There are primary elections today in Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina. The South Carolina run-off election for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate will get most of the news coverage.
The scribes are eager to learn whether President Trump can drag a weak candidate across the finish line. If he does, they will be disappointed. If he doesn’t, there will be celebratory commentary about how he’s “beginning to lose his hold” on the Republican base. Not a lot of Republican elected officials will take that bet.
What happens in South Carolina is far less important than what happened in Missouri and Kansas three weeks ago. There, Mr. Trump was not “on the ballot” in any meaningful way. The Republican establishments in those two states were “on the ballot”, lending their full support to three initiatives that had been expected to pass or be defeated by narrow margins. In the event, all three initiatives were defeated, decisively in one (56%-to-44%) and by a staggering 80%-to-20% in the other two.
Jerry Seib was born and raised in Kansas and knows that state, and neighboring Missouri, as well as any national political reporter. So we we asked him to explain what happened. What follows is his report.
Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. — John Ellis
By Jerry Seib.
In these days of political polarization and hyper-partisanship, it has become fashionable to view most American voters as lemmings, following their party and one another off whatever cliff lies just ahead.
It might not be that simple in 2026. Primary election results this month from two states in the nation’s heartland suggest that voters might be in a more contrarian mood than commonly believed. Those results deserve a second look because they may presage volatility nationally, and in the Midwest in particular.
The states in question are Kansas and Missouri. Both are, of course, reliably, deeply red. President Donald Trump carried Kansas by 16 percentage points and Missouri by 18 percentage points in 2024. All four U.S. Senators from the two states are Republicans, as are 9 of the 12 House members. Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932.
Kansans have periodically shown a streak of independence and unpredictability. The state has a Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, and its voters four years ago soundly defeated a ballot initiative, pushed hard by Republicans, that would have declared there was no constitutional right to an abortion in the state.
But even against that backdrop, what happened this summer was remarkable. In the primary election held on Aug. 4, Kansas voters again were presented a ballot initiative strongly backed by the state’s Republican leaders, this one a referendum that would have required that Supreme Court justices be elected rather than appointed by the governor. They didn’t merely defeat that measure, they shot it down decisively, by 22 percentage points. Even the forces that were fighting against the ballot initiative didn’t see that level of rejection coming.
The outcome is all the more striking because, at the end of the day, Republican voters were the ones who proved decisive in turning back a measure their party’s leaders were pushing hard. The initiative lost by more than 140,000 votes, on a day in which Republican voters far outnumbered Democrats. If those who cast ballots in the primary races that day had voted a straight party line on the referendum, it would have won by some 117,000 votes. That’s quite a swing against party leaders.
In Missouri, the outcome was even more dramatic. The state’s Republican governor, Mike Kehoe, strongly backed a proposed constitutional amendment eliminating the state’s income tax, which would have forced an increase in other kinds of taxes. The state’s Republican establishment also backed another initiative that, ironically, was designed to make it harder to get future citizen initiatives on the ballot.
Both were defeated by stunning margins: 83% voted against eliminating the income tax, 80% against the proposal to make it harder to get future initiatives on the ballot. Remarkably, both amendments lost in every county, even the most red ones. The Kansas City Star noted that in one county that Trump carried with 84% of the vote two years ago, 92% of voters this year opposed the Republican-favored income-tax initiative.
What do those outcomes show us? “Voters punish anything that smells like a process power grab, regardless of party,” notes one Republican operative. That, he adds, is less a signal of a particular political wave this fall and more an indication that both party establishments need to be wary of over-reach.
Indeed, one reason President Trump is suffering such a slump in popularity is his own pattern of over-reaching, in the conflict with Iran, in his pursuit of his perceived enemies and in his aggressive use of tariffs, all of which score badly in polling.
The Kansas and Missouri results also serve as a warning to both parties that there is a price to be paid for disrupting venerable institutions to achieve their own ends. Democrats’ current talk of expanding or restricting the Supreme Court might well be seen by mainstream voters as a “process power grab,” as would steps by Republicans to either interfere with this fall’s general elections, or to refuse to accept their outcome.
Kansas and Missouri offered other signs of the limits of establishment power. On the one hand, it still appears that a Trump endorsement means a lot. In Kansas, his endorsement of State Senate President Ty Masterson was almost certainly the reason Masterson won the Republican primary race for governor—and one reason the previous favorite, former Gov. Jeff Colyer, dropped out of the race. On the other hand, the candidate Gov. Kelly endorsed in the Democratic primary, State Sen. Ethan Corson, ** lost by almost 10 percentage **points to Cindy Holscher, another state senator who has a testy relationship with the governor.
A Trump endorsement still carries weight. Others from established figures, not so much. Despite the perception of armies of voters marching in lockstep, they don’t seem to be in much of a mood to be ordered around by party leaders.
For Democrats nationally, Kansas and Missouri may have offered another, more heartening lesson. On the same day Democrats in Michigan were nominating a high-profile progressive candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, in a contested primary for the U.S. Senate--and probably imperiling their chances of holding that seat by reaching too far left for their nominee—Democrats in Kansas and Missouri were picking more moderate candidates. In Missouri, left-wing former Rep. Cori Bush was soundly defeated by the more moderate Rep. Wesley Bell in her attempt to win back the seat in Congress she lost to him two years ago.
And in Kansas, a relatively moderate Democrat, Adam Hamilton, easily won a contested primary election to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. Hamilton is hardly the prototypical Democratic candidate: He is pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country. But upon entering the primary race late in the season, he immediately proved to be a prolific fund-raiser, which is just one reason he appears to be the most electable of the multiple Democratic contenders who were chasing the Senate nomination.
Republicans already are attacking Hamilton as not a moderate at all, but rather as “too woke” for Kansas because of things he has said about climate change and the Black Lives Matters movement. That figures to be the Republican playbook coast to coast this fall, and it might work. As the history of the last century has shown, any Democrat running for a Senate seat in Kansas is an underdog.
That said, Marshall isn’t an especially popular Senator, and his unfailing loyalty to Trump, an asset in a primary, could prove to be a liability by time November rolls around. In addition, there are ample reasons to believe that Republican candidates running in an election with Donald Trump on the ballot benefit from a turnout boost that simply doesn’t exist when, like this year, Trump isn’t on the ballot.
It’s hard to know how the electorate in November will compare with the one that showed up for an August primary with a controversial ballot initiative in play, which helped juice Democratic turnout. Overall, though, voters did show anew they are in a contrarian mood, which gives Democrats some hope for Hamilton’s candidacy. He’s the best candidate Democrats have fielded in Kansas in a very long time.
This piece was first posted last week at Political News Items. We’ve reposted it here because we thought it was worth your time.
