George McGill had “too little flair for the theater of politics,” one historian wrote.
“He was a bald, somewhat paunchy man of no flamboyance and little imagination,” observed Donald R. McCoy, a history professor at the University of Kansas, in the journal Kansas History in 1981.
The historian ticked off other failings: “his lackluster personality; his putty-fingered rhetoric: his being considerably a lone ranger in the state’s politics…”
Yet George McGill possessed a record of political accomplishment that stands out. Until Tuesday, he was the last Democrat elected to the Senate from Kansas — in 1932. Indeed, it was his second victory running for Senate.
Now, 94 years later, a Democrat has once again finally been elected to represent the state in the Senate, ending a drought that nearly rivals the 108 years the Chicago Cubs went without a World Series championship before defeating Cleveland in 2016.
In Tuesday’s midterm election, Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton rode the blue wave that delivered Democrats control of both houses of Congress. He defeated one-term Senator Roger Marshall, an OB-GYN doctor whose candidacy was tarnished by a New York Times report that he had sued more than 700 patients over medical debts, charging 18% annual interest. Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases after missing court dates. Marshall responded that he had cared for many patients without charge.
Stepping back, the result in Kansas — as in Texas, which elected James Talarico, its first Democrat to the Senate since 1988 — is truly stunning. It’s a measure of just how far the Republicans have cratered since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. It’s a sign that the economic message that has helped him get elected to the presidency twice no longer inspires confidence.
The Great Depression played a major role in making George McGill’s 1932 victory possible; similarly, today’s stubbornly high inflation and doubts about Trump’s leadership helped enable this year’s Democratic victories. The president added to his party’s woes by endorsing several notably weak candidates — including Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina — in the Republican primaries.
Donald Trump won the state of Kansas by 16 points in the 2024 presidential election. Most polls show that more Kansans now disapprove than approve of Trump’s presidency.
“I am so fed up with the Republican Party,” a former Republican state House majority leader told AP last month, “and their willingness to play sycophant to our current commander in chief that I’m willing to consider alternatives.”
Many farmers blame their economic woes on Trump’s tariffs and his Iran war, which has helped drive diesel to record levels. ICE raids swept up immigrants whose labor helped fuel the Kansas economy.
George McGill
George McGill was born on an Iowa farm in 1879. His family moved to Kansas five years later. After studying law, he gained admission to the Kansas bar, worked in private practice and was elected twice as Sedgwick County attorney.
McGill had a couple of things going for him when he ran his successful Democratic race for Senate in 1932. Two years earlier, he had defeated Henry J. Allen in a special election for Senate. Allen, a newspaper publisher, led the Republican National Committee’s public relations effort in the 1928 election on behalf of President Herbert Hoover.
By the time of the 1930 midterm elections, Hoover and the Republicans were on the defensive, blamed for being unable to turn around the nation’s economy after the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the depression. As a result, McGill was in a position to benefit from a political climate strongly favorable for Democrats.
In truth, presidents have few levers to affect the nation’s economy in normal times. With the help of Congress, they can raise or lower government spending, affect oil prices with their foreign policy choices and regulate foreign trade with tariffs.
But perhaps their biggest economic power is what President Theodore Roosevelt called the bully pulpit: the platform the White House provides to shape public perceptions of how things are going. Hoover was particularly clumsy in using that platform; his successor proved to be adept at it.
On April 7, 1932, TR’s fifth cousin, then-New York Gov. and presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a radio address from Albany. He accused Hoover’s administration of trying to fix the economy from the top down, rather than the bottom up. He called for policies “that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” specifically criticizing the effects of the Hoover economy on farm families and homeowners. FDR blasted the punitive Smoot-Hawley tariffs for reducing worldwide trade American manufacturers depended on.
Hoover probably deserved more credit than he got for trying “innovative and unprecedented government-inspired efforts” to find solutions to the economic morass, wrote historian David E. Hamilton. “Many historians, with the benefit of hindsight, argue that Hoover in reality could have done little to solve the Depression. They correctly assert that American entry into World War II — and not Roosevelt’s New Deal — lifted the United States out of its economic doldrums.”
But Hamilton added:
Nonetheless, many scholars still criticize Hoover’s refusal to authorize large-scale relief programs that might have alleviated suffering and hunger, his unwillingness to use significant federal spending to stimulate the economy, and his general failure to recognize the all-encompassing nature of the Great Depression. Quite simply, Hoover seemed never to have grasped the grave threat that the economic crisis represented to the nation — and that solutions to the Depression might have required abandoning some of his deeply held beliefs.
Trump took a page from FDR, and not from Hoover, in his rhetoric. In his first Inaugural Address, in January 2017, Trump said, “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”
He added:
We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world. But that is the past. And now we are looking only to the future.
But as president, Trump has done little for the “forgotten men and women.” His tariffs helped increase inflation, even though he had promised in his 2024 campaign to bring prices down. His decision to launch a war against Iran helped increase gasoline prices by nearly 40% and diesel prices by more than 70%.
Trump’s policies have failed to curb inflation. But more mystifying is why his rhetoric has failed too. He’s no longer making even a pretense of speaking for the common man and woman, as disingenuous as that has been from the start. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said last year. He called the idea of “affordability” a hoax. This year, when he was asked about the war’s impact on the economic challenges people are facing, Trump said: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
In the president’s closing argument for the midterms, staged at the renovated Reflecting Pool in Washington, Trump buried his economic message in a convoluted account of the pool’s renovation, including asides about the recaulking of granite and the need to replace grass.
In the Kansas race, victorious Democrat Adam Hamilton kept the focus on costs: “The biggest part of affordability right now are self-inflicted wounds, and these are inflicted by people in Washington, D.C., including Roger Marshall,” he said.
“For Kansas farmers, for many of them, financing their entire operations at the beginning of the year for the year, interest rates not coming down, fertilizer prices, diesel fuel, other inputs, it’s deadly.”
After McGill’s victory in Kansas
Historian Donald McCoy credited McGill’s reelection to the Senate in 1932 to riding Roosevelt’s coattails and “the emergence of a significant third-party vote.”
When McGill ran for reelection in 1938, FDR was no longer popular enough to give him a lift. McGill had been active in shaping legislation to boost the farm economy. But Kansas farmers were unhappy about their treatment at the hands of the Department of Agriculture and some may have blamed McGill.
He compounded his problems by failing to organize his campaign early enough, McCoy wrote.
Voted out of the Senate, McGill resumed practicing law in Wichita. He kept trying to recapture the magic of his victory in 1932. McGill ran for Senate — and lost — in 1942, 1948 and 1954.
Electing a Democrat to the Senate from Kansas once again seemed an insurmountable challenge — until Donald Trump helped make it possible.