Roger Marshall spent his August break from the U.S. Senate moving across Kansas while his reelection campaign took heat over who gets to see him and where he is really rooted. He is asking voters to send him back this fall, but the trip only sharpened questions about why so many of his stops happen behind closed doors.
Marshall was in Topeka on Aug. 28 for a 15-minute interview after a roundtable at Stormont Vail, and The Capital-Journal also saw him at Washburn Tech on Aug. 10, at Hazel Hill Chocolate on April 1, in Alma on Feb. 19 and in Lyndon on March 6. Earlier this year he finished a tour called 4 Corners, 50 Counties, and in the past month he has been on another swing, 120 Stops to Strengthen Rural Kansas, as the Senate was in its August recess.
That pace is part of Marshall's answer to the criticism. He said he averages 135 days a year in Kansas, between 175 and 200 days in Washington, D.C., and about 30 days on official travel around the country. He also said he works 12-14 hours every day and that his days on the road this week were starting at 7 a.m. and ending at 9 p.m. at the hotel. In his telling, he is not hiding from Kansans at all. He is meeting them where they are.
“We’re out there talking to people — real people with real jobs with real problems with real challenges,” Marshall said, adding that the complaints about his travel are “just a social media lie out there.” He said town halls became unsafe because “the radical left meets hard-core right” and that he feared a riot. He said he has held telephone town halls, where questions can be screened, and noted that he gets thousands of emails and calls.
That is where the dispute sits. Marshall says he is making himself available across Kansas; critics say ordinary voters are being kept at a distance while public town halls disappear. His official residence is in rural St. John after he sold his former home in Great Bend, and his campaign is also facing allegations of a Florida residency, a charge that keeps the residency fight alive even as he presses for reelection. The real test now is not how many stops he can make before Election Day, but whether he can convince Kansas voters that seeing him in private is close enough to hearing him in public.
