đ± If our emails sometimes get buried in your inbox, weâve got another way for you to keep up to date: the new Zeteo app. Read our latest reporting, watch exclusive interviews and original shows, listen to podcasts, get alerts, and save content for later â including offline viewing. Download now: iOS | Android.
Happy Thursday! Itâs Swin again. In the very last days of the interminable, extremely high-stakes U.S. midterm elections, things are not looking good⊠if youâre a Republican or President Donald Trump.
Weâll see what happens on election night, but most signs are now pointing toward stunning losses for the GOP, given that conservative politicians are so inextricably wedded to Trumpâs agenda of unpopular war, mindless economic destruction, unfettered corruption, and aberrant bloodshed and lawlessness. Itâs hard to pick what GOP lawmakers and operatives are oh-so-very privately steamed about the most, but if you talk to them, up high on that list is one simple, two-syllable word:
âKansas.â
In todayâs âFirst Draft,â weâll dig in on why. Plus, Rep. Haley Stevens has an increasingly strange â and awful â way of showing her supposed support for Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate election. Letâs read in.
Whatâs the Matter with Kansas?
If the Republican Party savagely eats it in the 2026 midterms (especially if itâs a defeat so humiliating it proves too hard to steal), there is going to be a geyser of score-settling and finger-pointing after election night. There is all but guaranteed to be a gargantuan sum of anonymous or on-record intra-GOP sniping over who should be scapegoated, with most participants being too cowardly to correctly and publicly blame their god-emperor, Donald Trump.
The knives will be out for top Trump advisers who have, for different reasons, made bitter and sometimes jealous enemies within their party structure. Think Susie Wiles, James Blair, MAGA-cogs like that â even if it wasnât completely their fault. Another Republican who keeps coming up in these types of discussions is Roger Marshall, a Trump-backed senator from ruby-red, conservative Kansas.
Marshall is running against pastor and Democrat Adam Hamilton in what has been a shockingly close contest. If the Democratic Party flips a Senate seat in Kansas, of all places, it would be as good an indicator as any that the 2026 blue wave is more a blue biblical flood, crashing right into Trumpâs authoritarian presidency and his party collaborators. A reminder: Trump won Kansas by 16 points in 2024, and the state hasnât elected a Democratic senator since⊠1932!
Republican operatives working on competitive races and other key figures in the party whom Iâve spoken to lately are cautiously optimistic (emphasis on the adverb) that Marshall will squeak it out and keep that Kansas seat red. Their Democratic counterparts say the same.
But even if Marshall wins, the damage is already done.