{"id":28292,"date":"2026-11-05T21:48:04","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T21:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/11\/05\/deep-red-kansas-votes-for-change-as-patience-wears-thin-with-trump-the-economy-is-really-taking-a-beating-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-11-05T21:48:04","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T21:48:04","slug":"deep-red-kansas-votes-for-change-as-patience-wears-thin-with-trump-the-economy-is-really-taking-a-beating-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/11\/05\/deep-red-kansas-votes-for-change-as-patience-wears-thin-with-trump-the-economy-is-really-taking-a-beating-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep-red Kansas votes for change as patience wears thin with Trump: \u2018The economy is really taking a beating\u2019 – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bills have soared in rural state buffeted by tariffs and war in Iran \u2013 and Democrat Adam Hamilton\u2019s stunning upset shows how deep economic frustrations run
L<\/span>inda Olson always does her homework before voting \u2013 a trait she inherited from a family invested, and interested, in politics. Her father was a photographer who took portraits of political leaders in Washington, while her grandparents were farmers who cared deeply about their industry.
In 2024, Olson\u2019s research led her to Donald Trump<\/a>. She trusted that the then-former president would improve their economic realities in Junction City, Kansas \u2013 where she was born and raised \u2013 if he returned to the White House.
But two years later, life is just more expensive. Last winter, Olson was forced to spend $700 on medication while in between insurance plans, and skipped out on doses to stretch it out longer. Her grocery bills are unrecognizably high. And fuel prices are about a dollar per gallon more expensive than last year.
\u201cI thought at the time that he was the better choice of what we had,\u201d Olson said of Trump in 2024. Instead, he had been acting to \u201cmake himself richer instead of really helping the people\u201d.
With frustrations like these looming large across the state, Kansans this week elected a Democrat, Adam Hamilton, to the US Senate for the first time in nearly a century. It was a stunning upset in what was, until recently, thought to be a reliably red stronghold.
\u201cI\u2019ve seen what Roger Marshall did over the eight years or so that he\u2019s been doing this,\u201d said Olson, of the defeated Republican senator. \u201cAnd I thought, it\u2019s time we get fresh blood up there.\u201d
Hamilton won, in part, by flipping six counties that backed Trump in 2024 and Marshall in 2020 \u2013 a sign that, even in more remote, and traditionally conservative, areas, patience with Trump and the Republican party is wearing thin.
\u201cNot everybody that voted for Trump is part of this cult of personality that Trump has tried to make the Republican party into,\u201d said Michael Smith, a political science professor at Emporia State University, located in one of those six flipped counties.
\u201cThere are certainly people in Kansas<\/a> that are like that: they\u2019re pretty conservative, but they\u2019re not beholden to Trump. And so I think one of the things this election did is peel off those people.\u201d
M<\/span>ost of Kansas is made up of farmland, encompassing nearly 45m acres and employing nearly one in five Kansans. Pastures, dotted with grazing cows and their calves, hug the state\u2019s highways. Junction City is surrounded by its famed toffee-colored prairies, so expansive that untouched grassland stretches out to the horizon on both sides of the interstate.
Kansans who ranch and farm here, in the most rural corners of the state, remain deeply Republican, according to Smith. But neighboring communities such as Junction City and Emporia, where he teaches, depend heavily on the agricultural economy and have felt the impact of the strains on farmers.
\u201cThe people that live here aren\u2019t actually farmers,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd they\u2019re more likely to swing over to the other party because the economy is really taking a beating.\u201d
David Aguirre, a 25-year-old who was born and raised in Junction City, and works at a Mexican restaurant, El Patron Dos, said that when the rest of the county is suffering, so does his work.
\u201cIt has, like, a domino effect for families,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they\u2019re not doing their best, they\u2019re not gonna come out to eat, and then that affects staff, and cooks, and so on.\u201d
While grocery shopping on Wednesday afternoon, Janet Grimm, who considers herself an independent, lamented her rising bills. Everything she picked out from the aisles was tagged with a red and yellow \u201csale\u201d sticker, a conscious choice she needs to make now.
Checking out with just a handful of items \u2013 eggs, chicken, some deli meat, two cucumbers and powdered sugar for the banana bread she was planning on making later that day \u2013 her total rang up to over $60.
Grimm voted for Hamilton, and felt hopefully that he would be able to improve the economy for people like her. \u201cI really have faith that they\u2019re going to do good,\u201d she said.
H<\/span>amilton \u2013 whose campaign slogan was \u201cleading from the middle\u201d \u2013 followed an increasingly reliable playbook in Kansas, Smith suggested, in which candidates position themselves as moderate and distant from the national Democratic party. In his victory speech on Tuesday, Hamilton emphasized to a packed room of supporters that he would seek greater collaboration between parties during his tenure, to \u201csolve problems like it used to be\u201d.
\u201cI\u2019m going to tell you a little secret. I want to become Jerry Moran\u2019s best friend,\u201d said Hamilton, referring to the state\u2019s other senator \u2013 a Republican.
\u201cFor the rest of the United States, in deeply red Kansas, the heart of America, I want us to model what it looks like when thoughtful people actually work together to solve problems, instead of slinging mud at each other.\u201d
Channeling his years as the pastor of a megachurch, Hamilton recounted the story of the Good Samaritan \u2013\u00a0in which a Samaritan stopped to help a man who was beaten on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho \u2013\u00a0as a way to illustrate the importance of Democrats and Republicans<\/a> helping out one another.
\u201cIf Jesus were telling this parable to a room filled with Democrats<\/a>, he\u2019d say, \u2018And there was a Republican who came along and stopped and helped the man,\u2019\u201d said Hamilton. \u201cIf he was talking to a room filled with Republicans, he\u2019d say, \u2018And there was a Democrat who came along and stopped.\u2019\u201d
Every county in Kansas shifted to vote more Democrat in this year\u2019s Senate race. Still, many areas of the state remain staunchly Republican, and no moderate candidate is likely to change that, said Smith.
\u201cIt\u2019s still a pretty conservative state,\u201d he said. \u201cLet\u2019s not get too hasty here.\u201d
At a grocery store on the outskirts of Junction City, located in Geary county, Dan Duever, 75, said he believed Trump was the reason that Republicans \u201cgot hurt so bad\u201d in the midterms, \u201cbecause of the economy and the war in Iran\u201d.
Duever, a semi-retired farmer, said that fuel costs on his farm had tripled \u2013 from about $15,000 to closer to $45,000 \u2013 because of the record high prices of diesel. He has stopped driving one of his trucks that relies on diesel. His fertilizer prices have roughly doubled.
Still, he did not break with his party this year when he voted in the state\u2019s Senate race. \u201cI\u2019m a damn Republican,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bills have soared in rural state buffeted by tariffs and war in Iran \u2013 and Democrat Adam Hamilton\u2019s stunning upset shows how deep economic frustrations runLinda Olson always does her homework before voting \u2013 a trait she inherited from a family invested, and interested, in politics. Her father was a photographer who took portraits of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}