Trump's Immigration Crackdowns Helped Turn Kansas Blue
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration policies, was promoted despite the midterm losses and Trump's admission that ICE has been too harsh.
In late September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents swarmed southwestern Kansas, where a large immigrant population is vital to the region's massive livestock industry.
The crackdown was disruptive. Businesses closed, and workers missed shifts, according to a local public radio report. The Kansas Livestock Association said the ICE operations were "having a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table," and warned that the "unwelcome political interference" would cause prices to rise for consumers. Local officials said they were not given advance notice of the enforcement efforts.
And perhaps the most telling comment of all came from Sen. Roger Marshall (R–Kan.), a Republican lawmaker from a state that President Donald Trump had easily won in 2024.
Rather than cheering on the ICE crackdown, however, Marshall put out an official statement highlighting the "mass disruptions to local communities and businesses" and urging the Department of Homeland Security to be more "responsible" about immigration enforcement.
Marshall lost his Senate seat in November's midterm election, as Kansas elected a Democratic senator, Adam Hamilton, for the first time since 1932. The ICE raids in southwest Kansas during the closing weeks of the campaign may have played a major role in that result.
Take a look at the county-by-county results from the Kansas Senate race.
The blue areas on the state's eastern edge are usually that way—even when Trump won the state by 16 points in 2024, Kamala Harris carried the counties around Kansas City and Wichita.
What stands out on the Senate map are those blue blocks in the southwestern corner of Kansas. Hamilton won Finney, Ford, and Seward counties. That is not supposed to happen. Trump carried Finney County by 35 points in 2024, and he won the other two by even larger margins.
But that is the exact part of the state where the September immigration crackdown occurred. Dodge City, the center of the state's livestock and beef industries, is the county seat of Ford County, where voters swung by 39 points toward Hamilton.
Across Kansas, voters swung 22 points toward Democrats compared with the 2024 election, The New York Times reports. In Seward County, the swing was a staggering 52 points.
As election guru Dave Wasserman notes, Trump netted about 8,700 votes from that part of the state in 2024. Marshall, the incumbent Republican senator, lost the same region by a gap of about 900 votes. Hamilton won the election by more than 50,000 votes, so those counties were not decisive—but the results are dramatic and certainly "sums up," as Wasserman puts it, how Republicans lost the midterm.
"I'm very proud and honored that so many of the people out there voted for me," Hamilton told The Topeka Capital-Journal. "I think what they knew, they'd been hurt by the present administration and even Republicans, state legislators from that part of the state, reached out to the president and said, 'this is not OK.'"
That seems to be the message voters sent, but so far it is unclear whether the president is listening.
In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired on Sunday, Trump seemed to acknowledge that his immigration enforcement policies had gone too far.
"I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out," Trump told Ross Douthat in that interview. "But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs." Later, Trump admitted more straightforwardly that his immigration policy "might be too tough."
But that conclusion is in tension with the only significant change Trump has made to his administration since the midterm drubbing. Last week, Trump announced that Stephen Miller, widely regarded as the architect of the administration's aggressive deportation policies, would be promoted to White House chief of staff.
The backlash against Trump's immigration policies goes beyond Kansas, of course. In a CBS News exit poll last week, 58 percent of voters said immigration enforcement had "gone too far."
But what happened in southwestern Kansas is particularly telling. After seeing the reality of Trump's ICE policies up close, even some of America's deepest red counties turned blue.
