Roger Marshall holds Kansas and loses the country. He reads 25 points better inside his own state than the national conversation gives him, and the gap widens to 60 points once posts naming Hamilton are stripped out. The week that produced it was not about policy: it was about his billing records as a doctor and his campaign's travel expenses.
Adam HamiltonDemocratic nomineeNo X account found in this week's corpus
NET SENTIMENT+9.1In Kansas+46.4Nationally
65K
TOTAL VOLUMEPosts, articles and comments across all geographies. Only 9% of the U.S. portion is original writing; the rest is reposts and replies.
-7.4
MARSHALL, NATIONALNet sentiment outside Kansas. -33.1 on posts naming them alone.
+46.4
HAMILTON, NATIONALNet sentiment outside Kansas. +37.7 on posts naming them alone.
13K
BIGGEST DAYReporting that Marshall billed taxpayers for campaign travel landed alongside coverage of the interest he charged patients as an obstetrician. The two stories ran together all weekend.
What The Polls Say
Published polling, shown to set context. A poll asks a sample of voters which candidate they intend to support. Everything else on this page measures something different: the balance of positive and negative labeled posts about each candidate in the captured conversation. A candidate can lead the vote and still take the worse of the argument online, and where the two diverge this page explains the conversation, not the electorate.
Trafalgar Group · field date Oct 2, 2026 · 1,095 LV · margin of error 2.9 points
Marshall leads both measures, and both are close to a tie. He takes the better of the Kansas conversation by 16 points of net sentiment while leading the four-poll average by 0.2. The most recent poll is tied at 44. His national sentiment figure, which the polling does not measure at all, is where his week actually went wrong.
The Week In One Line
Net sentiment runs on the left axis from −100 to +100. Gold bars carry total daily
volume for both candidates combined; hover any bar for the narratives driving that day. Marshall's line falls off a cliff on Friday and Saturday, to -35.5 and -35.9, the two days the billing and expenses reporting circulated hardest. Hamilton peaks at +71.5 on the same Friday.
Marshall net sentimentHamilton net sentimentTotal posts, articles and comments
Inside Kansas
Both figures cover posts that resolve to Kansas. Net sentiment runs from -100 to +100 and counts only posts a classifier labeled, roughly a quarter of the total.
KANSAS
Marshall
Kansas
3,630posts
470 positive
280 negative
Hover a segment
800 unique authors · 200 original posts
(6% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 750 labeled posts, 20.7% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 75 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
The Incumbent Still Has A Floor
POSITIVE DRIVER
Marshall's positive material in Kansas is personal rather than political. It is built on familiarity, the long-serving doctor people recognize, and it holds up under the single-subject test, which is what separates a real floor from a statistical artifact.
The sharpest in-state criticism is about what Marshall did before the Senate. Reporting found patients he sued as an obstetrician were routinely charged 18 percent interest, with some bank accounts garnished, and no other Kansas provider charging the same rate. His own supporters answer on his record as a rural physician.
Patients sued by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas were routinely charged 18 percent interest, The Times found. Some had bank accounts garnished.
Running under both threads is surprise. Kansas has not been a competitive Senate state in a long time, and a good deal of the in-state conversation is people registering that it has become one.
676 unique authors · 80 original posts
(3% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 770 labeled posts, 27.4% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 77 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
Republicans Who Crossed Over
POSITIVE DRIVER
Hamilton's strongest material in Kansas is who is standing with him. Two former Republican governors of the state lead a coalition backing him, and one of them said plainly that he had supported Marshall before.
Kansas Republican Governor Mike Hayden endorses Adam Hamilton: I supported Roger Marshall before, but he has put party first.
The organized case against Hamilton concerns his handling of an abuse allegation at a church youth retreat. It is the one charge against him with real reach, and it is why his Kansas figure lands at exactly 0.0 once Marshall's name is removed.
Kansas beware. Teen boys molested at youth retreat. Adam Hamilton ignored concerns and allowed the predator back to the same retreat.
A quieter in-state thread is arithmetic about how a Democrat wins Kansas at all, and it treats moderate Republicans as the decisive group rather than turnout.
Kansas effectively had three parties: Democrats, moderate Republicans, and conservative Republicans. Winning as a Democrat requires the first group and strong inroads into the second.
The same week reads differently depending on where you stand. Net sentiment is plotted
from Kansas on the left to the rest of the country on the right; the solid line counts every post
naming a candidate, the dashed line counts only posts that name that candidate and not the other.
All posts naming the candidate
Posts naming that candidate only
+32.7Roger MarshallKansas minus national · +60.0 on single-subject posts
Marshall reads 32.7 points better in Kansas than across the rest of the country, and the single-subject figures widen that to 60. This is the opposite of the usual shape: the people who have voted for him twice are far more forgiving than the audience meeting him through a week of reporting about his billing records.
-37.3Adam HamiltonKansas minus national · -37.7 on single-subject posts
Hamilton is the mirror image, 37.3 points better outside Kansas than inside it, and the gap holds at 37.7 on single-subject posts. Nationally he is a story about a pastor answering an insult. In Kansas he is a candidate with a church record his opponent is spending money to define.
What each audience actually argues about
Geography, not party. Both columns cover the same week and the same two candidates; what separates them is which arguments actually travel.
IN KANSAS
Kansas Argues About Two Records
In-state posts are about conduct, and both men have a charge to answer. Marshall's is the interest he charged patients he sued; Hamilton's is how he handled an abuse allegation at a church retreat. Neither is a policy argument, and both are specific.
Eighteen percent interestNo other Kansas provider was found charging it.
A youth retreatThe one charge against Hamilton with real reach in state.
Two Republican former governorsCrossing over, and saying why.
REST OF THE U.S.
The Country Argues About A Pastor And A Doctor
National posts are about character at one remove. Vance's attack on Hamilton's faith and the reporting on Marshall's expenses both travel as stories about what kind of person each man is, with almost no Kansas policy attached.
A skin suitVance's phrase, and the answer that outran it.
One official meetingThe reported threshold for billing a trip to taxpayers.
A spiraling candidateHow national commentary described the incumbent by Saturday.
Both columns spent the week on the same two documents: a newspaper investigation into how Marshall collected medical debt, and an expenses filing. Kansas treats them as reasons to reconsider a senator it knows. The rest of the country treats them as confirmation of a seat in play.
The Rest Of The Country
The same two candidates over the same seven days, measured across every state except Kansas.
NATIONAL
Marshall
Rest of United States
29,097posts
4,192 positive
4,863 negative
Hover a segment
15,432 unique authors · 2,783 original posts
(10% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 9,055 labeled posts, 31.1% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 1,510 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
Taxpayer Money And Campaign Travel
NEGATIVE DRIVER
Nationally the billing story is joined by a second one: that Marshall billed taxpayers for campaign trips by attaching a single official meeting to each. The pairing is what drove his national figure to -33.1 on single-subject posts.
Republican Roger Marshall billed taxpayers for campaign travel by adding just one official meeting to trips. He said there was no limit on it.
The second national thread is prognosis rather than conduct. Kansas was added to the list of competitive Senate races during the week, and national commentary began describing the incumbent as the one in difficulty.
Chuck Todd: Roger Marshall is a spiraling candidate in deep trouble.
What positive national material exists is mostly rebuttal of the debt reporting. It is also the slice where the measurement is least clean: about 9 percent of the stored national documents are college football coverage that mentions Kansas and a different Marshall, and carries no political content at all.
This is false and deceptive. The woman was building debt with many companies and not paying it back, and was ordered to court three times.
9,364 unique authors · 2,014 original posts
(11% of volume; the rest are reposts and replies).
Sentiment from 6,189 labeled posts, 33.9% of this slice; stored sample behind the labels 1,213 documents.
Top 3 narratives driving sentiment
1
An Attack On His Faith That Rebounded
POSITIVE DRIVER
Hamilton's +46.4 nationally is built largely on one exchange. Vice President JD Vance described the Methodist pastor's faith as a skin suit, Hamilton answered, and the answer travelled further than the attack.
United Methodist Church pastor Adam Hamilton has condemned Vance's smears against him, calling the attacks sad and pathetic.
The second thread is simple exposure. A long interview on national cable was the single most engaged post of the week in this slice, and it introduced him to an audience with no prior view of him.
People in Kansas are suffering, says Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, joining MS NOW.
The negative national material is the retreat allegation again, amplified beyond Kansas. It is a smaller share of the national conversation than of the in-state one, which is why his two figures diverge by 37 points.
Republicans be like, Adam Hamilton is the only corrupt pastor in the history of everything.
This page is the product of two different kinds of work. One half is data that no public API makes available; the other half is judgment about what the data does and does not support.
What Quid made possible
None of the following could be assembled from public endpoints inside a week.
65K posts split by geographyOne week, separated into a Kansas half and a rest-of-country half on the same days.
Sentiment aimed at the personEach candidate is defined once, centrally, with primary-term targeting, which is what keeps a bare "Hamilton" from collecting every other Hamilton in the country.
A single-subject re-run that changed the readingMarshall's national figure falls 26 points once posts naming Hamilton are removed. Without that test the joint number would have understated how he is discussed alone.
2,875 stored documents behind the labelsEnough in all four cells to characterize the argument rather than guess at it.
What Claude was responsible for
The data does not interpret itself, and it arrives with traps in it.
Measuring the noise instead of ignoring itAbout 9% of the stored national documents for Marshall are college football coverage that mentions Kansas and a different Marshall. Counted, reported, and left in rather than quietly filtered, because filtering it would change the figure.
Refusing to read the joint number as the storyHis national figure is -7.4 together and -33.1 alone. The page leads with the gap between them rather than either number on its own.
Checking the poll against the sourceThe published average has this race inside a point. The panel uses the 270toWin page rather than any figure circulating in the posts themselves.
Leaving the classifier visiblePosts reporting the debt investigation are labelled positive toward Marshall. The caveats say so rather than dropping them.
Neither half can establish cause. This page measures what was said, how much of it there was, and who said it. It is not a poll, it does not model turnout, and it does not predict the November result.
How to read this
Source. Quid. Each person is defined once, centrally, by a stored definition that uses
primary: sentiment targeting, so the sentiment is scored toward that named figure rather
than toward the post as a whole. Every figure on this page reads that same definition.
Window. Oct 5 - Oct 11, 2026, seven complete day buckets. Quid closes its day at 23:00 UTC and
ignores the timezone parameter, so each bucket covers roughly 23 hours of the labeled calendar day.
Net sentiment is (positive − negative) / (positive + negative) × 100, computed on
labeled posts only. Neutral posts are excluded from the meter but counted in the volume figures.
Sentiment coverage. Sentiment labels cover 21 to 31% of Marshall's posts and 27 to 34% of Hamilton's.
No cell on this page is thin. The smallest is Marshall inside Kansas at 75 stored documents; his national slice carries 1,510.
Classifier attribution is imperfect. In a two-candidate race most posts name both people, and
the classifier sometimes assigns a post's sentiment to the wrong subject, and several posts attacking one
candidate are labeled positive for them. Every soundbite shown here was read and placed against the narrative
it actually supports, but the donut and meter totals are the classifier's unedited output.
Twitter/X counts are projected ×10 from a 10% sample, so volume figures exceed the number of
individually stored documents. Counts and samples are never mixed inside one ratio.
Sensitivity test. 25% of Marshall's posts and 33% of Hamilton's name both candidates, where the classifier can credit sentiment to the wrong one. Re-running every figure on posts that name one
candidate only pulls the two men in opposite directions. Marshall barely moves in Kansas, from +25.3 to +26.9, but his national figure falls from -7.4 to -33.1: the posts that name him alone are far harsher than the ones that also name Hamilton. Hamilton's Kansas figure drops from +9.1 to exactly 0.0, an even split. Read the single-subject column as the better guide to how each man is discussed on his own.
Volume is amplification, not voices. Only 9% of posts are original; the rest are reposts and replies. Unique-author counts
are shown on every panel and are the better measure of how many people are actually talking.
Link integrity. Every source link on this page was checked for liveness at publication.
Exploratory. Figures may not match Quid's own dashboards exactly. Sentiment is a
measure of how people are talking, not a poll, and nothing here projects a November result.
