texas, just like so many other races around the country where people of faith are stepping forward and looking at the genocidal, murderous, Nazi fascist shit the Trump regime is doing at home and abroad and saying “Not in my fuckin’ name, and certainly not in my God’s name.”
So, Adam Hamilton! He’s a United Methodist pastor who leads a 24,000-member megachurch in the Kansas City, Missouri, suburbs, the biggest UMC congregation in the country.
And a number of people are suddenly asking if oh holy shit, Hamilton might be able to beat Marshall. (By the way, Marshall is one of those election-denying GOP senators who is a doctor, but the kind of quack you wouldn’t trust to give your hamster a Band-Aid because you’d be worried he might squeegee some Ivermectin up their butthole while he was down there.)
NPR notes that Kansas has been electing Republican senators since the early FDR era, 1932 to be exact, the longest streak of that kind that exists anywhere. But they’ve got a political scientist named Bob Beatty from Washburn University in Topeka who says we need to pay attention to this one. And Beatty notes that Kansas does elect Democratic governors. (Right now he doesn’t think they’ll do that this year.)
Beatty directly referenced Hamilton’s communication abilities as a pastor when it comes to the crucial last 11 weeks of this race, plus the fact that dude can raise money like nobody’s business. And you know what? If you listen to his victory speech, you will note that he sounds like a pastor. And not in the Southern Baptist “I protect pedophile youth group leaders” sort of way.
He actually sounds, well, pastoral.
My colleague at Wonkette noted that Hamilton’s message is replete with the sort of “bring us together while standing for what’s right” message that just might work in a place like Kansas. He said in his victory speech:
“Recently I was in Greensburg, Kansas, and a woman, a kind woman, came to me and she said, ‘Look, I feel angry and frustrated when I think of people of the other political party and I don’t want to feel that way. These are some of my neighbors, my family and friends, but I don’t want to feel this way towards other people. I want a senator who’s not going to divide us further, but try to bring us together.’
“But she also said this, ‘I also hope for a senator who will stand up for what’s right and good and true.’”
Beatty, the Kansas political scientist above, theorized that one reason the state regularly elects Democratic governors but hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in almost 100 years is that Republicans have been able to successfully tie Democratic Senate candidates to the national party. (You know the shit: coastal elite San Francisco values coming to do transgender abortions to white nationalist Jesus.)
But will that really work with this guy?
Dunno, watch his campaign announcement and tell us:
Washington Post conservative opinion writer Kathleen Parker — known in political circles as “The one who isn’t Peggy Noonan, we think?” — seems charmed by the idea of Kansas sending this Democratic pastor to the Senate. “God willing,” he’ll be elected, she says. (Or inshallah.) She emphasizes his empathy, and his very Moral High Ground reclamation of the very notion of right and wrong.
Parker writes, “[H]e replaces fire and brimstone with kindness and common sense imbued with biblical wisdom. He said his congregation includes Republicans, Democrats and independents in about equal numbers.”
He’s not mealy-mouthed — none of this new crop of Democratic candidates who number among the faithful is. He explicitly says he’s doing what he’s doing because of that motherfucker Donald Trump (he did not say “motherfucker”).
He calls the Trump regime’s policies “an assault on the values I preached and taught for 35 years.” He wanted someone to do something, and it turned out after some serious prayer and conversation with his wife that that someone was he. (Though he’s humble enough to admit he’s only “87.2 percent sure” this is God’s will for him. Sometimes God mumbles.)
Now, we should note that Hamilton, like James Talarico, is clearly a gay vegan six-genders potato taco-eating wokester from Wokeville, and probably also an Islamist jihadi. (Socialist communist totalitarian Bad Bunny lover.)
The Christian Post breathlessly reports on a “newly resurfaced sermon” Hamilton gave in 2022 where he preached that God is not going to send the atheists and non-Christians to burn in hell for all eternity. (Like this sermon was the secret his campaign had been hiding. Like they were gonna have to pay off whoever heard that sermon like Trump paid off Stormy Daniels.)
In a 2022 clip titled “Who goes to Heaven? Who goes to Hell?” Hamilton asked his congregation, “Does everybody else who doesn’t see through your same lens as clearly as you do, is everyone else going to burn forever in Hell because they don’t?”
He cited 1 Timothy 2:3–6, noting God’s desire that all people be saved, and explained that Jesus “has already paid whatever price needs to be paid for the sins of the world.” Hamilton continued, “Many of us believe that God can give the saving work of Jesus, God can take that payment Jesus has made and apply it to anyone he chooses based upon what he sees of their own hearts.” […]
Hamilton said he believes “there’s going to be a whole lot of people you’d be surprised are going to be in Heaven because of the grace of God. And when it comes to other faiths, I believe as a Christian that they are going to, when they get to Heaven, they’re going to see Jesus and they’re going to say, ‘Oh, it was you all along that I was searching for.’ But I don’t fear that those folks will spend eternity in Hell.”
AND THEN HE SAID:
“Here’s one thing I’m certain of: Jesus calls us to love our neighbors and even our enemies. We’re to practice love that includes our neighbors who are Muslim, our neighbors who are Jewish, our neighbors who are Hindu, our neighbors who are Buddhist, or atheists, or agnostic,” said Hamilton. “There’s just no question that we’re called to love, and we’re called to see them as God’s offspring.”
“They are our siblings, even if we don’t share the same faith,” he added.
Ooh, them’s fightin’ words, if you’re a white supremacist MAGA Christian!
It’s extremely threatening to them, because if you take away the punishment part of conservative Christianity, if you imagine a God who is bigger than the puny little bitch ass grievances of white Republican Christian men, if you rob them of their masturbatory fantasies that ONE DAY, YOU’LL SEE! their God is going to burn you queers and women and insufficiently respectful racial minorities IN HELLLLLLLLLLL …
Well then you’ve pretty much robbed their faith of its entire meaning. Conservative MAGA Christians hate Jesus, that’s not why they’re in church. They’re there because they’re too fucked up as humans to imagine a God who isn’t as much of a vengeful loser as they are.
Oh hello, speaking of the puniest little conservative Christian men God ever did phone it in while creating, Ted Cruz has something to say:
Imagine your concept of God being so pointless, shallow and needy that you think “No one comes to the Father except through me” simply involves babble-mouthing your way through the sinner’s prayer and then making sure you remain a homophobic racist little piece of shit all the rest of your days. And imagine Ted Cruz thinking he understands the Bible better than this theologian with a masters in divinity.
Adam Hamilton’s Jesus, on the other hand, has enough compassion that He’d even save Ted Cruz, even though Ted Cruz’s entire life is an exercise in missing the point, and he is obviously the kind of gargoyle piece of shit Jesus was talking about in Matthew 7:21-23.
(What if God saves literally everybody except the Ted Cruz types? Hahahahahahaha.)
Roger Marshall — speaking of Matthew 7:21-23/Ted Cruz types — is going to struggle mightily against Adam Hamilton, we reckon, if the first days of the general election are any indication. He’s trying to call Hamilton “too woke” for Kansas, lying and saying that in a 2020 sermon, Hamilton said “we need to repent from eating beef in a state like Kansas.” (They’re just going to dig through every sermon he’s ever preached.)
To which Hamilton replied with more of that Christ-like “love your neighbor” shit that is like garlic to white supremacist MAGA Christians:
“When did caring about your neighbor, being concerned for children, being concerned for the poor and vulnerable become woke?” Hamilton said. “And I think if you’re so far to the right on the political spectrum that being in the center and having compassion for people sounds woke, but that’s not woke. These are Kansas values.”
Hamilton told AFP in July that “The Christians we’re hearing in Washington don’t reflect the Jesus of the Gospels.” He’s just relentless with this stuff.
By the way, it should be made clear that, while Hamilton talks a lot about bringing people together, and while he did reference the “center” right there, he’s not compromising when it comes to people’s rights and dignity. About abortion, he says that “I do not believe that politicians should be making these decisions for women,” and he has been opposed to the amendments that have gone up in Kansas to try to take abortion rights away from people. (Kansas has notably voted to tell those amendments to fuck off each time as well.)
He has also long been very pro-LGBTQ, first as a pastor for decades, and now as a candidate.
Which brings us to Roger Marshall’s attack on Hamilton the other day, as he pledged to save Kansas from drag queens and the liberal beef police:
Whatever, weirdo.
Hey, you wanna know another thing? Hamilton preached at the prayer service for Barack Obama’s second inauguration. So basically he is Jeremiah Wright, speaking of digging through sermons.
To wrap this up, we’ll go back to Kathleen Parker, who quotes Hamilton speaking on a Wizard of Oz theme in the town of Liberal, Kansas:
“Lots of people [in Washington] have lost their minds,” he said, referring to the Scarecrow’s search for a brain. “A lot of them have lost their hearts. And there’s a lot of cowardly lions afraid to say what they know to be true. They’re so afraid they’ll be bullied and primaried that they go along with it until they lose. Then they’ll speak up. But it’s not courageous when you’re on the way out. It’s courageous when you have everything to lose and say, ‘You know, this is wrong and I’m sorry, I can’t support this.’”
I’ve been saying that the real Democratic intra-party struggle right now is not DSA vs. establishment or progressive vs. centrist, or any of that media-manufactured bullshit. Rather it’s “Team Fight” vs. all the Democrats who can’t get their thumbs out of their fuckin’ asses long enough to meet the moment, who are so desperately naive that they think once Trump is gone, they can go back to trading selfies at prayer breakfasts with their Republican colleagues, that the spell will be broken and the fascists will just become normal once again, so better preserve that good old bipartisan collegiality!
Thing is, Team Fight actually doesn’t look the same in every race. Could Adam Hamilton be what Team Fight looks like in Kansas?
Sure looks like maybe.
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Gotta say, the hardest part about being Universalist is yes, even the Ted Cruz- types.
Jesus did say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (I've been in a KJV mood today) Republican "conservative" Christians are saying, "And we will determine how Jesus will do that, because we are the final authority. So, no one will come to the Father unless they pass our test and gain our approval before they get to Jesus."
I am tired of whited sepulchres.