Kansas state Sen. Cindy Holscher would like you to know she isn’t a demon, and her daughter, Maddie, isn’t a witch.

“I am not a demon,” Holscher told MS NOW by video chat from Wichita on Friday. “I’m a mom to three great kids. I’m a wife of 34 years. I’m an active person in my community that is fighting for all Kansans. and my commitment is to making life better for the people in our state.”

Holscher, the Democratic candidate for governor of Kansas, took time from campaigning a couple of weeks out from the election to confirm that she is not an evil spirit, because her opponent, Ty Masterson — the Republican president of the Kansas Senate who is currently leading in the polls — recently accused her of “demonic stuff,” casting their race, and a surprisingly close U.S. Senate contest, as “spiritual warfare.”

Masterson’s comments, made during a speech Sunday before the congregation at Praise Chapel in Wichita, included accusations against Holscher’s daughter, 21-year-old Maddie, who has gained a notable online following for posting videos on TikTok in support of her mom.

“Evil is maturing along with the brotherhood, and it is rising to a level that is just in your face,” Masterson said, his speech scored by swelling piano music and rounds of “amens” from the audience. “My race and the U.S. Senate race with Roger Marshall versus Hamilton. Those are spiritual battles.”

“My opponent, she didn’t even hide it, they’re doing like witchcraft spells on TikTok so she can win the governorship,” Masterson went on. “It’s like demonic stuff that they’re doing, right? Just in your face that way.”

Holscher told MS NOW she is a Christian.

“I was raised Lutheran,” she said. “You will find me at that same country church that I attended as a child.”

Masterson seems to have been referencing a couple of Maddie’s videos posted earlier this year. In one, Maddie waves her arms and smiles as her mother looks on, incredulous. “Summoning a spell so my mom wins Kansas Governor,” text on the post read. “Vote cindy for ks gov.” In another, Maddie and a young man do the arm waving dance in front of a refrigerator, a magnet with her mom’s picture stuck to the door.

Maddie, a senior at the University of Missouri studying statistics and public health, joined her mother on the video call. Like her mother, she, too, wanted to set the record straight.

“I’m not a witch,’ Maddie said, describing her TikTok account as “goofy” and “playful.”

“I’m just a 21-year-old college student trying to pass all my math tests right now. And supporting my mom throughout this campaign,” she added.

Maddie explained what anyone with a passing knowledge of the internet could have: her post wasn’t an incantation summoning evil spirits to help a Democrat win a governor’s race. It was a widely known TikTok meme. The audio comes from a Spanish-dubbed scene of “Charmed,” the show about three young witches that ran on The WB in the aughts.

Masterson did not respond to emails or calls requesting comment.

The Republican’s comments are the kind of extreme rhetoric that’s become more routine on the right, including from President Donald Trump — in which politicians don’t just demonize their opponents but cast them as literal demons.

At his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas, Trump warned the audience that stakes of the upcoming election went beyond control of the White House.

“Either we surrender to the demonic forces,” he said, “or we defeat them in a landslide.”

In 2022, Trump said a Biden speech with red lights was “like the devil.” Last year, Trump shared a post that called Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.”

It’s hardly the first time a politician or movement has framed a race’s stakes in apocalyptic terms, cast an opponent as a monster, or linked a rival to the devil himself. Dr. Ben Carson, USDA’s National Advisor for Nutrition, Health and Housing, linked Hillary Clinton to Lucifer in 2016, the same year former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner called Sen. Ted Cruz “Lucifer in the Flesh.”

But explicitly demonizing a political opponent leaves no room for understanding or common ground, only “degrees of punishment,” said Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon and co-author of “The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics.”

“What else are you supposed to do with the devil other than punish them? You don’t set the dinner table for the devil. You kick the devil out,” Phillips said.

“In a pluralistic democracy, any kind of language or behavior that kicks people completely out of the civic realm is a problem,” Phillips said. “The ideal is that people respectfully disagree, not that they say, ‘You are so evil I can’t even conceive of you as another human being.’”

Holscher criticized Masterson’s record as president of the state Senate, his focus on culture war issues over affordability and his personal attacks.

“This is the type of strategy we have seen from across the aisle,” Holscher said. “When there isn’t a record to stand on, when there isn’t sound policy, or when you have candidates that are just so out of line with the people, they resort to attacks against their opponent and calling names.”

“What I do find really concerning here is that he seems to be obsessed with my college student’s TikTok,” Holscher said.

Maddie agreed.

“Ty is being very weird,” she said. “But whatever.”

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From MS Now.