Former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius once said that in Kansas “Democrats don’t win; Republicans lose.” Given how registered Republicans greatly outnumber registered Democrats throughout the state, that makes sense: Sometimes low-engagement Republicans dislike their party’s candidates and just stay home, and sometimes moderate and independent Republicans, for the same reasons, switch their votes, and Democrats eke out a win, despite GOP advantages.

So, with the start of early voting, Election Day around two weeks away, and all national talk about the unpopularity of President Trump’s tariffs and wars and personal corruption and a predicted “blue wave” around the corner, which Democrats will eke out wins in Kansas?

Let me commit the classic sin of political commentary and make predictions, focusing solely on Democrats competing for national or statewide seats.

The biggest question is whether, for the first time in nearly a century, a majority of Kansas voters will prefer a Democrat for the U.S. Senate rather than a Republican. Amazingly, I think Adam Hamilton has a 50% chance of pulling it off. He has communicated a fiscally and culturally moderate message without being weighed down by the poor opinion most Kansans have of the national Democratic party, while Roger Marshall has struggled, tangled up by negative news stories and his support for a president whose actions have increased prices and hurt rural communities. (President Trump’s last-minute visit to Kansas to rally voters for Marshall just complicates those ties further.) The race remains Marshall’s to lose, but there’s a greater likelihood of an upset here than in any Kansas senatorial contest in my lifetime.

But with the exception of Sharice Davids, the incumbent Democratic U.S. representative in the 3rd District — whose fifth straight win is a guarantee; Kansas City and its suburbs have turned blue, and that won’t change this year — probably no other Democrat enjoys as good a chance as Hamilton. When Kansas moderates and independents vote Democrat, it’s historically a one-off; such voters rarely continue to check the Democratic box down the ballot. Remember that when Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly assembled the coalition which reelected her 2022, those same voters actually increased the size of the Republican super-majority in the state legislature.

For this reason, I doubt that Democrat Cindy Holscher can count on picking up a huge number of Hamilton voters in her race for the governorship against Republican Ty Masterson. Her campaign has been confidently run, and Masterson’s close ties to both President Trump and data center interests have probably hurt him. But the quarter-century old pattern of two terms of a moderate female Democratic governor followed by two terms of a conservative male Republican governor (Sebelius to Brownback to Kelly to…) will probably keep a large number of low-engagement Republican voters in the GOP lane. I give Holscher a 30% chance of a win.

Every other Kansas Democrat in a national or state-wide race has an even smaller chance, I suspect. Very few political nerds like myself believe Secretary of State Kris Kobach or 2nd Congressional District Rep. Derek Schmidt have a real chance of losing; the question is how well Democrats like Chris Mann or Don Coover are going to do against them, which will tell us something about how well the state Democratic Party is doing at building a unified alternative to Trump’s unpopular legacy. Registration rates for new voters in the state have strongly favored Democrats, so obviously the potential is there. Turning potential into electoral reality in Republican Kansas, though, may take a few more cycles yet.

— Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.