Adam Hamilton: Knock Holes in the Darkness

Tim Miller welcomes Reverend Adam Hamilton back as Senator-elect after his upset Kansas Senate victory. Hamilton says he and his wife still ask each other whether it really happened, and he feels both humbled by Kansas voters and responsible for producing concrete change. On election night, he expected to lose despite internal confidence that the race was winnable. His family watched from a room upstairs while staff delayed the announcement for roughly an hour and a half; Hamilton joked that after waiting 94 years for a Democrat to win statewide, another hour or two was tolerable. He says he had not planned to run a year earlier.

Hamilton says his candidacy began with imaginary arguments with Senator Roger Marshall while he was in the shower: he kept thinking Marshall needed to speak up and do something. No Democratic leader recruited him; he had never spoken with Chuck Schumer before winning the primary. Hamilton felt Washington was hurting people and abandoning American values, including officials claiming Christianity while acting unlike anything in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. He cites the proposed televised execution and the president berating a Reuters journalist as examples of conduct that felt unlike America. His wife initially opposed another sacrifice after 36 years at church, but after Hamilton preached a funeral in January, she concluded that the country was broken enough to try.

Hamilton describes visiting Dodge City and Liberal, where meatpacking, livestock, and dairy industries depend heavily on Hispanic workers. When ICE appeared, parents feared collecting children from school, leaving teachers and children waiting. Nine Republican state legislators wrote to the president, partly because workers stopped showing up and cattle arrived with nowhere to go. One lifelong Republican farmer told Hamilton that Hispanic immigrants had worked through a night to repair storm-damaged irrigation equipment; he had never asked for their papers and said it was wrong for those workers to fear arrest. Hamilton says one county shifted 56 points from Donald Trump’s result to his own, reflecting both registration work and opposition to harming immigrant families.

Asked about people currently separated from families in Texas detention centers, Hamilton says immigration reform is urgent. He supports ICE performing the national-security function created after 9/11—stopping dangerous people from threatening Americans—but argues that the agency and border enforcement now receive roughly $70 billion and have been militarized and politicized. Quotas for arrests, he says, are not legitimate law enforcement, especially when officers are inadequately trained for their expanded duties. Hamilton receives messages from families who have contacted their representatives without finding help and says his heart breaks for detainees left in an opaque process. He supports border-security funding, but not indefinite detention or abandonment of due process.

Hamilton’s victory speech centered on “love thy neighbor” and the Good Samaritan. He explains that the religious lawyer who asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” was really asking whom he did not have to love; Jesus answered with a Samaritan helping a beaten stranger whom religious leaders ignored. Hamilton says the modern “other” could be a Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative, depending on the audience. The parable also requires identifying who causes harm—such as people cutting health coverage, SNAP, Medicaid, or USAID, or creating arrest quotas—and who merely looks away. He invokes Martin Luther King Jr., who preached this passage before his assassination, and asks whether Americans will wonder what happens to the vulnerable if they do not stop to help.

Hamilton says 38 years as a pastor taught him to listen long enough to understand the fears and assumptions behind Republican and Democratic positions. Political rhetoric makes people fear what will happen if the other party wins, so a relationship cannot begin with a gotcha or insult. He recalls preaching on the death penalty, abortion, and euthanasia, and says respectful explanation sometimes changed congregants’ minds. He connects this to metanoia, the New Testament word for changing one’s mind, heart, and behavior. He also describes changing his own views on LGBTQ inclusion and helping a conservative church member move toward supporting same-sex marriage over five or six years.

Miller asks how Hamilton will bridge divides when many politicians have entered the Senate promising the same thing. Hamilton answers that he has practiced it for decades, distinguishing influence from irritation: poking people in the eye is easy, while making them feel heard requires skill and trust. He dismisses Vice President JD Vance’s claims that Hamilton misuses his pulpit, saying Vance has never listened to his sermons and was saying whatever helped Roger Marshall. Hamilton is willing to talk theology with Vance or Ted Cruz, but says he will not kowtow. He jokes that Vance will at least have to swear him in, and Hamilton plans to bring his own Bible rather than use the Trump Bible.

Miller plays Hamilton’s 2013 National Prayer Service advice to Barack Obama: as a child, Robert Louis Stevenson watched a lamplighter and said he was “knocking holes in the darkness.” The prayer asked for compassion toward marginalized people and a compelling vision that could unite America. Hamilton says the image feels more relevant now and remains central to his sermons, including an Advent series on light and darkness and Christmas Eve services where worshippers turn off the lights and hold candles. He says about 140,000 people joined those services last year and that his goal in Washington is to keep punching holes in the darkness, with God’s help.

Rob Flaherty, former Harris campaign deputy manager and author of The Bulwark’s 2024 autopsy, offers a “life topsy” of the Democratic midterm victory. He says part of the result was a favorable midterm electorate: people who vote in such elections are more civically engaged and invested in democracy. But Democrats also got important things right by focusing on affordability, corruption, and the parts of the system voters resent. Flaherty describes the winning formula as economic populism combined with pragmatism and compelling candidates. He rejects the idea that simply performing TikTok dances or appearing on podcasts is enough; candidates need something substantive to say in a style consistent with who they are.

Flaherty highlights Roy Cooper’s 58–39 North Carolina Senate win, Jon Ossoff’s 59–40 Georgia victory, and Josh Shapiro’s 60–38 Pennsylvania result. Cooper’s strength helped Democrats win the North Carolina House and potentially expand the congressional delegation to 11 Democrats, undoing a gerrymander that had seemed impossible to fix before 2029. Ossoff won by 19 points and gave Georgia gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms enough of a boost to win by nine. Shapiro won by 22 and is positioned as a possible 2028 presidential contender because he dominates Pennsylvania and communicates effectively in speeches, podcasts, and conversations. Flaherty credits all three with matching the political moment.

Flaherty says Gina Hinojosa and Texas gubernatorial winner Beto O’Rourke’s broader infrastructure helped produce a 12-point win. Hinojosa’s abortion ad told her personal story while emphasizing the value of life, creating permission for skeptical voters to hear her; she also focused on public education rather than allowing Republicans’ bathroom-centered culture-war frame to define schools. Her attention to data centers created a rural wedge against expansion. Flaherty credits O’Rourke’s Powered by People organization with registering students across Texas campuses since his presidential campaign, contributing to turnout alongside shifts in the Rio Grande Valley and suburbs. He says Hinojosa and O’Rourke benefited from running as complementary candidates.

Flaherty argues Mississippi is potentially swingable because it has a large Black electorate and relatively inexpensive media, and he praises Scott Colom’s relatable, content-driven campaign. Colom made polished but not overproduced videos, including “Pick Another Senator,” a Halloween parody, and footage of him talking with Trump-rally attendees in line. Flaherty says the same authentic, candidate-specific approach worked for Colom, Hinojosa, and Hamilton. He also calls Republican mid-cycle gerrymandering efforts a major misread: Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah Republicans could have drawn maps that accidentally produced more Democratic seats. The backlash also increased Black and Hispanic turnout, with voters reacting against ICE actions and other anti-democratic policies.

Flaherty calls the AI super PAC Leading the Future one of the cycle’s biggest strategic failures. Its theory was that voters did not care about AI, so politicians could be pressured with money into avoiding regulation; instead, voters disliked the technology’s buildout, and the PAC became too toxic to spend effectively. He similarly says Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen’s political spending was counterproductive. Data-center expansion lost 39 ballot initiatives and won only one, in Harwood, North Dakota, where the wording may have obscured the issue. Flaherty says Democrats should respond with a regulatory plan because voters increasingly connect data centers to AI and resent companies becoming wealthy at public expense.