Adam Hamilton

Adam Hamilton was born in Prairie Village, Kansas. Hamilton's career experience includes serving as a pastor and founding a church in the Kansas City area in 1990.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I'm a fifth-generation Kansan. My great-great-grandparents settled in Dickinson County 147 years ago, in a little town called Hope.

36 years ago, my wife LaVon and I started a church with four people and a dream. Today it's the largest United Methodist church in the country, and its members are equal parts Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

Together we’ve become the largest source of donated food in Kansas City after the regional food bank and the area’s largest sponsor of blood drives. We’ve given away thousands of beds to children who didn’t have one, funded a mobile dental clinic that treats 2,700 kids a year at their schools, and invested millions of dollars in the lowest-income elementary schools in the area.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Affordability. Kansans are working hard, but too many families are falling behind. People are struggling to pay for gas, groceries, housing, and especially health care. I'll work to bring those costs down: end the self destructive policies coming out of Washington like tariffs and war, crack down on the price-gouging and anti-competitive behavior that push up your bills to pad profits, get more homes built that working families can afford, and push for trade and tax policies that help Kansas families, farmers, and small businesses instead of making fertilizer, diesel, groceries, and everyday necessities more expensive. Over 10,000 children have lost their SNAP benefits in KQuality, affordable health care. We must reverse the disastrous cuts to Medicaid that threaten our rural hospitals. We should restore the ACA premium credits whose expiration raised the typical Kansan's premium by more than half. And we should let Medicare negotiate prices on more drugs, and extend those savings to families on private insurance to save Kansas families thousands of dollars. Everyone deserves access to affordable care, no matter where they live.End the Chaos and Corruption in Washington. We need to end the self-inflicted wounds of tariffs and a war no one asked for raising the price of nearly everything Kansans buy. It’s time for term limits and age limits for all three branches of government. I'll work to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, stop their pay when they shut the government down, and get dark money out of our elections. And I'll answer to Kansans: our campaign takes no corporate PAC money, and I'll hold in-person town halls across the state every year I serve.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Decency. But decency isn't just words, it's how we treat each other. Over 10,000 hungry children in Kansas have lost their SNAP benefits thanks to One Big Ugly Bill. And tens of thousands of Kansans have lost their health coverage since January 2025. I've spent my life with families during some of their hardest moments, and I know how frightening it is when people can't afford the care they need or can't find it close to home. Kansas leads the nation in rural hospitals at risk of closing, and cuts from Washington are only going to make it worse. One woman told me her health insurance runs nearly $2,500 a month, more than her house payment, so had to go without. That's unacceptable and has to change.

What organizations or individuals have endorsed your campaign?

Tim Kaine, Kathleen Sebelius

Campaign websiteHamilton's campaign website stated the following:Adam’s Affordability AgendaProtecting Kansas Families from Rising Energy Bills Electricity prices have increased more sharply in the past year than they have in decades. Gas prices have surged. Yet Congress has failed to act to bring costs down for Kansas families, and the White House has made things worse. We need a comprehensive, all of the above strategy that creates jobs and increases energy independence while bringing down costs for consumers today.End self-destructive tariffs and unnecessary wars, which are driving up energy costs and hurting our ability to add energy capacity. Washington has repeatedly taken actions that directly increase costs and reduce affordability for Kansas families. When Washington imposes sweeping tariff taxes without a vote, the bill lands on Kansas farmers, manufacturers, and families in the form of higher prices on everything from equipment and fertilizer to groceries. The Constitution gives Congress responsibility over trade, and Congress should use it. Adam would prevent future administrations from harming Kansans by requiring congressional approval for new tariffs, and to publish the real cost to American families before those tariffs take effect. This is not a partisan idea. Kansas’s own Senator Jerry Moran has joined a bipartisan bill, the Trade Review Act, led by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, to require exactly that.Require data centers to pay their fair share of electricity costs. Power usage by Data centers, driven by the rapid growth of AI, is growing rapidly throughout the United States, including rural states like Kansas. While these developments can provide economic benefits and jobs to areas that need them, we need to ensure that the companies behind them cover their costs instead of burdening ratepayers and earn the support of the towns and counties they move into. Republicans and Democrats agree on this. But where some support voluntary pledges, Adam would propose binding rules and legislation.Stop the war on domestic energy projects and restore energy production tax credits that increase our energy independence and create good-paying jobs. Adam supports all of the above energy production and believes Kansans should decide what happens on their land. More than two dozen Republican members of Congress asked to protect these credits before they were repealed, threatening nearly 10,000 jobs and shrinking the state’s economy by over $1 billion.Require competitive bidding processes for transmission projects instead of handing utility companies lucrative contracts at taxpayer expense. When a nearly half-billion-dollar transmission project is handed to a single utility with no competitive bidding, Kansas ratepayers can end up paying far more than they should. Competitive bidding has been shown to cut these costs by twenty to thirty percent. Politicians on both sides of the aisle should speak out against harmful policies that avoid competitive bidding, like the $493 million project that was handed to Evergy. Protecting the Security Kansas Seniors Have Earned In Kansas and across the country, millions of seniors are struggling to keep up with rising health care and everyday costs. Almost 20% of Kansans are 65 or older, and many live in rural communities where getting care can mean long drives, fewer providers, and harder choices. After a lifetime of work, Kansas seniors should be able to count on affordable care, stable benefits, and the chance to age with dignity. We need to protect social security and provide real solutions for seniors. Prioritize home-based care reimbursement to give seniors the option of aging at home instead of in a nursing facility or hospital. At-home care costs a fraction of care in a facility, and is often a better solution for seniors regardless of cost. We should make it financially and logistically feasible for seniors to access the care they need while aging in place with dignity, including by increasing reimbursement rates for home health aides and in-home care services.Expand Medicare to cover vision and dental so seniors are no longer forced to dig into their savings or skip care entirely because of holes in their coverage. Medicare excludes most dental and vision care, leaving seniors to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars a year out of pocket. Untreated dental disease is linked to diabetes and heart disease while vision loss increasing isolation and raises the risk of falls. We can close these gaps, keep seniors healthier, and save money down the line.Protect seniors from higher prices fueled by tariffs. Tariffs act as a hidden tax that ends up baked into the price of groceries, medications, utilities, and household goods — an estimated $1,700 a year for the average household — and they fall hardest on seniors getting by on a fixed Social Security check that doesn’t rise when those prices do. Requiring congressional approval before new tariffs take effect — like the Constitution requires — and publishing what those tariffs will cost families before they’re enacted, would protect the Kansans least able to bear them.Do more to fight elder fraud and scams. Fraud against seniors is surging — the FBI logged nearly $5 billion in losses in 2024, a 46% jump in complaints — and AI is making it far worse: with just a few seconds of audio scraped from social media, a scammer can clone a grandchild’s or spouse’s voice for a fake “family emergency” call. Rural seniors who bank and shop by phone are especially hard for local law enforcement to protect. Adam would strengthen the Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative and give investigators the resources to pursue these cases — building on bipartisan work, including  legislation Senator Marshall has sponsored to protect seniors from scams.Housing Kansans Can Afford Adam is a fifth-generation Kansan who grew up in Prairie Village, and he has seen firsthand how housing costs have gone up and up, all across the state.Home prices across the country have skyrocketed since the pandemic, and Kansas is no exception. In the nine years Roger Marshall has been in Washington, the average home price in the Kansas City area has risen by roughly eighty percent, the share of first-time buyers nationwide has fallen to a record low, and the typical first-time buyer is now forty years old. We can and must do better. Congress should make it easier to buy a home and easier to build one.The same across-the-board tariffs raising prices at the store are driving up the cost of building a new home by thousands of dollars and resulting in hundreds of thousands of new homes not being built. We must end these disastrous tariffs and require congressional approval for any future ones to bring building costs back downModernize and standardize regulations for modular homes in order to increase the housing supply and provide more affordable options for families. Outdated regulations have slowed our ability to scale up their use nationwide, but by changing these rules we can increase the adoption of modular home building and bring down the cost at the same time. The Bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act has started this process, but we must go farther than reviewing financing barriers and commissioning studies on building codes. We need to do more than pass laws, we need to make sure the ones we have are enforced.Ban Wall St. and other investors from buying up single family homes and driving up prices on Kansas families. Investors increasingly are purchasing a large share of single family homes for sale nationwide, topping 30% of all sales in 2025. In 2025, roughly one in five homes sold in the Kansas City area went to an investor, among the highest rates of any major metro in the country, and across Kansas investors bought close to the same share. Congress just passed a first-ever limit on the largest institutional investors, and that is real progress. But the limit only applies going forward, does nothing about the homes already bought up, and leaves loopholes that let the biggest firms split into smaller entities to keep buying. Adam supports closing those loopholes so the rule actually protects Kansas families.Create tax credits for first time home buyers, firefighters, police officers, and teachers. Last year, the share of first-time home buyers dropped to just 21%, an all-time low, while the average age of first-time buyers rose all the way to 40 years old, also a record. Republicans and Democrats alike have supported the use of tax incentives to help first time home buyers. By creating new tax credits for young families looking to buy a home for the first time – as well as public servants like firefighters, police officers, and teachers – we can open up the dream of home ownership to more Kansas who have been priced out of the market. Stop anticompetitive price collusion from landlords, including the use of algorithmic pricing designed specifically to reduce competition and drive up rent for tenants.Adam's Agenda to Lower Health Care Costs Lowering Health Care Costs for Kansas FamiliesNearly 80% of Kansans are worried about being able to afford health care in the future, and nearly three-quarters say they skipped care in the past year because of the cost. At the same time, the country wastes billions of dollars every year on overpriced drugs and wasteful paperwork that helps no patient. We can do better on both fronts — these reforms lower costs for Kansas families while saving taxpayers money.Expand Medicare drug price negotiation and extend the savings to private insurance. Letting Medicare negotiate the price of high-cost prescription drugs — which it began doing for the first time under the 2022 law that also capped insulin at $35 a month and seniors’ out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 — is projected to save Part D enrollees an estimated $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2026 alone, with far more to come as more drugs are added. More than 571,000 Kansans rely on Medicare, but negotiation currently reaches only a short, slow-growing list of drugs and does nothing for the working-age Kansans on private insurance. Adam would expand the number of negotiated drugs, speed up the timeline, and extend negotiated prices to private plans — an approach CBO once estimated could save roughly $456 billion over a decade — while capping out-of-pocket drug costs at a reasonable level.Reverse the cuts to Medicaid and restore the ACA subsidies that hold premiums down. Two changes are raising health care costs for Kansas families at the same time. Kansas families are being squeezed from both sides. Deep federal Medicaid cuts are projected to drain up to $3.77 billion from KanCare and cost about 13,000 Kansans their coverage over the next decade. That would fall hardest on rural hospitals, and Kansas already has more hospitals at immediate risk of closing than any other state. At the same time, the end of enhanced ACA premium tax credits has made a typical subsidized Kansan’s monthly premium jump by more than half for 2026 — the steepest increase since the marketplace began. Because Kansas never expanded Medicaid, about 28,000 working Kansans are already stuck in the coverage gap: too well-off for KanCare, too poor for marketplace help.Cut waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare without touching anyone’s benefits. Medicare often pays about 2.5 times more for the same outpatient service in a hospital than in a doctor’s office — so paying one fair rate regardless of where care is delivered (“site-neutral”) could save more than $150 billion over a decade. Private Medicare Advantage plans, meanwhile, are projected to be overpaid by roughly $76 billion in 2026 because they document members as sicker than they really are. These are real opportunities for Republicans and Democrats to save billions in taxpayer dollars. Adam would go after both problems, and he would reform prior authorization so insurance paperwork cannot delay or deny care that doctors say patients need. This should be common ground. Protect and invest in rural hospitals. Kansas has more rural hospitals at immediate risk of closing than any other state — roughly two-thirds are at risk overall — largely because insurers, including Medicare Advantage, don’t pay enough to cover the cost of care. A rural hospital is often a county’s largest employer and its only nearby emergency room, and studies find that closing one raises deaths from time-sensitive emergencies like heart attacks and strokes by about 10%. The squeeze is sharpest in childbirth, where only about a third of rural Kansas hospitals still deliver babies. Reversing the Medicaid cuts would help, but Adam would go further to fix the underpayment and keep these hospitals’ doors open.Reform medical billing and medical debt. In 2024, more than a third of U.S. households carried medical debt, and 43% of Kansans report a financial burden from medical bills — made worse by high interest and aggressive collection. In 45 states, including Kansas, a collector can garnish a patient’s wages and even jail them over unpaid medical bills. Adam would cap interest on medical debt, limit wage garnishment, and keep medical debt off credit reports — reforms a growing number of states have already adopted with no disruption to hospitals or care. Much of this debt is disputed or billed in error in the first place, sweeping people who never owed the money into collections.Protect a woman’s right to choose and prevent further government interference into personal decisions by codifying the access to contraception into law. Require insurers to cover non-prescription over the counter birth control just like they cover prescription contraception.Support Kansas Agriculture, Producers, and Consumers It’s been a generation since Kansas families felt so much pain at the grocery store. Global instability is hurting Kansas, but so have many of our own government’s choices — the war in Iran, the trade war, a farm bill three years late, and an inadequate response to animal-health crises like Avian Influenza and the New World Screwworm. Leaders have failed Kansans and Kansas farmers in their most basic responsibility: a secure and affordable food supply.Protect Kansas farmers from tariffs and expand export markets for Kansas products. Farmers in Kansas are being hit hard from all sides –hundreds of farms closed last year, in large part because tariffs drove up the cost of equipment and hurt exports of Kansas products. We should immediately get rid of tariffs that are hurting our farmers’ ability to make a living,double funding for USDA’s export promotion programs – an investment economists project would generate more than $44 billion in new agricultural exports, much of it Kansas wheat, sorghum, and beef. And Congress should re-engage in trade policy and push for new market access agreements.Fund an overwhelming response to the animal disease outbreaks driving up the price of eggs and beef. Avian influenza cost American consumers $14.5 billion in higher egg prices in a single year, and with the New World Screwworm now detected in cattle in Texas, beef prices – already forecast to rise 12% this year – are at risk of climbing even higher. Congress must fully fund the animal disease vaccine bank, laboratory network, and preparedness programs; accelerate the new domestic sterile-fly production facility; and pass the bipartisan Rural Veterinary Workforce Act so rural Kansas can recruit large-animal vets.Finally pass the full farm bill after three years of Congressional delay. The 2018 farm bill expired in 2023, and Kansas farmers have been operating on extensions and uncertainty ever since. The House finally passed its version in April, but the Senate hasn’t acted and the current extension runs out September 30. Congress needs to finish the job and give agriculture five years of certainty.Give agriculture the stable, legal workforce it needs to keep food affordable. Labor shortages on cow-calf operations, farms, and dairies drive up the cost of producing food, and those costs land on Kansas families at the checkout line. Congress must reform the broken H-2A guest-worker program — permitting year-round visas that reflect modern needs, lowering compliance costs, and giving existing workers a path to legal status.Make fertilizer in America. The wars with Iran and in Ukraine caused huge increases in fertilizer costs, and those costs land directly on grocery shelves. USDA’s Fertilizer Production Expansion Program has already invested in dozens of facilities — including in Kansas — and is being expanded with accelerated permitting. Congress should supercharge it.Cut prices at the pump with year-round E15. Homegrown ethanol blends save drivers 20 to 40 cents per gallon while building new markets for Kansas corn and sorghum. The House passed year-round E15 legislation in May with bipartisan support — the Senate should send it to the President’s desk.Ban algorithmic price-fixing at grocery stores that takes advantage of consumers and reduces competition. Dynamic pricing, in which grocery chains change prices based on market conditions and even shoppers’ personal information, is becoming more and more widespread. We need to prohibit the practice and penalize retailers that take advantage of consumers.End the policy chaos in Washington that drives economic uncertainty and volatile prices — beginning by lowering the partisan temperature, bringing Republicans and Democrats together, and showing a unified face to a global economy that looks to America for leadership.— Adam Hamilton's campaign website (July 29, 2026)Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.