Kansas Dem Senate nominee Adam Hamilton is under fire from GOP Sen. Roger Marshall for a past sermon urging people to repent for eating beef.
Page A2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 28 September 2026
Marshall calls Democrat's beef sermon too woke for a party whose own former governor just endorsed him.
As it ran on the front
Roger Marshall wants Kansas voters to worry about a sermon. Not a policy vote, not a bill — a sermon, from Adam Hamilton, the Methodist pastor challenging him for the Senate, who once told his congregation to think about the cost of eating beef. The New York Post ran the story September 28 under a headline calling Hamilton's church "woke," and the Marshall campaign is happy to let that word do the work an actual record would otherwise have to do.
The trouble for Marshall is that the record already spoke, on September 16, before the beef sermon became a talking point. Bill Graves, a former Republican governor of Kansas, filmed a video that day endorsing Hamilton. Graves said Marshall "has turned his back on Kansas" for six years and that it's "time Kansas does something different." He didn't call Hamilton woke. He called him the better option, on camera, in Marshall's own party.…
…(cont) So Marshall picked a sermon as his opening act after the state's former governor had already picked his opponent. Graves held that office under the same party letterhead Marshall now campaigns on, and decided the letterhead wasn't the point anymore.
Hamilton, for his part, isn't running as anyone's rubber stamp either. On September 18 he told CNN he won't back Chuck Schumer for Senate Democratic leader if he wins, a break from his own party's leadership offered before Election Day, not after. Marshall's opponent is putting distance from his own leadership in public while Marshall is still relitigating a sermon about cattle.
Line the receipts up and the sequence tells you what the attack is actually covering for: an incumbent whose own side already walked out the door, running an ad about beef to keep from running one about Graves. The Washington Examiner spent September 21 warning readers that "Woke 2" was coming for the midterms, without naming a number — five days after a Republican governor had already crossed the aisle, and three days after Hamilton had already broken with his own party's Senate leader. The sermon is the distraction. The endorsement is the story, sitting in the same file, dated, on the record, from Marshall's own party.
“Marshall picked a fight over cattle while his own party's former governor had already crossed the aisle to back the other guy. Follow the man who used to run the statehouse — he didn't wait for permission, he just left, and the ad came a week too late to matter.”
“Look, a sermon is fair game — voters deserve to know what's in a candidate's own words, that's just accountability. As for Governor Graves, he's, ah, one voice, doesn't speak for the whole party — did I just say the party doesn't speak for itself? That's not really what I meant.”
The receipts
· Democratic Senate candidate in Kansas won’t support Schumer for leader from the morgue, 18 Sep 2026
· Former Republican governor backs Democrat over Marshall in Kansas Senate race from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ and ‘Woke 2’ will be even worse from the morgue, 21 Sep 2026
· Kansas's former GOP governor backs Democrat over Marshall for Senate from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.